I‘m pretty excited, ngl! I‘ve recently finished my daily driver and put ubuntu 23.04 on it. 3060ti (don’t buy nvidia! Just dont) and an i9, 32gigs of ram. Streaming on an apple tv with a ds4 controller.
All settings maxed with raytracing ultra (did hitch a bit like 30-40 min into the game, either bigger rooms or heat buildup, gotta check that) turned off raytracing, everything was fine again.
The game is so cinematic and 3rd person lends itself to controllers imo.
But I wanted to share this because it blew my mind how far linux gaming has come. You don’t need a game console. You can just run it on your tv over fkin lan. Crazy!
To add to what @Grass wrote:
- Ubuntu has never been a good distro for gaming. The main reason being their outdated packages in their default repos. As a result, you’re always missing out on all the latest developments and advancements in Linux gaming - the Linux world moves really, really fast, and each month you get new versions of Wine, your graphics drivers, kernel advancements etc that improves system performance and game compatibility - but you won’t get to enjoy any of these features until the next major release of Ubuntu. Also, for some folks, having the newest kernel/mesa (graphics) etc is a necessity if they’ve got recent hardware and they want to make the most of it. To address these limitations, people have created their own repositories (ppas) containing up-to-date packages, such as the Oibaf repo, but the problem is that these repos tend to break your system, especially when the time comes to do an OS update/upgrade, which is why we do not recommend anyone to use these repos. But as a result, you’ll be stuck with an outdated system, and sometimes that means you won’t be able to enjoy playing some games because you’re stuck on some old version of something where your favorite game doesn’t work.
- Ubuntu hasn’t been a good distro in general for a long time now - this goes back to more than a decade ago when they made the controversial decision to switch their default DE to their in-house developed Unity, instead of continuing to use Gnome. Unity was, at the time, bloated and clunky, and many people felt it was a wasted effort. Eventually Ubuntu abandoned Unity and adopted Gnome, and the whole community laughed at them like “lol, we told you so”. This sort of pattern continued pretty much constantly, where Ubuntu would choose to go for their own, often inferior, in-house solutions - such as Mir instead of Wayland, Upstart instead of systemd, Snap instead of Flatpak etc. The most recent anger from the public comes from their decision to force Snap packages as the default over native packages (when most people prefer either native or Flatpak packages), and the taking over of LXD. In addition to such unpopular decisions, they’ve been criticized for including bloatware such as Amazon search, unwanted telemetry, or just the general bloat of unwanted apps and services that come by default, compared to stock Debian. Basically, Ubuntu has become the Windows Visa/8/11 of the Linux world.
- There are plenty of gaming oriented distros these days that are a much, much, better choice. These distros come with a gaming-optimised kernel, plus the newest mesa/wine/codecs/drivers out-of-the-box, and they include configs to make things like the newest game controllers and other gaming hardware work properly. Examples of such distros include Nobara, Bazzite, ChimeraOS etc. Or even a general distro such as Fedora, Pop!_OS, EndeavourOS, CachyOS etc would still be a much, much better choice than Ubuntu.
To be absolutely fair: your assessment is most probably true for the people who fit the profile you just described.
But from a „I come from windows and want my steam games to run“ it works fine. Proton runs like 50 games in my library (from 51 so to speak)
I‘d rather say the downsides of ubuntu (from a windows perspective) is that it’s very finicky at times. I couldn’t get xrdp to run on 22.10 back then and had to switch back from pulse to pipewire to get it to run which led to more problems down the road.
And the reason you mentioned Ubuntu is “finicky” was explained above. It is not a good “just works” distro, there’s much better options than Ubuntu.
It used to be (one of) the best “just works” distros, but is somehow one of the worst now. Outdated blogposts still recommend it, and Canonical still calls themselves the “most used” desktop distro. The alternatives are just better.
Interesting perspective. I might check out a couple distros just to see what you mean. :)
(Tbf I use ubuntu server for years and that is not finicky at all. Just the desktop somehow is)
I’m not an Ubuntu doomer like most of the internet (I don’t hate snap like everyone else), but I did recently switch to OpenSUSE on my gaming laptop and I’m loving it. I switched because I wanted a rolling release distro so I didn’t need to worry about waiting for new features. I also wanted to switch to KDE Plasma after using it on my Steam Deck and loving it, but I could have done that while staying on Ubuntu. It was just another excuse for me to try something new.
That said, I will likely never move my server off of Ubuntu. I am totally fine with my packages being old and not getting new features right away because my server must be functioning all the time. Even updating to new LTS releases makes me nervous.
Anyway, if you’re happy with Ubuntu, don’t let anyone bully you off of it. It’s really not bad. It’s stable. That’s its best feature. Unless there’s something specific you want from another distro, stick with what you like.
Thank you very much. There are quite a few people on here who feel very strongly about otherwise inconsequential topics.
I feel like we should open a “touchedgrass” community where everyone can post pics of landscape with their username and the current date to prove they have touched grass recently. This is obviously mostly a joke but I kinda like the idea. :) Would you like to mod that with me?
… until it doesn’t. You’re not going to keep playing the same games forever, right? What if a new game comes out that you really want to play, and it doesn’t work in Ubuntu but it works everywhere else? This is actually a fairly common issue, because Ubuntu tends to be so far behind in package versions.
Also, as you mentioned, Ubuntu can be very finicky at times, so there’s no guarantee your games will continue to work.
It’s best to switch now while your install is still fresh and you don’t have much data and customisations, because later on, it’ll be a bit of a pain to migrate everything.
I wouldn’t call it „fresh“. I‘m running this machine for over a month daily and for work purposes. I can’t afford to change now. Also, ununtu being finicky and it stopping to work for some undisclosed reason is not in the same ballpark. Also, I just said that 95% of my games run on ubuntu. Who cares if a game comes out that doesnt support it? I sure don’t. I‘ll maybe check out a couple distros in vms and then switch over if they’re insanely good and I need to change something major.