Just because you went to the trouble of bringing views on the limitations of each system to each user profile in a rational way and without the rage typical of forums, you deserve my credit. I tested several current distros such as cachy (I don't like the store) and nobara (I like the store in gnome). I would like a video of you teaching how to optimize mint. Thank you very much
He already has a video on it. I followed his instructions and it worked fine, but I still wanted newer features like VRR so I went on to other distros after
Reddit poster here. I'm a fan of the channel and was not expecting a video on this topic. Thanks for making it; very educational. I wasn't trying to say that stable distros aren't for anyone, but rather that they shouldn't be the default recommendation as much as they have been in the past. I think it should also be emphasized how little maintenance most people will need to do on a rolling release distro. Additionally, it's worth noting that there are legitimate reasons why Bobby might want to use up-to-date software and libraries in general, despite everything working "fine" on Mint. Wayland on Mint is still a headache to set up, regardless of hardware. I agree there's a lot of nuance to this topic. In my post, you can see that I have no problem with anyone using Mint if it works for them, but I strongly disagree that stable should be the default recommendation. I also think Cinnamon is simply inferior to KDE and Gnome and shouldn't be recommended to former Windows users just because it looks vaguely like Windows XP. When Bobby wants to enable VRR with multiple monitors, or plugs in his shiny new HDR OLED monitor, he will be very disappointed on Cinnamon X11. There is also the argument of developers getting constant bug reports from users with outdated drivers and packages. *If Mint had been my first distro, it wouldn't have left a good impression of Linux on me.*
I am aligned with your arguments overall. I just wanted to add the nuance of hardware and feature in the mix. Those two variables are key to understand each side of the story (Bobby vs Ryan, lol WTH was I thinking with this example xD). From my standpoint it is just impossible to send someone toward a rolling edge distro because I believe the hassles are just to big when it come to maintenance. I have seen way to many posts when people jump into Arch for example and get annihilated by the huge barrier to entry of the wiki when they don´t have some linux bases. The way I see it is actually pretty simple: Mint => Arch based (if hardware / features not supported by Mint) => Full Arch (full control of every package / config for tweaks lovers). Thanks for your post which was the trigger point of this video, thanks for the comment and thanks for being a fan of the channel! Also, don´t forget to subscribe, it will help me send Linux gaming to the moon =)
I dont recommend noobies using mint or ubuntu for gaming. Sure, with some knowhow and suffering you can make it work, but most noobied cant. I had someone I know recently install ubuntu to game and his dual monitors didnt work properly, warthunder would not open at the correct screen, it would not work porperly on native or even proton, he couldnt get the 555 drivers and various peripherals wouldnt work due to him being on the LTS version. He left linux. Point being that people recommending "stable" distros like linux mint or ubuntu for noobies is a terrible idea
@@AndRei-yc3ti I disagree. I would call this instance just unfortunate. There are too many guides and tutorials on how to prepare your machine for gaming (Which won't even take that long to set everything up) for stable distros for different levels of linux knowledge, so even a child would be able to follow them. And there is the same amount of forums on how to fix certain bugs or issues in general. Errors are something that is typical for any OS, although if a person is not willing to take some time to address them, then they are not ready to make the switch. Perhaps that "someone" is just more familiar with fixing Windows' inconveniences and issues, so that is their choice.
Let's put it in other words. If any distro was perfect for everybody's taste and any pc hardware, we woudn't have to choose between 200+ distros. Same goes for women as well. ;) Let's be happy for what the active linux community is giving us FOR FREE, instead of Microsoft's totalitarianism.
The thing is, even stable distros have more problems with compatibility then the shit Microsoft releases. People like me, who just wants an operating system that works as intended will always use Windows, even if they don't like it that much. Convenience will always win for an average person.
@@szhadjii8363 I can dig what you say about compatibility. However, i'll take freedom over convenience any time. The sooner the "average" person realize it, the better for humanity. That goes as well for a lot of stuff happening lately in our lives.. Check what Microsoft will soon "feature" in their next versions for the "average" person. (recall, AI co-pilot etc). The end of digital privacy is upon us and it's coming fast and furious.
@@illusiondrmr Digital privacy doesn't exist from the time smart phones got popular, but yeah, I've seen what Microsoft wants to implement into Win 11, like Recall, and I'm considering switching sometime, but I don't have a lot of time at my laptop cause of school and work.
@@illusiondrmr That comment didn't age well brother, hardware unboxed just released a video that shows massive CPU download for Ryzen in the next windows 11 release. Is it worth it? Not for me but it would make linux look bad performance wise.
You can get the best of both world. I use garuda for the rolling release advantage and gaming tweaks, it uses the latest zen kernel for default. But i keep an lts kernel like xanmod lts for when things break at times. Something breaks your game, restart with lts until it's fixed. Works awesome, haven't had any downtime as my pc can game anytime i want
1 millions views !! Congratulations !! It's always a pleasure to watch your videos. The explanations are great, you do not try to influence people on choosing, you just present the choices, with the advantages and limitations with a little bit of context, and man, I love that !
Honestly, as someone who uses my Linux workstation for both work, programming, and gaming... Debian Testing is a great mix of stability, package availability and new drivers. You can even clone the latest linux-firmware from git and dump all the blobs into /lib/firmware and you're fully up to date on your GPU firmware: My 7900 GRE didn't have the latest firmware that allows you to overclock your VRAM past like 3% and upon installing the latest linux-firmware blobs, I can overclock it up to 33%. If you want a stable yet modern distro with a .deb package manager and some of the best software availability, go for Debian Testing.
