Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver. Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don’t end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
One thing i will say though, even though the state of gaming has drastically improved since my first foray into linux, the “fine details” of gaming have not. Fuck me the first time i looked into the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul. Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue, my bandaid was to do a wired connection, and sitting here just now i hear a laugh and look back and see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, thats for sure
I plan on making a post of my own personal experiences in the coming weeks. However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don’t usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other “managed” operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.
I’m really concerned about my MiL and wife as they both have machines with NVidia cards. My wife and her mother play Sims 3, as well. Her mom’s game, specifically, is extremely mod-heavy and she is religious about updating her mods when patches drop (she’s retired so has a shit ton of time to do that monthly, I guess). I’ve talked to her about getting off Windows, but I’m nervous to get her on any version of Linux because 1) I don’t play Sims 3 nor do mods for it, 2) I’m a tech-baby with Linux troubleshooting, unlike Windows, and 3) I’m just a registry editor 💔, so I’m concerned I won’t be able to support her potential sticking points with it and Sims 3 and it’ll further entrench her against Windows and change, in general.
Good luck on your journey, regardless. The people in this community are pretty great (including the Arch and Vi users, I guess)! Totally wasn’t held at gun point while saying that last bit. Nope, not at all!
Yeah, i have an example of this. I spent since time today building a local copy of handbrake have it run in a distrobox of arch to get AMD hardware acceleration as an option. The flatpak version refused to do this. It wasn’t too bad, but still wild i did this.
However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don’t usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other “managed” operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.
This, right here, if you’re a tech savvy windows user considering migrating, read the above until you’ve internalized it. Don’t trust me? Go watch Linus from LTT use Linux and break everything in a matter of hours because he literally answered “Yes, I know what I’m doing” when he had no idea.
It’s my experience that tech savvy windows users know enough to be a danger to themselves, and worse, have the confidence to shoot themselves in the foot.
Switched over someone I know just recently. No headaches. Video card worked without issue from the jump and they’ve been playing Fallout 76 on it with more stability than they ever had with Windows. I put it on my own machine a few months back, and it was the same. Smooth. Either I got double lucky or you got unlucky.
It’s a weird cycle of “it’s not an OS used by gamers so we don’t have to support it” and “nobody supports it so I don’t wanna use it.”
And the part that sucks is that writing drivers for linux was probably trivial to these companies compared to windows but they just didn’t wanna because it’s unpopular.
My suspicion for Nvidia not opening their drivers is that they have something shifty going on, maybe benchmark “optimizations” or some other trickery.
That, and they’re plain evil.
I think it was a Finnish philosopher who once said it best: Fuck you, Nvidia.
Gotta love Finnish philosophy!
It’s much simpler than that actually. Nvidia makes a lot of money in feature licensing, particularly GRID/vgpu. If they fully open-sourced the driver they would have no method of enforcing license restrictions.
I just installed bazzite on a spare box over the weekend, with a bunch of cobbled together old nonsense I had laying around, and gave to a family member.
… I have a feeling the 1050 I tossed in there is just old enough to not be a problem.
Though it seems the r9 270x in on of my PCs is *toast. So it looks like my quadro 2000 is going in that machine. Or, fuck it, the even more ancient 5770 I have.
I don’t play very recent games though.
Edit: I a whole word.
Yes, you need closed source Nvidia drivers. That’s a pretty heavily discussed topic. Basically, it’s because Nvidia refuses to open source their drivers. They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on. I buy AMD video cards specifically because they work really well on Linux without any work at all.
I’m surprised you’re seeing issues on Hogwarts Legacy though. My wife and I have been playing it over the last few months on two different machines both with Bazzite and haven’t had any issues at all. We don’t use Nvidia cards, so it might be an issue with Nvidia’s drivers.
They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on.
I read this a lot but I’ve been using nvidia-open, on Arch so I’m not running a LTS distro or anything, for over a year with no breaking issues.
It’s especially annoying in threads where someone is having a technical issue and as soon as they say they have an nvidia card you’ll see a bunch of people decide that it’s a driver issue.
Their issue is that they’re using Valve’s Proton which is missing some commonly used but proprietary video codecs. Using GE-Proton will ensure that they have the correct software to play videos.
I use Valve’s Proton and don’t have this issue. That’s not it.
The parts of Nvidia’s drivers that they’ve released as open source are not enough to game on. You have to add additional code to actually be able to game, whether it’s community drivers or Nvidia’s drivers.
Same, AMD is where it’s at for now if you penguin.
Same. I’ve been avoiding NVIDIA for years now, and haven’t regretted it yet. However, some people say that NVIDIA divers are good now, but I have my doubts about it. Seeing posts like this one just reinforces my confirmation bias.
Jap, I have a laptop with an NV dGPU and it’s still a bit hit or miss. And the perf penalty VS Windows is quite steep whereas in the red corner it’s pretty margin of error in most cases.
Are you using FOSS divers or the proprietary ones? How about power management, suspend, wake up etc?
Proprietary blob.
edit: there’s good advice in the comments for this post.
OK, thanks.
Based on those comments, it still sounds pretty rough. Are those the worst-case scenario, or should all Nvidia users expect that sort of struggle?
Its was fine for a couple fof months but the 575 broke everything for me. The 580 did not change the status quo so I just reverted to 570. 555 worked fine so it’s a last nuclear option. You’d think the first company in history to hit 5TUSD cap would have a competent driver team but, here we are… It’s a shitshow. In the eternal words of Linus “fuck you nvidia”.
