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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.

(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

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I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

This is awesome!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.

Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat.

I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now.

If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset.

My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.

Sorry being IT guy I wondered about the logic. I understand the need to align. But if one fail all fail and children like customers … not the patient kind? Or you have two system within each … then across the …. Sorry cannot stop my mind spinning.

The kids will get over it lol

This is also a reason why I have 4 separate stations now, if I have to upgrade hardware only one station is down at a time. And while you can get a 3 GPU system at budget, a 4 GPU system will get expensive, at least last time I checked. It would be interesting to look into using old used ai servers for multi seat purposes.

So for a GPU with say 4 display ports, I can run 4 sessions off the same GPU provided I can get enough USB ports.

It might be possible one way or another, although I used separate gfx cards. You might find a different x server that lets you do it using a single card. I suggest getting an extra hard drive, install grub so you can dual boot, install the experimental OS on the extra hard drive and start fiddling. I also dual booted different OS in order to experiment with machine learning when the kids was sleeping, as I got multiple gpus, although the old ones where crap it was a good learning exercise.

Modern GPUs aren't constrained by the number of ports. You can use DisplayPort MST (hubs) to output multiple displays off a single port.

But most GPUs are limited to being able to run 4 displays. Except some AMD Eyefinity can do 6

I hate it so much that multiple video cards are needed and you can't just use the multiple outputs of a single video card.

On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.

Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so).

For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.

If LTT is to be believed, this is in the works Maybe SteamOS managed to ruffle enough feathers to start moving the inertial colossus that is Microsoft, not that I have much trust on their willingness to leave a good idea remain good in the long term

Microsoft is a big expensive oil tanker. They have the resources to turn the ship around, but they need to feel incentivize to do so. I love using Linux and won't go back to Windows, (it's been quite a while for me) but they could blow the performance problems out of the water if they really cared to.

It's called Xbox Full-Screen Experience and is marketed as Xbox PC.

It's available now, but nobody's been impressed yet. Gives you a gamepad-compatible launcher (although the gamepad PIN to login is buggy). Doesn't seem to actually save resources.

I might have to look into this for my ROG Ally X... it already runs pretty beastily but I'm never going to complain about better performance...

Edit: though, I'd have to give up my Fallout 4 with mods. (Don't judge me I know it sucks but it makes the dopamine go brrr)

FYI, you can install Vortex on Linux systems and mod games via that just fine: https://github.com/pikdum/steam-deck/

(Edit: their native version appears to be in-development, but doesn't currently support non-native titles: https://nexus-mods.github.io/NexusMods.App/ )

As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!

[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/

I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.

I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily:

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf...

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...

I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.

It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such.

The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.

Well yes.

The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.

Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.

On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.

Let us say Star Wars. Until someone has a daughter and suddenly found out there is no nothing between them and then he should we say now we have one then very annoying girl Jedi forced onto the team.

This apparently is something that came about after the Atari days where games were social activities in bars and home console advertising features boys and girls. When the NES came out, it was marketed in the US as a toy so had to mold itself to the retail store layouts and pick a toy aisle and they picked boys. In the mobile era and perhaps as early as The Sims beating MYST as the bestselling game, started to develop a more balanced marketing approach.

That sounded outlandish so I asked Gemini for a citation:

https://www.mindlessmag.com/post/a-boy-s-hobby-gender-and-ma...

Another reference, first hand account, for the later SEGA perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(book)

There are simply too many games, and many genres are underserved by AAA studios.

Strange things are happening regarding genres served by AAA studios. Some of them come and go fairly quickly. There was a brief resurgence of strategy(!!) games because of XCOM.

AAA run to the formula that works as a safe bet, when they want risk they just borrow an existing concept and sell it harder.

It's not surprising to me.

The reason some of the most popular games are popular isn't because they are fun, it's because they've built an esports industry. Those popular games get spectators which in turn makes the games more popular.

Video games are a dead concept. Meanwhile companies like Wizards of the Coast are making billions on paper trading card games.

"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."

I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).

But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!

Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.

I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.

The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.

Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.

Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.

> But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads

I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine.

I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.

I never used Windows 11, but with 10 they had craps like Candy crush etc that comes back after large updates.

They don't have annoying bundleware with Windows 11?