Even for gaming, better use stable (with a few kernel/mesa tweaks if the person is ok with it) Because unless you use the machine for work, who wants to debug things that an update crashed? I just want to go out of the work, and for leisure launch my computer, start some games and play. And when it's not broken, there's no need to fix it.
I run my gaming PC quite rarely, on average 4-6 times a year, when games that interest me are released. I'm playing in most cases up to 2 weeks and then PC waits for another time :) That is why I chose Mint and it works flawlessly. Rolling doesn't seem to be the best option for me due to the risk of skipping the packages versions
I think this is a very balanced take, especially from a newer Linux user perspective. Many new Linux users will start with Mint, but many will learn quickly how to find ppa kisak and how to get a more up to date kernel. Don't underestimate Mint users. At the moment, I'm running Mint on one SSD. Earlier I had Win 10 on the second SSD. Two weeks ago, I installed Cachy OS on the Win 10 drive (inspired by your channel). The reason why I felt confident doing that was that I felt sure that Mint would not break. Sure Win 10 has broken Grub numerous times in this dualboot abusive relationship....but I learnt how to fix that. If Cachy OS breaks, I'll probably not be able to fix it, but I can fall back on Mint, but learn something while trying to fix it. So how have I got on with Cachy OS as a newb Linux user? Well, Cachy OS holds your hand, pretty much like Mint. You don't need to use to the terminal, but you quickly get on with some basic commands that are quicker in the terminal. What I love is that you do get the benefit of Arch Wiki. I'm a great foodie, I love cooking. When you are a newb you follow the recipe, once you can really cook a recipe is a source of inspiration. For now, I must follow the recipe, but Arch Wiki have you covered if you need it. Is Cachy OS quicker in games than Mint? In my view, I see no difference. It is perhaps a bit snappier in desktop, but that is a bit unfair because my Cachy OS installation is barebones compared to Mint. I think the original post on u/linuxgaming is a bit too simplistic. You don't need to sit on an obsolete Mint distro, you can update. This is perhaps a good time to comment a bit on your channel @A1RM4X - As a Gen X, I have no time. I have kids, work and elderly parents. In no time in my life have my time been more squeezed than now. I cannot watch your 4 hours videos. However, I have time for your shorter videos, not only because they are short, but because they are balanced. I'm tired of clickbait and RUclips channels with loud yelling titles to draw clicks and subs. I simply have no time to waste on this. That makes my threshold to subscribe very high. I try to keep my subscriptions low, so that it is worth my time. Your channel has been worth my time.
Honestly I understand this guy's point of view. There are some examples of people who faced issue with Linux and have developed a bad opinion about it since then, and if you ask them what device and distro they used it's probably going to be a pretty recent hardware running a distro with outdated packages. Games are quickly developing and a distro like Debian Stable is not going to keep up with these rapid changes. Also recommending such a distro with a slogan which at the beginning tells them that it's going to be easy-to-use, and will not require terminal - makes them treat Linux like it was Windows, and in result we get more and more bad opinions about Linux because it's not working there, it's not working here, it's not working elsewhere, this broke, that broke, here I can't fix, there I can't fix... bad software in general blah blah blah... 1st We should make them know the possible outcomes of using a "Stable Distro" and a "Rolling Distro" for gaming like you did in your video, thumbs up for that! 2nd The distro should fit the hardware out-of-the-box. A beginner will be scared of terminal at first, and him/her hearing "compile yourself latest TkG kernel" will get their brains busted even tho they may know that internet is there to help them. No offense here. 12/13/14 gens of Intel CPUs are still facing issues on stable distros much more often than older gens, and these are the CPUs I mostly hear Stable Distros are causing problems with. Sadly most of people suffering from this pain develop themselves a bad opinion about Linux, and this is where their journey usually ends.
Fair point. The way I see it is: - do you want to learn how to optimise once and then enjoy it? (don't need to compile kernel, just get xanmod as a start for example, also don´t need to compile mesa kisak, use the mesa from flatpak which is recent). Distro optimized in 2mn, no compilation, no brainer. - do you want to learn after each update why something could break? Downgrading libreoffice is a 5mn type of work. Chrooting into your partition because a random upgrade broke your boot, not the same story. For advanced users it is pretty simple (I chrooted to many times in my life LoL), for beginners it is a straight reinstall your linux distro from scratch (we all have been there if not prepared)... Pick your poison: do you still want to recommend a "ready to go" but fairly hard to maintain distro like Arch or a minimal optimisation with a no brain maintenance like Mint? I choose to recommend Mint to a beginner for the reasons above. When and IF the user feels the limitations of a stable distro (lack of recent features mainly), this user should be able to handle rolling (Arch / Fedora / Opensuse TW / NixOS / etc...).
@@A1RM4X I do recommend Mint as well for beginners but first I make sure what hardware are they using, I always do it. It will soon not be a problem in Mint's case as they started to use more recent kernel if we talk about the Ubuntu version because Debian still runs 6.1.
That is why I use flatpak for most apps, they are the same version no matter what distro I use. So if you have multiple distros all the apps are the same, so you dont have to worry about file compatibility or features not being the same.
Actually I came up to this reddit post too 2-3 days ago and the guy is right about the performance BUT... he may be right right about it when it comes to new high-end PCs. When you have older specs, like f.e. 5 - 6+ years old (or older, i drew this line for explanation purposes), the latest drivers, kernels etc won't do much for you, as the hardware has outdated technology etc. am I right? The case is to find your sweet spot on the current build and stick with it, and as you said sometimes the sweet spot = constant upgrades (at least until some point) and sometimes the time to stop upgrading has come as the "gains curve" becomes flat (and it will eventually), right? I mean that's the knowledge I gained from reddit posts similar to this so idk if I am talking BS or not but it seems logical to me.
