My distro of choice is Debian (I like their philosophy and it works great on my laptop) but I have an nVidia card in my desktop PC, and driver management was kind of annoying. Decided to try Kubuntu, which worked ok, but I didn’t really love, and then I didn’t update for a bit too long and had some repo issues trying to install updates. I didn’t bother digging into what the fix would be, since I had been considering Bazzite for a while, as it has been talked about a lot for gaming.
Knowing literally nothing other than “Bazzite works out of the box with nVidia” I figured I’d give it a go. First off, I was surprised at the size of the image, and how long the install took. I did some reading about atomic distros and began to understand why things were set up that way. Seems pretty cool! I still don’t love that as soon as I logged in on my fresh install, Steam opened up and asked for a log in, but that is what I signed up for with Bazzite, I guess. The nVidia drivers out of the box worked fantastic, as advertised, and I love a good KDE desktop, so it’s not all bad.
Initially I was frustrated that some things weren’t working in the flatpak versions of the app (couldn’t get to my 3d printer using the .local address from the browser because flatpak has a bug with mDNS) and layering a package with rpm-ostree seems like overkill and not a good experience. Then I watched some videos on distrobox.
I can just distrobox create --image debian:latest debian-box and then use apt install for whatever packages I want, export them and use them as if they were natively installed on Bazzite??? And this works on any distro??? I have been using Linux exclusively for a few years (and on and off for more years), but I have been totally out of the loop with distrobox and atomic distros. This feels like the same level of magic I felt when I first dual booted Ubuntu back in the Windows Vista days. This seems like it will fix 99% of the issues I run into on Linux.
I know distrobox isn’t exclusive to atomic distros, but I wouldn’t have discovered it if not for Bazzite.
Anyway, none of this is really new info, but I just wanted to nerd out about it for a bit with people who will know what I’m talking about.
Linux noob here, I’ve been running Mint for about a year and constantly bitching about my Nvidia card’s performance vs. Windows. I have the most updated closed source drivers installed, but cooking shaders on games still takes a half hour and many games run like trash even after precompiling said shaders. Space Marine 2 comes to mind, runs like butter on my Win10 partition but is basically unplayable on Linux.
Am I hearing that I just need to switch to Bazzite and this problem disappears?? Because on God I will do that literally tonight if that’s true. I had been holding out for a new batch of Nvidia proprietary drivers to hit the scene or else just resigning myself to having to buy an AMD card.
I’d expect that Bazzite and Mint would use the same Nvidia proprietary drivers without much noticeable change in performance, but to be honest I don’t know jack about shit about their back end behind the scenes processes so I could be wildly off base.
I still had to wait for a long time for shaders to load on initial launch on some games (DA Veilguard) but performance seemed fine. I didn’t have performance issues on Ubuntu so not sure about your particular issues, but another thing to consider is based on your card, the latest nvidia drivers may not be correct - I had to download an older driver package for my card (1070) as recommended by nvidia. Bazzite had me select which series of card I had when downloading the ISO, so I assume it included the older drivers for my card. I haven’t actually checked the installed driver version though
Yes
I got a 3090 card and have her 0 issues so far. Wouldn’t even consider another OS for gaming at the moment with how well everything works.
Even my monitor works better with Bazzite than with Windows 11.
Yes, simple as that. I use Bazzite for ~2years now on my main desktop with nvidia and a legion go. It really is “install and forget it’s linux”. It’s almost too good to be true…let’s hope the big “enshitification” doesn’t follow soon.
Expect a big leap in performance, they do a lot of magic with the kernel on Bazzite. It’s really fun.
sadly, no. there are not any special kernel parameters or compilation difference. at best, these things can bring ± 5% difference (assuming a general benchmark, instead of a special synthetic benchmark). if there was some major switch you could hit which would increase performance, most distros would just press it. if most are not doing it, then it is likely because either their is not much to gain.
for example, cachy os compiles it’s programmes for x86-64 v3/v4 as opposed to v1 or v2 for most distros. their have not been many extensions to x86-64 between v2 to v3, and most performance gain you get is in specific hashing benchmarks. on average, their is not much reason. as to why not all distros do it? because any software compiled in v1 runs on v4, but v3 can not be run on v2, v4 or v3, so if all distros would start doing it, then either they would have to stop serving users v3 or earlier versions (that is practically everyone with cpu before 2020, and new v3 cpus are still being made), or they would have to serve separate v3 versions for v3 folks, v2 for v2 folks and so on. that is a lot more costly, and increases software burden. even big company like microsoft is not serving different windows version forr different x86-64 versions (though they have different things, and windows 11 requires v2 or higher afaik)(it may even be v3, but not sure).
https://github.com/bazzite-org/kernel-bazzite
Enough magic for me :D I’m not sure where I read about latency fixes as well, have to come back on that.
Fuck yeah, heard. I’ve got a project to do tonight. Thanks!
During installation make sure to read up on atomic distros, there are some changes like package handling or the immutable system, but it’s not a big hurdle. Have fun!
not a nvidia user, but answer is likely - no. bazzite has no special magic nvidia drivers. their special thing is that thy prepackage closed drivers (which most distros can but not do so that they are not in legal trouble of redistributiing closed software or the ethics of distributing closed software in a foss promoting environment).
precisely.
there is a possibility that maybe going to a newer kernel version or vulkan or other system libraries can get you some more performance, but on average, it is not going to be more than 5% (there may be some exceptional games which gain more, where there were game/engine specific bugs which were dealt in specified period). these are also the performance differences that people say that different distros (bazzite, cache, newer ubuntu release vs older) perform better than others, but you can check many places that assuming that game was already supported well.
general reason for bad performance is - nvidia on linux is bad. (period). their drivers are bad (closed or open, for a long time open drivers could not even regulate power, so they were stuck in lowest power mode).
you do not necessarily have to buy new amd hardware. try checking out protondb database, and see if the numbers you are getting are same or similar to others with similar hardware as you or not. if you are, then that is the best that can be done. if not, find what special sauce do they have (maybe a different library version, or some flags, or environment variable)