I think people might be equivocating over the word “ad.” Some people consider ads to be interstitial modals which steal focus and have nothing to do with current context. I am much more sensitive and consider any notification to buy or use a service to be an ad. Maybe not pre-installed games but I would prefer they not be there. Microsoft is about as bad as Apple is at suggesting we use their cloud services. I also consider these ads. Still, if I’m honest, they’re infrequent and hardly insurmountable. If one is sensitive to this, the Pro version of Windows makes it easy to disable almost all of this stuff.

DO you see messages or icons for Teams, cortana, AI, onedrive accounts? These are ads.

they are worst than ads. Onedrive runs automatically and all of a sudden, your files under Documents are all stored by Microsoft without you even knowing.

We must be using different Windows 11 then. Last I booted up Windows instead of shoving Cortana everywhere now it's shoving Copilot. The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.

The "current" state does not matter. What matters is that MS can shittify your experience at any time. Your machine can stop working if you don't agree to MS "updates". On Linux you have the assurance that the state of your machine can be preserved and you know exactly what's being installed on it.

> The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.

FTFY: Windows is spyware. The fact that you paid for spyware or it came on your computer or it has useful properties (like Bonzi Buddy) doesn't make it not spyware.

You can turn them off, but the start menu definitely shows you "recommended" content by default.

The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.

It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.

A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).

Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.

I'm surprised to hear that you were talking about Windows 10. Windows 11 is MUCH worse than 10 with the ads and seems to be the first one where people are complaining en masse. It also comes with a start menu that's both dumbed down and has performance issues. Yes, the start menu. It's slow.

I just know it from a new laptop where I'm keeping the preinstalled Windows for occasions that require it (very rare these days).

so you're saying you'd have to download some obscure software just to remove defaults from the OS and that's a plus? The fact that you even know about such software tells me you've already gone thru steps to neuter Microsoft.

Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html

Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).

I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.

Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.

How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.

Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack

Do you ever find it "updated" to the snap version? I have Ubuntu on my work laptop and every so often after an update Firefox will suddenly be the snap version and I'll have to reinstall it.

I no longer remember all the exact steps I did but I only googled them in the first place so presumably they are there to be googled still. But it's possible to fully remove snapd and all snap support and then taboo it so that it never comes back. Or at least, it's been a few years and it hasn't come back. FF has remained a real .deb from the mozillateam ppa. It was a few different steps though not just uninstalling a few packages but also editing some apt config files I think. Sorry that sounds useless but like I say I just googled it up at the time, did 15-20 minutes of reading and poking, and never had to touch it again since then. It's been several version bumps.

..edit.. I installed a dummy package that displaces the nagware about the pro version too so I never get those messages during apt update any more.

Taking a quick definitely incomplete look I see at least:

/etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla.pref

  Package: firefox*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
  Pin-Priority: 501
  
  Package: thunderbird*
  Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
  Pin-Priority: 501

/etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref

  Package: snapd
  Pin: release a=*
  Pin-Priority: -10

and removed ubuntu-pro-esm-apps and ubuntu-pro-esm-infra from that same dir

but also there is a mozillateam ppa in sources.list.d, and I don't see any installed package name that looks like it might be that dummy ubuntu-pro-esm thing, so maybe it got removed during a version upgrade and I never noticed because ubuntu stopped that nonsense and it isn't needed any more? Or there is some other config somewhere I'm forgetting that is keeping that hole plugged.

Anyway, it WAS a little bit of fiddling around one day, but at least it was only a one and done thing so far.

I kind of expected to be off of ubuntu by now because once someone starts doing anything like that, it doesn't matter if you can work around it, the real problem is that they want to do things like that at all in the first place. Well they still want what they want and that problem is never going away. They will just keep trying some other thing and then some other thing. So rather that fight them forever, it's better to find someone else who you don't want to fight. I mean that's why we're on Linux at all in the first place right? But so far it's been a few version bumps since then and still more or less fine.

I recommend downloading the executable-in-a-tarball form of Firefox and running that. I personally do that with Nightly, and I find it works quite well.

As someone else says, for Firefox (and Thunderbird) I just uninstalled the package manager version entirely and dropped Mozilla's regular distro-agnostic binary tarballs in my home folder. Using the built-in update systems also avoids that problem from .deb versions where updating the package could make the browser yell at you that it needs to be restarted when you try to open a tab.