I recall reading a dev ranting on a forum, about how "stable" distros were not pushing the open source drivers. He was saying that the team were getting bug reports, with bugs that were fixed over a year ago, and the distros were not interested in pushing updated drivers... because they didn't see it as a big issue. With the Mint, Pop, and Debian devs being a right pain. He believed it was making him, and the team look bad, and lazy. Especially because it was a lot easier to upgrade the proprietary drivers, and people assumed that the open source drivers would just update automatically, and get the latest. Now I use a proprietary driver, and Nvidia. I don't really have the experience, or expertise to argue with his points. I believe you are also in the same boat, with a proprietery Nvidia driver. Maybe, it's a different story when you use an AMD card, where most people stick with the open source stuff. So yes, I think hardware does matter, and an outright recommendation (to something like Mint) might not be the best thing. Especially if you need to "optomise" it. You try to get the viewpoint to a new user, and how many of them will really optimise it? The moment you even talk about omtimisation, an a supposedly stable distro, you've already lost them.
Super coup de gueule j'adore A1RM4X ! Diviser pour mieux régner.. Se justifier pour se sentir du bon côté.. Linux c'est l'union et c'est vraiment ce qui me fait aimer Linux ! Je trouve cette notion très importante et on voit que ça marche ! Linux en 2024 c'est beau ! Tu as raison il faut arrêter de se tirer dans les pattes 😌👏 ! Bon de là à ce que Ryan et Bobby fassent l'amour je ne sais pas.. ça ça les regarde 😊 !
I have always told persons that "stable" in this case does not mean no breakage. It means static. Not changing .That being said, just because it does not change it might have or will have less breakage over rolling.
I can definitely see using a newer kernel and GPU drivers is nice for a stable distro, but it seems like people just suggest Mint and don't talk about the kernel or GPU. Then a new linux user isn't aware of the differences or how to actually change those things. I like arch, but I think my smoothest gaming experience was actually Ubuntu with Xandmod kernel and and either kisak or oibaf Mesa drivers.
Wayland, RTX, DLSS does work in Mint and even Debian 12 if the game supports it and most nVidia cards or any card that is supported on the distro. The only real reason to use a rolling is NEW HARDWARE.
I used Linux for several months. I’ve gone back to windows. Linux is good but it just makes life a bit harder. HDR doesn’t work. Ray Tracing has terrible performance on Linux. Probably needs a few more years. It’s close.
will a beginner know to install Kizaki mesa and recent wine though? doesn't this open them up to more risk compared to say a 6-month release cycle distro like fedora/nobara?
It depends on if you just want single player, or if you want competitive. If you want just single player games I think stable is better since I think fixing it once is more important. Competitive you need latest to be compatible with the servers.
So far any Arch based distro using Plasma locks up for my system since the latest update to plasma after about 30 minutes. I dont know when or what I will be trying to do when it does it. Normally it does when watching video or trying to run a game. If I use any other DE/WM it works fine.
for example, Hitman 3 on Nvidia GTX1070 on Ubuntu don't work, so I go back to archlinux. But I prefer Mint, just install, open synaptic add some other apps and ready to use
Stable releases can remain broken for a very long time. I had a driver bug that would break debian and me and many others begged the devs to fix it but they refused because of their precious stability dogma, the issue had been fixed in the original repo for almost 2 years at that point but we were told to wait for the next debian stable release. A good year goes by, the next debian stable releases and it had the same broken driver, the devs then kept roping us on that they were going to backport the fix but it never came. It wasn't until the next release after that, that it finally got fixed, almost 5 years after ubuntu backported the fix. It made me wary of running stable "ancient" debian even on older hardware.
I don't need latest and greatest. My current hardware and operating system, MX Linux Xfce, handles everything I do without any problem. Everything I use opens immediately when I click on it. I don't game and don't use Nvidia or AMD. It's Intel CPU and Intel GPU.
Linux today reminds me of an old clip from TED by Barry Schwartz. It has become a paradox of choice :). So many ways of doing the same thing. Hope this guide below will help when deciding what distro to use: If you have time to spend on tinkering no matter how new/old is your device go with a rolling release (ex Arch) If you don't have time and want stability go with stable distro (Mint) but your shiny new rig will have to wait 6-12 months until the kernel with proper drivers is integrated ... officially. Personally I find stable distro well suited for old hardware. And, personal preference, if you want to be somewhat in the middle between rolling release and stable go with Fedora 40 KDE. After a while, found it as a good blend between cutting edge integrations (ex wayland, secureboot signed nvidia driver, etc) and stability. When mixed with Flatpak it becomes real flexible.
I dont recommend noobies using mint or ubuntu for gaming. Sure, with some knowhow and suffering you can make it work, but most noobied cant. I had someone I know recently install ubuntu to game and his dual monitors didnt work properly, warthunder would not open at the correct screen, it would not work porperly on native or even proton, he couldnt get the 555 drivers and various peripherals wouldnt work due to him being on the LTS version. He left linux. Point being that people recommending "stable" distros like linux mint or ubuntu for noobies is a terrible idea
Lets talk about this. Debian is stable and just works. Arch is great and if you have newer hardware might be better. When it comes to gaming, etc. STABLE IS BETTER. I ran the Black Myth benchmark on both Arch with Hyrland and Debian 12 running Gnome. Both had the same results, about 1fps difference. In BeamNG Drive Vulkan mode on Arch is broken, flickers so bad you cannot play (at least on my machine with an AMD GPU). On Debian 12 is just works perfectly. I was running and testing Arch for about 3 weeks and found that all games that I play are the same, no matter which one of those two I use. Debian 12 forces you to use Flatpak if you want newer versions of software, which is fine (for the most part). Arch however has newer packages than Flatpak sometimes and for instance if you use Openshot and Blender Arch will allow them to work together, where the flatpak has sandbox issues and they seem not to talk to each other. Also Arch can allow HIP (AMDs GPU Rendering) to work on Blender, does not work on Debian 12 as they dont have the support. Use whatever distro you want. Any distro can do whatever you want with work. Rolling release distros will require more work to maintain.