Honestly I’ve had zero issues with nvidia on Wayland for about a year now, before that there were some issues, but it seems to be fine now! Maybe I’m just lucky.
But on closed source drivers, right?
I don’t have any real issue either. Have a rtx 4070 card. Or… Well… There was some issues playing darktide on anything but the lowest settings for some reason but other than that its been good.
Note that i mostly play smaller/indie games with very few exceptions.
I only hope that people who still think that Nvidia drivers on Linux are an old issue that’s been solved ages ago, see this post and this comment. It got slightly better, but the problem never went away. Yet, anyway.
The post where the user is missing proprietary multimedia codecs, unrelated to NVIDIA drivers or the comment by the person decrying the problems had by NVIDIA users despite not using NVIDIA cards?
What do you mean “unrelated to NVIDIA drivers”? It’s literally the first sentence of OP’s post (emphasis mine):
Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver.
closed source instead of open source nvidia driver.
This is where the problem really began. though afaik, you can get a version of the bazzite distro with the closed source nvidia drivers already installed, so did you select a different one? Nvidia gave me nothing but issues when I was trying to migrate to Linux though. Ever since I switched to AMD, it’s been smooth sailing.
Shes the only one in the house with nvidia, which tbf, has been just perfect for her needs up to this point. I’m just worried what might happen when i finally get her a new motherboard (long story short, it was my old one, i was splicing a 500ft ethernet cable, and didn’t realize 250 ft away the other end was still plugged in)
Super weird that you upgraded your fiance’s computer to Linux, but not your own? What’s the driving factor here that led to using your partner as a lab rat?
She asked me to?
Ah, that adds a lot of context. Sorry, the post just sounded like this was a “you” initiative.
Nah lol she really doesn’t like the big AI push that windows is doing and suggested Linux, NGL I was surprised and a little proud
Maybe Tiny 11 was the answer?
Oh it’s the transphobic billionaire’s game. Nice 👍
There was no mention of this, but if you’re dual booting (which I don’t recommend to anyone anymore) that might be causing the Bluetooth issue. Windows doesn’t properly “let go” of some Hardware when you “shut down” with default settings. This is because the default settings are to hibernate instead of properly shutting down. Linux boots up and the hardware doesn’t load correctly.
Interesting. Do I have to double shutdown?
If I remember correctly, I think the solutions are to disable Fast Boot and Hibernation in Windows, then shut down?
Which, this solves a lot of Windows issues even if you don’t use Linux.
I hate to be that guy, but this is just the Linux BT stack being… Not great. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but Bluetooth is one area I still see issues with every other update. Headphones using wrong audio codec, devices dropping out, incorrect ordering of trust login actions, etc.
The xbox controller thing is because you gotta update the driver of the xbox controller on windows, then it works. (Source: had to do it)
Not necessarily, could be a Bluetooth driver issue.
I don’t think so, it worked out of the gate for me, but that would be the second thing to look at if it fails obviously.
Fair enough, I only said that cause it was the case for me aha.
what card?
You could’ve just ask ;)
To fix Xbox controller connect it to an Xbox console and update its firmware.
To fix some videos not playing in games, switch from stock Proton to GE-Proton, you can install ProtonPlus or ProtonUpQt from your desktop store for easy Proton installs, newly installed Proton versions show up after Steam restart.
She’s playing the terf wizard game? Is the wedding off then?
Nope, learn to separate art from the artist you cretin.
The art is a product of the artist. Their beliefs, opinions, and ideals. Separating them is an impossibility.
That attitude doesn’t work when the artist is actively using the profits from her art to oppress trans people.
pirated games can be quite ethical :3
Who says we bought it? Also this was in response to the shit head who said I should break off my marriage, fuck them
“I’m fine with supporting a nazi who wants to kill trans people, but I draw the line at joking about divorce”
Lol
Let me translate (sorry JK for the scary word) that:
“I don’t give a shit about trans people.”
You are seeing the truth of why normies should not switch lol. Its way more work than people tell you and if you dont find it fun like I do , you’ll hate it.
Do you mind sharing what the issues were/was?
I’m the pool of people where my computer “just worked” when installing Bazzite.
Looks like it was Nvidia drivers… Might have had trouble with any other distro then too.
I was a dum dum and installed the wrong version of Bazzite for my graphics card. If someone is having drivers issues the first thing I’d check is if they have the right version for their card, and then check that the card is actually recognized. Immediately fixed most of my problems by installing the correct version.
Now if I could get my Steelseries headset chatmix to work reliably I’d be 100% happy lol.
Not OP but I installed Bazzite on my old previous rig, Intel/nVidia system (i9-9900k/1080) last week. I’ve already installed Mint on multiple machines as well as my daily driver.
The regular ISO would not install and black screen. I couldn’t resolve whatever issues there were on the F2 screens and almost gave up. Later I read on some forum about deleting existing partitions on the install drive might help, so I tried the Live ISO instead and it booted into the environment just fine. The old NVME drive had an existing Windows install that I was planning on overwriting. I ran Gparted, selected the two partitions and hit delete, then install. The progress bar stalled a bit on the nVidia part but it finished install.
The only problem I have now is wifi/bluetooth, as it’s not recognized for some reason.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z390-AORUS-MASTER-rev-10
(edit - fixed the wifi/bt problem, not sure when but I had it disabled in the BIOS for some reason)
