Manjaro or Pop!_OS for (Nvidia) gaming on Steam?
Manjaro or Pop!_OS for (Nvidia) gaming on Steam?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16149785
Cross-posting here for more opinions.
Gentlemen, just for context, I usually use Linux. I have been a user of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora for a few years.
Recently, I acquired a decent graphics card (GeForce RTX 4070) and decided to uninstall my Windows and install Linux.
I saw that Pop!_OS already has an image with everything pre-configured for Nvidia. Is this pre-configuration worth it, are the games more stable on this distribution, or is it the same as manually installing Nvidia's proprietary drivers on Manjaro?
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Avoid Manjaro
Most of the Manjaro criticism is pure nonsense. It's one of the most used distros in the Steam Survey. Anybody who's willing to recommend Arch or Pop or Mint (who are also in the top of the Survey) but not Manjaro needs a reality check.
Just because it's wildly used it doesn't mean it's the best, otherwise you'd be suggesting OP to install Windows 10.
Manjaro has several legit criticism. Maybe they're not important to you, but they are still legit and relevant points to make. Personally, I ended up going with an Arch derivative that uses the official arch repos. Everything else you like in Manjaro can be easily installed.
Manjaro has several legit criticism.
That page is not legit criticism, it's a bunch of nonsense. It misrepresents what Manjaro does, outright lying in some cases, it fails to understand how package updates and AUR work, it glosses over the fact that Manjaro helped the AUR infrastructure. It's prejudiced information made out specifically to make it look bad.
It's not nonsense, just concerns that you don't seem to have. Which is fine, really. If Manjaro is perfect for you, keep using it. No judging here.
I personally don't like Manjaro holding out on package updates, Arch stable branch is more than good enough for me. Everything else can be easily installed if you want to. Therefore, there's really no reason for me personally to recommend Manjaro.
It's not nonsense, just concerns that you don't seem to have.
There is not one pertinent criticism in there. It's all meaningless drivel presented as legit concerns.
Which one is a concern you share?
I personally don't like Manjaro holding out on package updates
Then you don't use it and that's fine. The whole point of Manjaro is to mitigate the bleeding edge risk. There's tons of people who see value in that. Not every distro has to do the exact same thing Arch does. There is something of value in every Arch-derived distro.
Which one is a concern you share?
My main concern is trust. How can I trust that the Manjaro team is competent when they can't keep up with something as simple as certificates. You say they helped the AUR but they actually DDOS'd it several times due to problems in
pamacthe software store they developed. By using Manjaro, you are saying that you trust the Manjaro team more than the Arch team, since you are using their repositories. Their actions do not inspire trust on me.Arch actually has an unstable branch, that is "bleeding edge". Most people run Arch on the stable branch, which is perfectly fine. You can run into problems, but so far I have never encountered any. Holding packages for "stability" is a neat idea but if the Firefox and Arch team deemed the new browser version to be stable, that's good enough for me. I don't see the Manjaro devs as having more competence to judge such things than the Arch community and the software devs.
This is a pointless discussion anyway, I'm not changing my mind and neither are you but all least now you know where I'm coming from. Cheers.
Every single large enough distro (and any organization) has at some point forgot to renew a certificate. How were you impacted by the expiration?
You say they helped the AUR but they actually DDOS'd it several times due to problems in
pamacthe software store they developed.The AUR was not originally designed to whitstand any meaningful traffic. What you call "DDOS" was simply the AUR being used by an actually popular distro, where enabling the AUR is a simple UI toggle, whose developers never imagined that the AUR doesn't have any traffic mitigation methods.
So Manjaro went out of its way to look for contributors to sponsor an AUR CDN and several caching layers, improving things for everybody.
The second "DDOS" happened after Manjaro implemented all of the above so it couldn't have come from Manjaro machines. All the "proof" is that whoever hit the AUR used a "pamac" user agent... which anybody can do.
I don't see the Manjaro devs as having more competence to judge such things than the Arch community and the software devs.
Manjaro's extra testing and vetting of Arch "stable" packages has avoided several problems so far.
This is a pointless discussion anyway, I'm not changing my mind and neither are you but all least now you know where I'm coming from. Cheers.
Yes well the difference is that I've used both and can explain their pros and cons and why one suits me better. I don't just read a page called "archno" and then parrot it.
Can you point out exactly what is misrepresented and lies?
- Manjaro repos not being in sync with Arch repos is false and misleading. Arch is the upstream, they're linked together. Trying to shift the issue into "btw" is stupid. Nobody claims that downstream distros are the same as the upstream, if they were what would be the point. The whole Linux landscape is built around derivate distros. This is entirely in the author's mind.
- Delaying packages is not stable – that's not all they do.
- AUR "compatibility" is cited as a problem. For starters it's a complete red herring – there's no such thing as "AUR compatibility" and you will be well advised to use AUR very carefully including on Arch proper. But also the author misrepresents how an AUR package can fail on Manjaro. In theory it's possible that a new feature would be introduced in an upstream package and immediately picked up by a new version of an AUR package, while the new core package is not on the target system yet. But then the author goes on to conclude "the package will break". Which package? The ones that are already installed won't break. The new AUR package may not be able to install but that won't break the existing version. It's not even certain the new build will fail; it depends on many factors, including how its dependencies are configured and whether it can be built without the new feature. Also this doesn't necessarily happen on Manjaro alone, it can happen on Arch or any derivate at any time; as long as you don't update your machine once a minute there will always be a window where AUR doesn't play well with the core packages that are on the machine at that time. Last but not least, AUR packages are updated fairly slowly and the chances of this scenario occuring with any significant frequency are astronomical; it has never happened to me personally or have ever heard it happening to anybody; but the author makes it seem as if it's a common issue.
- Security issues. Oh no, a distro has a security issue that has been fixed. Bleh.
- Problems with the Manjaro updater: false.
- SSL certificates for their website expiring. Nobody cares. The user base was not impacted in any way. As a daily user I only found out about it much later, from this kind of discussions. I don't know what their webmaster was smoking and why they delayed setting up an automatic renewal for so long but it's irrelevant because it has no relation to the distro or the distro maintainers.
- I've explained the AUR "DDoS" in another comment. Briefly, it wasn't a "DDoS" (obviously) as much as the complete lack of any serious infrastructure behind AUR, which couldn't cope with its rise in popularity. Manjaro makes it easy to activate and use the AUR. When the problem became apparent it was Manjaro who went out and got a CDN deal and set everything up so that the AUR won't be in that situation anymore.
- There was another instance that looked like someone maliciously and explicitly hitting the AUR with 10k requests/sec while posing as "pamac". That one was probably an actual DDoS.