Mint doesn't even exist to me until it properly supports Wayland / relatively recent hardware, so there's that. I can recommend CachyOS because I've never seen anyone run into a breakage with it.
New users dont know how to optimize mint. The download it then try to game and nothing works well. They leave linux thinking everything is shit. If the person only cares about gaming i just point them to nobara because it has sane defaults and all the packages you would expect installed by default. They still run into problems (leawrnign linux) but they can game usually.
On Debian Stable you can always pull kernel from backports, that will might help with mesa. Also installing steam give access to newest proton, so outdated wine in Debian repository do not matter.
Or you can just suffer with Windows, but at least, your games work as intended, system is somewhat working good after debloating and using Chris Titus Windows Toolkit. I am not a Windows fanboy, I always hated Microsoft, but I am stuck with their OS, because at least 99% of the time things just work, everything is compatible with the system. I only had problems with older games, but I solve it about 5-10 minutes. So yeah, I hate Windows but at least it's somewhat reliable compared to Linux.
I've had far more issues with Windows 11 than I've had on Linux Mint. Windows has frozen up, had applications stop responding/crash, rebooted itself at inconvenient times, the GUI is slow and sluggish, and a myriad of other issues on a daily basis. On the other hand, while I have encountered a few minor issues on Linux Mint over the past 7 months, I've experienced much less issues overall in comparison to Windows 11. Linux Mint feels like I'm driving a race car instead of a foot-powered Flinstonesmobile. It's faster, more responsive, more stable, and about 80% of the games I've tried have worked great using Steam Proton and Lutris. I got sick of trying to fix a new issue in Windows on a daily basis; it has been much less of a hassle running Linux Mint (I run into an issue on Mint perhaps once every few months as opposed to once or twice a day on Windows). Having a fast and responsive operating system that doesn't force updates, reboot itself, spy on the user, or require praying to the Microsoft gods that it'll randomly work today, is a blessing. I know that when I boot into Linux Mint that I'm going to be able to do everything I want to do; and more importantly: that it'll reliably work when I need it to.
@@SLNGRZ I don't know what kind of Windows 11 people have or how long you have to use it to shit itself but it's been installed for about 2 months now and I never had any issues like freezing or crashing. What I noticed that compatibility with older games are ass.
@@szhadjii8363 I purchased a brand new ASUS laptop in January of this year that has decent specs (Intel i9 14 core CPU, Nvidia RTX 3050, 16 GB RAM) and came with Windows 11 preinstalled. I hadn't used Windows in several years so figured I'd check it out for a month or so to see what Windows 11 was like. It was nothing but constant issues, and I wasn't doing anything crazy. I tried to join a Zoom web conference via a web browser and first the web browser locks up and says it's not responding, then the entire PC freezes up and I was forced to reboot, causing me to miss my scheduled appointment. Then a few days later, apparently Windows was updating itself or something because shortly after logging in the entire desktop becomes so laggy it's like I'm watching a slide show as I move the mouse around. Then a few days after that, I was working on a project and decided to take a break and get some lunch. Well, after I came back I noticed Windows had decided it was a good time to reboot for an update and so it closed all of the work I had open causing me to lose hours worth of progress. These are just a tiny drop in the bucket in the headaches I've experienced on Windows 11 in the short time I spent on it (a little over a month), but I haven't had any major issues at all after installing Linux Mint on this laptop. I still have Windows installed so I can dual boot if I ever need Windows for whatever reason, but I dread having to ever boot it up again. Linux Mint is just a much better experience without the headaches.
i think the best choice is semi-rolling. i'm using debian testing (sparkylinux) and i think is the almost the best version of "stable rolling distro". not perfect but close : )
For those asking: here is the tutorial on how to optimise Linux Mint for Gaming: ruclips.net/video/d1oK3J2SeuI/видео.html
@A1RM4X by the way why are you recommending Mint for beginners instead of let's say Nobara or PopOS?
Just because you went to the trouble of bringing views on the limitations of each system to each user profile in a rational way and without the rage typical of forums, you deserve my credit. I tested several current distros such as cachy (I don't like the store) and nobara (I like the store in gnome). I would like a video of you teaching how to optimize mint. Thank you very much
He already has a video on it. I followed his instructions and it worked fine, but I still wanted newer features like VRR so I went on to other distros after
@@Maitreya3001 I'm sorry. I didn't see it. I'm a new follower. I'll look in his list of videos. thank you very much.
@@pinchetech Here you go: ruclips.net/video/d1oK3J2SeuI/видео.html
Reddit poster here. I'm a fan of the channel and was not expecting a video on this topic. Thanks for making it; very educational. I wasn't trying to say that stable distros aren't for anyone, but rather that they shouldn't be the default recommendation as much as they have been in the past. I think it should also be emphasized how little maintenance most people will need to do on a rolling release distro. Additionally, it's worth noting that there are legitimate reasons why Bobby might want to use up-to-date software and libraries in general, despite everything working "fine" on Mint. Wayland on Mint is still a headache to set up, regardless of hardware.
