this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Distro for a local "cloud gaming" no monitor desktop (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by olafurp@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm looking for a specific distro to handle some tasks.

I got a second hand rig with Nvidia GTX 1050 that I want to use as a home server. I wanted to use HoloISO but it doesn't support nvidia. If someone says "do it anyway, it's fine" I'll install it though.

The idea is to support a Jellyfin server and Steam Link gaming but steam is not big on Nvidia so it's hard to narrow down "black screen" issues etc. I'm also planning to manage it via VNC and SSH.

I'm familiar with Ubuntu based systems since I develop software on Ubuntu based KDE distro but never had a graphics card.

So it boils down to:

  • Ease of setup including nvidia drivers
  • Ease of update via command line (I'm not going to download nvidia drivers from their website to update proprietary drivers)
  • Graphics performance
  • Prefer Ubuntu based

I'm up for Gnome, Xface, Cinnamon, KDE or whatever DE.

Edit: Changed title to better reflect requirements and not have misleading "headless" and "server" in it

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[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was hoping for a more specialised distro, another user mentioned Bazzite for example.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why? People in this community waste a lot of electrons debating various distros. In the end its all running basically the same software though.

What do you think "bazzite" will give you that you can't do now?

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Support for game controllers, HDR, DisplayLink, VAAPI, nvidia Wayland patches, Sunshine and Moonlight.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Like none of that was in your original requirements. :-)

Most of that I look at and think "yeah - why wouldn't that work on an Ubuntu-based distro?" I wouldn't care about wayland vs. X11 unless you have some very specific requirement that's met by one or the other. If it works what do you care which you're using?

Just because one distro is "optimized for gaming" doesn't mean others can't do gaming. Steam works just fine with bog-standard Ubuntu 22.04 and an NVidia GPU. You just may need to take an extra step or two to install nvidia drivers (e.g. sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:525).

99% of the time I'd just say "install it and see if it works". It's super easy to just install a quick Mint/Pop/Ubuntu/etc. and see what happens.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I didn't know those requirements were a thing until a few hours ago. I've been running Steam on KDE Neon with Intel embedded graphics and everything is great out of the box or easily installed. I just had a feeling that there would be "SteamOS but with Nvidia" thingy for Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora that has some nice features.

I mean, Linux gaming is moving so fast it's hard to keep up. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2025 we'll have a distro that has "run as game server" and "use Steam" toggles in the installer and you can access it from an Android TV from first boot.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Bazzite user here. For gaming it's great... Until it's not. Let me explain.

Out of the box, as pure steam machine is fantastic. Everything just works. But if you try to deviate, thighs get hairy.

It's inmutable, so almost all your apps need to be flatpack/appimages. If those don't work, you need to pray distro box can help. For some uses I had to do a lot of weird workarounds.

The main problem I have is that every now and then an update breaks the system. It's not a big problem as you can rollback easily, without affecting home, but it's a learning curve and very infuriating to see AGAIN boot to black and hope next update will fix it.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I installed Bazzite on my system and experience so far has been great. It's not what I would choose for a day-to-day workstation but for a computer that mostly just runs games and servers it's been really nice.

Setup was super easy, installing packages with rpm-ostree works very similar to dnf just takes very long. That's a small price to pay for Sunshine/Moonlight with VAAPI hardware encoding and Steam optimisations in my case.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

I do use it for day to day, even work. Not saying it's bad, but when you have an issue, you're basically alone. For example I'm still using the image from Feb 14th because all the newer ones boot to black (clean image, nothing layered).

I'm hoping at some point a newer one will eventually work, the same way it stopped working on Jan 16th and worked again early Feb.

I can sort of deal with it, but wouldn't recommend based on my experience.