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.

  • sga@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    10 hours ago

    Am I hearing that I just need to switch to Bazzite and this problem disappears??

    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).

    I’d expect that Bazzite and Mint would use the same Nvidia proprietary drivers without much noticeable change in performance

    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)