For gamers who are newcomes to Linux, Ubuntu (or Debian) should be a hard pass. Linux gaming is advancing too fast for the 2-3 year gap between LTS versions to not matter, and trying to work around the stable (outdated) packages is typically what ends up breaking installs.
I actually just switched to Ubuntu 25.10 from Bazzite. Can you recommend me other (non atomic) distros that play nice with both secure boot and nvidia drivers? I don’t think fedora does. I’m not interested in managing keys and certs for my drivers, and do occasionally play those anti-cheat games on a dedicated windows partition. I’d rather not toggle secure boot each time I reboot.
Can you recommend me other (non atomic) distros that play nice with both secure boot and nvidia drivers?
I wouldn’t exactly recommend it because of the learning curve, but I have the exact setup you’re looking for working on NixOS.
Lanzaboote made it pretty easy. The downside is that you need to put secure boot into user-managed mode, and some asshole anticheats might not like that even though only Microsoft-signed executables were used in the boot chain of Windows.
Did you set up secure boot during setup of Bazzite, out of curiosity? It has the ability to function with it and should prompt you if I remember correctly.
I don’t think I did originally, but I don’t recall secure boot being an issue with it when I did do the switch. I may have had to install a key or something, but I honestly don’t remember.
I’ve had driver issues with Fedora 42 under secure boot (RTX 3060ti), and Ubuntu seems to be the winner so far that’s playing nice with everything. I haven’t run into any gaming issues yet besides the latest Sonic Racing game not starting.
I love the philosophy of Atomic distros like Kinoite and even run Bazzite on my AMD living room “console”. I’d recommend them all day long to folks new in the space since they’re hard to break by design - especially Bazzite for a gaming machine if invasive anticheat isn’t needed - but it’s not for me.
How fedora still struggles to keep up sometimes which has always confused me why people suggest a bazzite. Not to mention how many community tools and communities that are starting to support Linux. Only support Arch and don’t support anything else.
Which means you now have new users trying to figure out how to f*** to compile or install software outside of their package managers without a flat pack or anything. Just to use the same community tools that they used on Windows.
While it’s just in the aur because it’s supported. Seriously cachyOS is such a easier solution for new comers.
People suggest Bazzite because it just works and is difficult to break or otherwise have things to wrong. I’m not sure what you mean by “struggles to keep up”, can you explain?
Also, you know about rpm-ostree and distrobox, right?
For gamers who are newcomes to Linux, Ubuntu (or Debian) should be a hard pass. Linux gaming is advancing too fast for the 2-3 year gap between LTS versions to not matter, and trying to work around the stable (outdated) packages is typically what ends up breaking installs.
I actually just switched to Ubuntu 25.10 from Bazzite. Can you recommend me other (non atomic) distros that play nice with both secure boot and nvidia drivers? I don’t think fedora does. I’m not interested in managing keys and certs for my drivers, and do occasionally play those anti-cheat games on a dedicated windows partition. I’d rather not toggle secure boot each time I reboot.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend it because of the learning curve, but I have the exact setup you’re looking for working on NixOS.
Lanzaboote made it pretty easy. The downside is that you need to put secure boot into user-managed mode, and some asshole anticheats might not like that even though only Microsoft-signed executables were used in the boot chain of Windows.
Did you set up secure boot during setup of Bazzite, out of curiosity? It has the ability to function with it and should prompt you if I remember correctly.
I don’t think I did originally, but I don’t recall secure boot being an issue with it when I did do the switch. I may have had to install a key or something, but I honestly don’t remember.
I’ve had driver issues with Fedora 42 under secure boot (RTX 3060ti), and Ubuntu seems to be the winner so far that’s playing nice with everything. I haven’t run into any gaming issues yet besides the latest Sonic Racing game not starting.
I love the philosophy of Atomic distros like Kinoite and even run Bazzite on my AMD living room “console”. I’d recommend them all day long to folks new in the space since they’re hard to break by design - especially Bazzite for a gaming machine if invasive anticheat isn’t needed - but it’s not for me.
Totally fair - you gotta find and use what works for you!
CACHYOS literally ANYTHING arch based.
There’s a REAL good reason steam uses arch. A REALLY REALLY GOOD ONE.
Cachy won’t necessarily be a magic bullet for Nvidia drivers, especially for older GPUs.
It’s a good option though, I just wanted to set expectations.
How fedora still struggles to keep up sometimes which has always confused me why people suggest a bazzite. Not to mention how many community tools and communities that are starting to support Linux. Only support Arch and don’t support anything else.
Which means you now have new users trying to figure out how to f*** to compile or install software outside of their package managers without a flat pack or anything. Just to use the same community tools that they used on Windows.
While it’s just in the aur because it’s supported. Seriously cachyOS is such a easier solution for new comers.
People suggest Bazzite because it just works and is difficult to break or otherwise have things to wrong. I’m not sure what you mean by “struggles to keep up”, can you explain?
Also, you know about rpm-ostree and distrobox, right?