Mozilla also has its own Apt repository, which can be more convenient.

Hmm, I might move to that. It is definitely annoying when it just periodically just stops working because I haven't restarted it and there is an update available.

No, hasn't happened so far.

I also game on Ubuntu and snaps have never been in my way. I actually like them and wish more non-game software was distributed this way, but Canonical has a brown thumb when it comes to growing their weird little side projects.

Setting up `apt` to pull from a different repo (to say install firefox.dpkg instead of snap) requires like 3-4 commands which are easily searchable.

I'd had effectively zero issues avoid snaps.

> How much work is it to get snaps out of your way?

If you don’t want what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu, why not just run vanilla Debian instead?

Ubuntu releases supported (aka "really supposed to work") versions much more frequently than Debian, or I would have switched already. As it is, I just make the appropriate changes to purge Snap and run Firefox from a Mozilla apt repo and Thunderbird from Flatpak via Flathub.

You are talking about Debian stable which is released approximately once in 2 years. People who want to have more (most ?) recent software on Debian should go for Debian Testing. Or Debian Sid, which gets upstream updates almost instantly but requires more Linux knowledge in case something gets broken.

Just use Linux Mint

There are a few games I play that have native Linux versions available (e.g. Warhammer Total War) and getting support requires you to run Ubuntu. Not the end of the world, but that plus some dev work was enough to get me to stick to it.

Linux Mint is Ubuntu

Not as far as the Game Devs are concerned. I was running Kubuntu and that wasn't 'supported' by them - only Ubuntu LTS.

You just install it. The debs work.

I just did this yesterday after my Kubuntu system got buggered up by snaps:

https://gitlab.com/scripts94/kubuntu-get-rid-of-snap

Up until now I didn't care how my software was installed, but snaps REALLY don't play nice, so it's time to retire them. Canonical has lost this battle, and the sooner they accept it and move on, the sooner they can recover their reputation and put this madness behind them.

Honestly snaps are fairly painfree nowadays.

I mostly agree, it's just annoying that we have so many competing formats. I imagine it is even more painful for developers trying to release software - it's a very fractured ecosystem.

I’ve used Ubuntu since 7.04 and recently jumped from Ubuntu to Debian. It feels more like home than ever before.

All the things you’re used to without the corporate “sugarcoating”.

Yeah, recently moved from ubuntu to ultramarine plasma - more responsive, more features, smoother, really good.

I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux.

Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)

cat-transit

You cannot say such things without more info. I envision cats sitting on small trollies.

https://lanparty.house/#catwalk

Cool. Thanks

Hey Kenton & the others,

What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work

Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore.

If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...

Do you still have the details details about fixing Windows 11 boot over iscsi?

I love the idea of injecting drivers into windows and did a lot of experimenting along those lines (using WinPE to install drivers offline and edit the registry).

I upgraded my home network and am booting over iscsi using ipxe. My only two remaining issues are: - Windows 11 25H2 fails to boot since 26200.7019 (and 24H2 since 26100.7019). - Windows 10/11 S3 sleep+resume does not work with WinOF-2 (mlx5.sys) driver

Everything works well in linux, though!

I am using NixOS. I had to customize the initrd to use iscsistart to connect to the target. It is also important to run iscsid when the system boots to automatically reconnect (which annoyingly takes 10-15 seconds when I resume from sleep). I am using iSER (iscsi over rdma), but TCP worked fine too. I export ZFS zvols on the server over iscsi using targetcli (which configures the in-kernel iscsi target support, sometimes called LIO).

I tried NFS but the performance was bad.

Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.

league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!

Some would consider not being able to play that game a feature!

You might be saying it in jest, but I think there may be something to this line of thinking. Whenever I read about anything on HN and bazzite comes up, it feels like the beginning of a new holy war is approaching. I am starting to wonder if the concern from the 'older' linux crowd is that the gamers will introduce changes to linux that will corrupt it more than systemd ever could ( like kernel level drm in games ).

I think the GP means because the game is a time sink, but you raise an interesting point. I wanted to say "that'll never happen", but someone could fork Linux, add DRM, and then that becomes massively popular and we're done.

> someone could fork Linux, add DRM

Realistically, that's only going to happen if Valve, specifically, decides to do it. There isn't really another player in the linux-gaming business with enough skin in the game to make it worthwhile.