I agree there's a lot of nuance to this topic. In my post, you can see that I have no problem with anyone using Mint if it works for them, but I strongly disagree that stable should be the default recommendation. I also think Cinnamon is simply inferior to KDE and Gnome and shouldn't be recommended to former Windows users just because it looks vaguely like Windows XP. When Bobby wants to enable VRR with multiple monitors, or plugs in his shiny new HDR OLED monitor, he will be very disappointed on Cinnamon X11. There is also the argument of developers getting constant bug reports from users with outdated drivers and packages. *If Mint had been my first distro, it wouldn't have left a good impression of Linux on me.*
I am aligned with your arguments overall. I just wanted to add the nuance of hardware and feature in the mix. Those two variables are key to understand each side of the story (Bobby vs Ryan, lol WTH was I thinking with this example xD).
From my standpoint it is just impossible to send someone toward a rolling edge distro because I believe the hassles are just to big when it come to maintenance. I have seen way to many posts when people jump into Arch for example and get annihilated by the huge barrier to entry of the wiki when they don´t have some linux bases.
The way I see it is actually pretty simple: Mint => Arch based (if hardware / features not supported by Mint) => Full Arch (full control of every package / config for tweaks lovers).
Thanks for your post which was the trigger point of this video, thanks for the comment and thanks for being a fan of the channel! Also, don´t forget to subscribe, it will help me send Linux gaming to the moon =)
I dont recommend noobies using mint or ubuntu for gaming. Sure, with some knowhow and suffering you can make it work, but most noobied cant. I had someone I know recently install ubuntu to game and his dual monitors didnt work properly, warthunder would not open at the correct screen, it would not work porperly on native or even proton, he couldnt get the 555 drivers and various peripherals wouldnt work due to him being on the LTS version. He left linux.
Point being that people recommending "stable" distros like linux mint or ubuntu for noobies is a terrible idea
@@AndRei-yc3ti I disagree. I would call this instance just unfortunate. There are too many guides and tutorials on how to prepare your machine for gaming (Which won't even take that long to set everything up) for stable distros for different levels of linux knowledge, so even a child would be able to follow them. And there is the same amount of forums on how to fix certain bugs or issues in general. Errors are something that is typical for any OS, although if a person is not willing to take some time to address them, then they are not ready to make the switch. Perhaps that "someone" is just more familiar with fixing Windows' inconveniences and issues, so that is their choice.
congratulations on your million + views, dude 👍
🎉
Let's put it in other words.
If any distro was perfect for everybody's taste and any pc hardware, we woudn't have to choose between 200+ distros.
Same goes for women as well. ;)
Let's be happy for what the active linux community is giving us FOR FREE, instead of Microsoft's totalitarianism.
The thing is, even stable distros have more problems with compatibility then the shit Microsoft releases. People like me, who just wants an operating system that works as intended will always use Windows, even if they don't like it that much. Convenience will always win for an average person.
@@szhadjii8363 I can dig what you say about compatibility. However, i'll take freedom over convenience any time. The sooner the "average" person realize it, the better for humanity. That goes as well for a lot of stuff happening lately in our lives.. Check what Microsoft will soon "feature" in their next versions for the "average" person. (recall, AI co-pilot etc). The end of digital privacy is upon us and it's coming fast and furious.
@@illusiondrmr Digital privacy doesn't exist from the time smart phones got popular, but yeah, I've seen what Microsoft wants to implement into Win 11, like Recall, and I'm considering switching sometime, but I don't have a lot of time at my laptop cause of school and work.
there's no way there are 200+ women
@@illusiondrmr That comment didn't age well brother, hardware unboxed just released a video that shows massive CPU download for Ryzen in the next windows 11 release. Is it worth it? Not for me but it would make linux look bad performance wise.
You can get the best of both world. I use garuda for the rolling release advantage and gaming tweaks, it uses the latest zen kernel for default. But i keep an lts kernel like xanmod lts for when things break at times. Something breaks your game, restart with lts until it's fixed. Works awesome, haven't had any downtime as my pc can game anytime i want
What a great explainer man with the drawings and all.
AHAHA! Do you really like my great drawings or you are trolling?
1 millions views !! Congratulations !!
It's always a pleasure to watch your videos. The explanations are great, you do not try to influence people on choosing, you just present the choices, with the advantages and limitations with a little bit of context, and man, I love that !
So nice of you
Honestly, as someone who uses my Linux workstation for both work, programming, and gaming... Debian Testing is a great mix of stability, package availability and new drivers. You can even clone the latest linux-firmware from git and dump all the blobs into /lib/firmware and you're fully up to date on your GPU firmware: My 7900 GRE didn't have the latest firmware that allows you to overclock your VRAM past like 3% and upon installing the latest linux-firmware blobs, I can overclock it up to 33%. If you want a stable yet modern distro with a .deb package manager and some of the best software availability, go for Debian Testing.
Even for gaming, better use stable (with a few kernel/mesa tweaks if the person is ok with it)
Because unless you use the machine for work, who wants to debug things that an update crashed? I just want to go out of the work, and for leisure launch my computer, start some games and play. And when it's not broken, there's no need to fix it.
This video is like a page of the Linux Bible. Everyone should watch this video before switching to Linux.
I run my gaming PC quite rarely, on average 4-6 times a year, when games that interest me are released. I'm playing in most cases up to 2 weeks and then PC waits for another time :) That is why I chose Mint and it works flawlessly. Rolling doesn't seem to be the best option for me due to the risk of skipping the packages versions
I think this is a very balanced take, especially from a newer Linux user perspective. Many new Linux users will start with Mint, but many will learn quickly how to find ppa kisak and how to get a more up to date kernel. Don't underestimate Mint users.
