Desktop Linux still kinda sucks butt
So I’m trying to get my desktop back up and running, primarily for games. Windows is out because I can’t stand it even less than whatever bollocks I have to go through with Linux.
This time around I thought I’d try some “gaming” optimised distros, and here’s the key failure points so far from my first day of testing:
Bazzite
- Uses flatpak, which is a bit shit
- Steam and Discord regularly forget their settings (flatpak issue, probably)
- Discord crashes the desktop environment when you screen share (probably a wayland issue)
- Discord loses audio devices constantly (probably flatpak)
- Discord push to talk keybinding randomly cuts out (no idea)
- Doesn’t mount extra drives automatically on boot
PikaOS
- Seems to have a laptop GPU switcher installed by default, which is weird
- Steam can’t display web views in the in-game overlay, which is probably a hardware acceleration issue
- Random game crashes
CachyOS
- Tried to open KDE panel options and it froze
- I tried to open it because the bottom bar looks weirdly squashed by default but that may just be me
- Discord crashed on second boot, then took ages to load the next time. Not sure what happened there, probably Discord shit
- Same issue with the Steam overlay as PikaOS
- Mordhau crashed to desktop
Performance
All 3 perform identically when playing Mordhau, which is to say generally good. Bazzite never crashed out, whereas the other two did. Discord crashed the whole display environment in all three, though.
Next steps
Try Linux Mint. Avoid wayland and flatpak.
--- 1 day later
Reinstalled Bazzite and it was even worse than the first time. Mordhau reliably crashes within 30 minutes of playing, I was wrong about Bazzite not being affected. I believe this to be either a GPU or Wayland issue as the game hasn't been updated in a while and the last time I played it on Linux it ran fine (Ubuntu with X11 and a different GPU).
Given up. Returning the GPU and selling the entire computer. Wayland is a major fault but fuck the rest of it too.