I could imagine Epic Games trying to keep the Epic Games Store relevant by making a SteamOS competitor, with the idea of attracting developers with strong kernel-level DRM and anti-cheat

Nobody is forcing anyone to play video games. Kernel level anti cheat DRM is inevitable if linux becomes remotely mainstream in the esports scene.

Those that don't like it can simply not play the games, or can have a dedicated "compromised" machine/vm for gaming.

Great excuse to start learning DOTA. You won't regret it (until a few thousand hours of gameplay later you realise how much of your life you wasted on it).

I mean, of course he'll regret it, as he probably regrets learning LoL. But yes, DotA is the better game of the two, according to my objective opinion.

Moved everything over a few months ago, and I still have a game or two that requires Windows... but so far dual-booting has been more than enough.

In some ways, the minor barrier is almost beneficial, in terms of clearly separating work-time and play-time.

That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !

That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!

I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.

I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.

Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.

Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out on the repo in case you get it there. It's an impressive setup.

Just so I understand correctly, are all the game machines segmented off so that the DHCP server only serves the game machines and doesn't interfere with the rest of the household? Or does it serve everything at once?

My thought process was to keep this game network segmented with a VLAN so that DHCP would be unaffected for the rest of my household.

The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).

VR on Linux is probably going to be the main reason the Steam Frame is going to be a day one pre-order for me

Certainly mine!

> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work

I consider this a feature, not a bug

Pretty sweet setup. Mine is a bit simpler, one laptop on a spinny taco table with HOMM3 from GoG

Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!

Love your website + house :D

what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really

Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.

A lot of hardware does have problems with properly resuming from sleep, but that is pretty much universal, not OS-dependent. People report just as many problems on Windows.

What distro?

Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.

I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.

Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.

You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.

I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.

Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)

Archlinux can be a pretty good choice for gaming. Not necessarily because of anything Archlinux does: most distros can do anything, if you configure them.

No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.

Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.

I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.

That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.

> Arch is really in a sense the absence of a distro, but keeping a package manager with up to date packages. No bloat bundled, just install exactly what you want.

You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you.

> I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.

Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck.

One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.

You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)

This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers.

What changed?

Most of the problems that break a system are being resolved in unstable rather than testing.

I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.

This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable]

The testing happens in Debian Sid.

But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.

The same question applies to any other distribution (Fedora, Arch, etc): who tests them ?

Debian testing is pretty much the worst option to choose. It can be as "unstable" as unstable, while being nearly as out-dated as a stable at points.

If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.

It looks like you have never used Debian testing (or used it 10 years ago ?). The testing phase is in Debian Sid and _not_ in Debian testing.

The "testing" name is one of the worst decision of Debian community IMHO. It misleads people.

I very much agree with this, it also scared me off Debian Testing initially as well.

I wonder how many potential users have been scared off by the name... Maybe Debian devs like it that way, less annoying desktop users to support.

But you use it for games, right? So I figured you'd pick one based on how well it runs Steam. (And maybe for GPU drivers.)

Steam supports Debian well.

I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.

I'm curious why bot just boot SteamOS? I'd imagine that being the easiest way to go

From what I read, SteamOS isn't really intended to run on any device other than official Steam devices. In particular I read that it doesn't support nvidia GPUs at all, since all official Steam devices are AMD.

Also, I have a pretty unusual setup: my machines netboot from an shared iSCSI volume, setting up a local copy-on-write overlay on each machine.

SteamOS is based on Arch, so I'm sure it would be possible to make it do anything Arch can do. But I don't know Arch -- I know Debian. So I was a lot more comfortable installing Debian and tweaking it the way I needed, then installing Steam on top.

I think it could be interesting to explore Universal Blue based distros such as Bazzite for this kind of use cases. The OS comes from a standard OCI container image, which means you can create your own customized one by layering changes on top of an upstream base image.

I feel bad for the unsolicited distro plug though especially since you already have a solution that works well and you are familiar with, but I thought it might still be useful to mention it. I'm not sure if uBlue would even be better vs your current setup. Seems like netboot would still be needed to get the latest version without an extra reboot.

Wow this is amazing!

keep it up!

prrsonally using bazzite desktop for my stuff.

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash.

I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it.

I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).

Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)

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