At the moment, I'm running Mint on one SSD. Earlier I had Win 10 on the second SSD. Two weeks ago, I installed Cachy OS on the Win 10 drive (inspired by your channel). The reason why I felt confident doing that was that I felt sure that Mint would not break. Sure Win 10 has broken Grub numerous times in this dualboot abusive relationship....but I learnt how to fix that. If Cachy OS breaks, I'll probably not be able to fix it, but I can fall back on Mint, but learn something while trying to fix it.
So how have I got on with Cachy OS as a newb Linux user? Well, Cachy OS holds your hand, pretty much like Mint. You don't need to use to the terminal, but you quickly get on with some basic commands that are quicker in the terminal. What I love is that you do get the benefit of Arch Wiki. I'm a great foodie, I love cooking. When you are a newb you follow the recipe, once you can really cook a recipe is a source of inspiration. For now, I must follow the recipe, but Arch Wiki have you covered if you need it.
Is Cachy OS quicker in games than Mint? In my view, I see no difference. It is perhaps a bit snappier in desktop, but that is a bit unfair because my Cachy OS installation is barebones compared to Mint.
I think the original post on u/linuxgaming is a bit too simplistic. You don't need to sit on an obsolete Mint distro, you can update.
This is perhaps a good time to comment a bit on your channel @A1RM4X - As a Gen X, I have no time. I have kids, work and elderly parents. In no time in my life have my time been more squeezed than now. I cannot watch your 4 hours videos. However, I have time for your shorter videos, not only because they are short, but because they are balanced. I'm tired of clickbait and RUclips channels with loud yelling titles to draw clicks and subs. I simply have no time to waste on this. That makes my threshold to subscribe very high. I try to keep my subscriptions low, so that it is worth my time.
Your channel has been worth my time.
Kernel backports + Flatpak Steam (comes with updated Mesa) solve the issue of reduced perf on stable distros 💪
Another brilliant Video, explains it all very well.
Glad you enjoyed it
Honestly I understand this guy's point of view.
There are some examples of people who faced issue with Linux and have developed a bad opinion about it since then, and if you ask them what device and distro they used it's probably going to be a pretty recent hardware running a distro with outdated packages. Games are quickly developing and a distro like Debian Stable is not going to keep up with these rapid changes. Also recommending such a distro with a slogan which at the beginning tells them that it's going to be easy-to-use, and will not require terminal - makes them treat Linux like it was Windows, and in result we get more and more bad opinions about Linux because it's not working there, it's not working here, it's not working elsewhere, this broke, that broke, here I can't fix, there I can't fix... bad software in general blah blah blah...
1st We should make them know the possible outcomes of using a "Stable Distro" and a "Rolling Distro" for gaming like you did in your video, thumbs up for that!
2nd The distro should fit the hardware out-of-the-box. A beginner will be scared of terminal at first, and him/her hearing "compile yourself latest TkG kernel" will get their brains busted even tho they may know that internet is there to help them. No offense here.
12/13/14 gens of Intel CPUs are still facing issues on stable distros much more often than older gens, and these are the CPUs I mostly hear Stable Distros are causing problems with. Sadly most of people suffering from this pain develop themselves a bad opinion about Linux, and this is where their journey usually ends.
Fair point. The way I see it is:
- do you want to learn how to optimise once and then enjoy it? (don't need to compile kernel, just get xanmod as a start for example, also don´t need to compile mesa kisak, use the mesa from flatpak which is recent). Distro optimized in 2mn, no compilation, no brainer.
- do you want to learn after each update why something could break? Downgrading libreoffice is a 5mn type of work. Chrooting into your partition because a random upgrade broke your boot, not the same story. For advanced users it is pretty simple (I chrooted to many times in my life LoL), for beginners it is a straight reinstall your linux distro from scratch (we all have been there if not prepared)...
Pick your poison: do you still want to recommend a "ready to go" but fairly hard to maintain distro like Arch or a minimal optimisation with a no brain maintenance like Mint? I choose to recommend Mint to a beginner for the reasons above. When and IF the user feels the limitations of a stable distro (lack of recent features mainly), this user should be able to handle rolling (Arch / Fedora / Opensuse TW / NixOS / etc...).
@@A1RM4X I do recommend Mint as well for beginners but first I make sure what hardware are they using, I always do it. It will soon not be a problem in Mint's case as they started to use more recent kernel if we talk about the Ubuntu version because Debian still runs 6.1.
That is why I use flatpak for most apps, they are the same version no matter what distro I use. So if you have multiple distros all the apps are the same, so you dont have to worry about file compatibility or features not being the same.
Welcome to the 1 million club 😎
10 millions club when? =)
@@A1RM4X When you can spell Bobby ;)
@@_xyz123_ MOUAHAHAH! Good ONE!
Actually I came up to this reddit post too 2-3 days ago and the guy is right about the performance BUT... he may be right right about it when it comes to new high-end PCs. When you have older specs, like f.e. 5 - 6+ years old (or older, i drew this line for explanation purposes), the latest drivers, kernels etc won't do much for you, as the hardware has outdated technology etc. am I right? The case is to find your sweet spot on the current build and stick with it, and as you said sometimes the sweet spot = constant upgrades (at least until some point) and sometimes the time to stop upgrading has come as the "gains curve" becomes flat (and it will eventually), right? I mean that's the knowledge I gained from reddit posts similar to this so idk if I am talking BS or not but it seems logical to me.
I recall reading a dev ranting on a forum, about how "stable" distros were not pushing the open source drivers. He was saying that the team were getting bug reports, with bugs that were fixed over a year ago, and the distros were not interested in pushing updated drivers... because they didn't see it as a big issue. With the Mint, Pop, and Debian devs being a right pain. He believed it was making him, and the team look bad, and lazy. Especially because it was a lot easier to upgrade the proprietary drivers, and people assumed that the open source drivers would just update automatically, and get the latest.
