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.
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.