Lately I've been suggesting Mint or PopOS for laymans looking to swap to linux, but do any of you know of any good gaming distros with a driver manager GUI built in ala Mint?

I've tested most gaming distros with latest (nvidia) hardware and they do not run most major titles out of the box due to driver issues. If there were a gui for driver rollbacks while having great general performance, I could see it beating out Mint/PopOS for my recommendation. Being able to install .deb files is quite nice for laymans too, though I don't know of any other deb based OSes that run well out of the box.

  • Grangle1@lemm.ee
    ·
    29 days ago

    I don't know how "bleeding edge" it is, but Nobara is a good gaming distro maintained by GloriousEggroll (the maker of the GE versions of Proton on Steam) that also has a GUI driver manager. It's based on Fedora, so you're not gonna have the absolute latest stuff 100% right now as you might with Arch, but it will likely be ahead of anything Debian or Ubuntu based. The one drawback in my short experience with it so far is that the package manager sucks for exploring stuff or locating packages if you don't know the package name, it's just an alphabetical list you search through by name.

    But as has been said elsewhere in this thread, if you're having driver issues with new Nvidia stuff, you may just be SOL until the Nvidia driver support in general catches up, no matter the distro.

    • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]
      ·
      29 days ago

      I've been using Nobara on my main machine for a few months and it's impressed me so far. It's got the GUI driver manager which worked fine for me although my card is quite old.

  • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    29 days ago

    What does a driver manager do that isn’t solved with a normal (graphical) package manager? Automatically picking the correct one for your GPU?

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        ·
        29 days ago

        A driver manager will not make the problems inherent to Nvidia's crappy proprietary drivers that need workarounds go away.

        If you don't want to tinker a whole lot, buy a GPU from a vendor that hasn't been actively hostile to its users for decades and is well supported by Linux and the freedesktop such as AMD.

        No AMD GPU user has a need for anything resembling a "driver manager".

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    29 days ago

    Manjaro,
    benefits of Arch,
    while being gamer ready,
    easier to use and more stable.

    It also has a GUI to manage your graphics drivers.

  • CubitOom@infosec.pub
    ·
    29 days ago

    What do you mean by a driver manager? I'm not familiar with that term, it sounds like a gui for managing and updating drivers. Or maybe you want something to help you switch between integrated graphics on your cpu to your dedicated gpu?

    In most cases, updating drivers doesn't require a GUI and can actually create more work. For instance, compare this Manjaro video of how to use its gui to install Nvidia drivers vs this line of code to install/update the Nvidia drivers on endeavorOS.

    eos-update --nvidia

    Ofcourse if you use an arch based distro you can also use the arch wiki to help you manage your drivers exactly the way you want. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

    If you want to control which apps use your GPU or integrated graphics, than you can just install prime and prepend a package name with the string prime-run when opening or in steam launch settings.