Now I use a proprietary driver, and Nvidia. I don't really have the experience, or expertise to argue with his points. I believe you are also in the same boat, with a proprietery Nvidia driver. Maybe, it's a different story when you use an AMD card, where most people stick with the open source stuff. So yes, I think hardware does matter, and an outright recommendation (to something like Mint) might not be the best thing. Especially if you need to "optomise" it. You try to get the viewpoint to a new user, and how many of them will really optimise it? The moment you even talk about omtimisation, an a supposedly stable distro, you've already lost them.
Loving your Québécois accent!
I am from France originally, this is a French accent, not a Québécois French one. I rather specify as I don´t want to offend their accent!
@@A1RM4X Tabarnak speaking club is not Bonne mère speaking club
!!!
@@TheBrainQC HERE WE GO xD
Super coup de gueule j'adore A1RM4X ! Diviser pour mieux régner..
Se justifier pour se sentir du bon côté..
Linux c'est l'union et c'est vraiment ce qui me fait aimer Linux ! Je trouve cette notion très importante et on voit que ça marche ! Linux en 2024 c'est beau ! Tu as raison il faut arrêter de se tirer dans les pattes 😌👏 !
Bon de là à ce que Ryan et Bobby fassent l'amour je ne sais pas.. ça ça les regarde 😊 !
i actually needed this video im having the same questions
I have always told persons that "stable" in this case does not mean no breakage. It means static. Not changing .That being said, just because it does not change it might have or will have less breakage over rolling.
I can definitely see using a newer kernel and GPU drivers is nice for a stable distro, but it seems like people just suggest Mint and don't talk about the kernel or GPU. Then a new linux user isn't aware of the differences or how to actually change those things. I like arch, but I think my smoothest gaming experience was actually Ubuntu with Xandmod kernel and and either kisak or oibaf Mesa drivers.
Ultramarime linux is a Fedora based distro, which is good for new linux users.
I always recommend this to new users instead of Tuxedo OS.
Wayland, RTX, DLSS does work in Mint and even Debian 12 if the game supports it and most nVidia cards or any card that is supported on the distro. The only real reason to use a rolling is NEW HARDWARE.
I used Linux for several months.
I’ve gone back to windows.
Linux is good but it just makes life a bit harder.
HDR doesn’t work.
Ray Tracing has terrible performance on Linux.
Probably needs a few more years.
It’s close.
I use mint and mesa ppas.
Along with tkg kernal.
I feel it's stable but gives me the same perf as a rolling distro
will a beginner know to install Kizaki mesa and recent wine though? doesn't this open them up to more risk compared to say a 6-month release cycle distro like fedora/nobara?
It depends on if you just want single player, or if you want competitive. If you want just single player games I think stable is better since I think fixing it once is more important. Competitive you need latest to be compatible with the servers.
So far any Arch based distro using Plasma locks up for my system since the latest update to plasma after about 30 minutes. I dont know when or what I will be trying to do when it does it. Normally it does when watching video or trying to run a game. If I use any other DE/WM it works fine.
I just tested Debian 12, its Mesa is 22.3.6 but if you use the flatpak steam version is 24.1.1
Could you make a video comparing nobara and cachyos gaming performance?
What about the new Nvidia open source druvers? Does that change things?
for example, Hitman 3 on Nvidia GTX1070 on Ubuntu don't work, so I go back to archlinux.
But I prefer Mint, just install, open synaptic add some other apps and ready to use
Stable releases can remain broken for a very long time. I had a driver bug that would break debian and me and many others begged the devs to fix it but they refused because of their precious stability dogma, the issue had been fixed in the original repo for almost 2 years at that point but we were told to wait for the next debian stable release. A good year goes by, the next debian stable releases and it had the same broken driver, the devs then kept roping us on that they were going to backport the fix but it never came. It wasn't until the next release after that, that it finally got fixed, almost 5 years after ubuntu backported the fix. It made me wary of running stable "ancient" debian even on older hardware.
my trial and error ended on Fedora. middle ground between stabe and rolling
There is no "one size fits all" distro, only trade offs.
I don't need latest and greatest. My current hardware and operating system, MX Linux Xfce, handles everything I do without any problem. Everything I use opens immediately when I click on it. I don't game and don't use Nvidia or AMD. It's Intel CPU and Intel GPU.
What board you are using for drawings?
excalidraw.com/
Hello @A1RM4X, congrats on the 1M views achiev.:)
Have you ever tried SerpentOS for gaming?
Cheers from Portugal :)
Linux today reminds me of an old clip from TED by Barry Schwartz. It has become a paradox of choice :). So many ways of doing the same thing.
Hope this guide below will help when deciding what distro to use:
If you have time to spend on tinkering no matter how new/old is your device go with a rolling release (ex Arch)
If you don't have time and want stability go with stable distro (Mint) but your shiny new rig will have to wait 6-12 months until the kernel with proper drivers is integrated ... officially.
Personally I find stable distro well suited for old hardware.
And, personal preference, if you want to be somewhat in the middle between rolling release and stable go with Fedora 40 KDE. After a while, found it as a good blend between cutting edge integrations (ex wayland, secureboot signed nvidia driver, etc) and stability. When mixed with Flatpak it becomes real flexible.
I dont recommend noobies using mint or ubuntu for gaming. Sure, with some knowhow and suffering you can make it work, but most noobied cant. I had someone I know recently install ubuntu to game and his dual monitors didnt work properly, warthunder would not open at the correct screen, it would not work porperly on native or even proton, he couldnt get the 555 drivers and various peripherals wouldnt work due to him being on the LTS version. He left linux.
Point being that people recommending "stable" distros like linux mint or ubuntu for noobies is a terrible idea
I use only rolling because la vida loca
Lets talk about this. Debian is stable and just works. Arch is great and if you have newer hardware might be better. When it comes to gaming, etc. STABLE IS BETTER. I ran the Black Myth benchmark on both Arch with Hyrland and Debian 12 running Gnome. Both had the same results, about 1fps difference. In BeamNG Drive Vulkan mode on Arch is broken, flickers so bad you cannot play (at least on my machine with an AMD GPU). On Debian 12 is just works perfectly. I was running and testing Arch for about 3 weeks and found that all games that I play are the same, no matter which one of those two I use. Debian 12 forces you to use Flatpak if you want newer versions of software, which is fine (for the most part). Arch however has newer packages than Flatpak sometimes and for instance if you use Openshot and Blender Arch will allow them to work together, where the flatpak has sandbox issues and they seem not to talk to each other. Also Arch can allow HIP (AMDs GPU Rendering) to work on Blender, does not work on Debian 12 as they dont have the support.
Use whatever distro you want. Any distro can do whatever you want with work. Rolling release distros will require more work to maintain.
Mint doesn't even exist to me until it properly supports Wayland / relatively recent hardware, so there's that. I can recommend CachyOS because I've never seen anyone run into a breakage with it.
New users dont know how to optimize mint. The download it then try to game and nothing works well. They leave linux thinking everything is shit. If the person only cares about gaming i just point them to nobara because it has sane defaults and all the packages you would expect installed by default. They still run into problems (leawrnign linux) but they can game usually.
On Debian Stable you can always pull kernel from backports, that will might help with mesa. Also installing steam give access to newest proton, so outdated wine in Debian repository do not matter.
Newbies optimizing?
I just wish ubuntu, mint etc had a "easy installer" thing for up to date mesa like they do with nvidia drivers
Or you can just suffer with Windows, but at least, your games work as intended, system is somewhat working good after debloating and using Chris Titus Windows Toolkit. I am not a Windows fanboy, I always hated Microsoft, but I am stuck with their OS, because at least 99% of the time things just work, everything is compatible with the system. I only had problems with older games, but I solve it about 5-10 minutes. So yeah, I hate Windows but at least it's somewhat reliable compared to Linux.
I've had far more issues with Windows 11 than I've had on Linux Mint. Windows has frozen up, had applications stop responding/crash, rebooted itself at inconvenient times, the GUI is slow and sluggish, and a myriad of other issues on a daily basis.
On the other hand, while I have encountered a few minor issues on Linux Mint over the past 7 months, I've experienced much less issues overall in comparison to Windows 11. Linux Mint feels like I'm driving a race car instead of a foot-powered Flinstonesmobile. It's faster, more responsive, more stable, and about 80% of the games I've tried have worked great using Steam Proton and Lutris.
I got sick of trying to fix a new issue in Windows on a daily basis; it has been much less of a hassle running Linux Mint (I run into an issue on Mint perhaps once every few months as opposed to once or twice a day on Windows). Having a fast and responsive operating system that doesn't force updates, reboot itself, spy on the user, or require praying to the Microsoft gods that it'll randomly work today, is a blessing. I know that when I boot into Linux Mint that I'm going to be able to do everything I want to do; and more importantly: that it'll reliably work when I need it to.
@@SLNGRZ I don't know what kind of Windows 11 people have or how long you have to use it to shit itself but it's been installed for about 2 months now and I never had any issues like freezing or crashing. What I noticed that compatibility with older games are ass.
@@szhadjii8363 I purchased a brand new ASUS laptop in January of this year that has decent specs (Intel i9 14 core CPU, Nvidia RTX 3050, 16 GB RAM) and came with Windows 11 preinstalled. I hadn't used Windows in several years so figured I'd check it out for a month or so to see what Windows 11 was like.
It was nothing but constant issues, and I wasn't doing anything crazy. I tried to join a Zoom web conference via a web browser and first the web browser locks up and says it's not responding, then the entire PC freezes up and I was forced to reboot, causing me to miss my scheduled appointment. Then a few days later, apparently Windows was updating itself or something because shortly after logging in the entire desktop becomes so laggy it's like I'm watching a slide show as I move the mouse around.
Then a few days after that, I was working on a project and decided to take a break and get some lunch. Well, after I came back I noticed Windows had decided it was a good time to reboot for an update and so it closed all of the work I had open causing me to lose hours worth of progress.
These are just a tiny drop in the bucket in the headaches I've experienced on Windows 11 in the short time I spent on it (a little over a month), but I haven't had any major issues at all after installing Linux Mint on this laptop. I still have Windows installed so I can dual boot if I ever need Windows for whatever reason, but I dread having to ever boot it up again. Linux Mint is just a much better experience without the headaches.
CatchyOS>>>>
CachyOS
Yes cachyos is good
Why not both with NixOS !
NixOs is the best for both worlds. Nothing beats nixos
@@ima_doggo_bork_bork6279 but it's so hard to learn, I gave after couple days! 😔
"NixOS"
Stop making war... Start making Linux! Missed opportunity there 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
thank god he missed it
i think the best choice is semi-rolling. i'm using debian testing (sparkylinux) and i think is the almost the best version of "stable rolling distro". not perfect but close : )
I'm using Debian Sid here. Even if it's a unstable distro, it rarely break personally.
@@agolinux6316 i'm using an old nvidia graphic card. believe me it's really annoying to not using a stable distro with nvidia