How does the driver support for PCLinuxOS differ from Ubuntu and Mint?

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CrazedNerd

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"PCLinuxOS is a user-friendly Linux distribution with out-of-the-box support for many popular graphics and sound cards, as well as other peripheral devices."

Also, is it recommended for gaming when compared to Ubuntu? Ubuntu is main recommended distro for gaming.
 


Ubuntu is not for gaming; whatever people say, it's way too hard to set up if you don't know what you do, and there is a big chance you end up breaking the OS. In fact, Ubuntu is not a suitable or user-friendly OS anymore compared with so many other OS out there, and Ubuntu is more for the advanced user now if you ask me because it comes with so little support out of the box that you need to manual install. For gaming, I would recommend POP_OS! or Garuda KDE Dragonized Gaming Edition since they are ready for gaming when installed and little setting up or tinkering is needed. I don't know PCLinuxOS, so I can't say anything about it, but I may try it at some point since I'm looking for the best gaming OS that works out of the box.​


Screenshot from 2022-07-24 00-10-39.png
 

Ubuntu is not for gaming; whatever people say, it's way too hard to set up if you don't know what you do, and there is a big chance you end up breaking the OS. In fact, Ubuntu is not a suitable or user-friendly OS anymore compared with so many other OS out there, and Ubuntu is more for the advanced user now if you ask me because it comes with so little support out of the box that you need to manual install. For gaming, I would recommend POP_OS! or Garuda KDE Dragonized Gaming Edition since they are ready for gaming when installed and little setting up or tinkering is needed. I don't know PCLinuxOS, so I can't say anything about it, but I may try it at some point since I'm looking for the best gaming OS that works out of the box.​


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Ubuntu has little support? That's interesting, but hard to believe since they're backed by canonical.
 
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Ubuntu has more community support than any other distro. RHEL has more enterprise support than any other distro, but that's not what a gamer is after.
 
I am currently gaming on Fedora, and you have to enable the community+non-free repositories (there called "rpmfusion-nonfree") because licensing problems of NVIDIA drivers and Steam itself.

Unless any of those distributions mentioned earlier in the thread include the NVIDIA modules in the official (not "community / non-free / whatever") repositories, I'd say that the complications would be pretty much the same regardless the distribution you'd choose. And if there's a distribution that includes the NVIDIA and Steam packages in their official main repositories, I am interested in knowing so, to see what are their licensing choices and overall standpoint in the convenience v. freedom discussion.
 
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Ubuntu has little support? That's interesting, but hard to believe since they're backed by canonical.
Ubuntu has more community support than any other distro. RHEL has more enterprise support than any other distro, but that's not what a gamer is after.

I am currently gaming on Fedora, and you have to enable the community+non-free repositories (there called "rpmfusion-nonfree") because licensing problems of NVIDIA drivers and Steam itself.

Unless any of those distributions mentioned earlier in the thread include the NVIDIA modules in the official (not "community / non-free / whatever") repositories, I'd say that the complications would be pretty much the same regardless the distribution you'd choose. And if there's a distribution that includes the NVIDIA and Steam packages in their official main repositories, I am interested in knowing so, to see what are their licensing choices and overall standpoint in the convenience v. freedom discussion.
Some distributions set up the Gaming aspect for you, like Garuda. Make sure Native steam and Runtime steam is up and running out of the box, the same with Proton and Mangohud, gamemode, and so on, so it's all there, and you don't need to do anything besides logging into steam and play. POP_OS has some of the stuff, so it's a little easier to get up and run, but Ubuntu has non of them installed, which means you have to install it all by yourself and compile it unless you know what you are doing; you may end up installing the wrong things and break the system or just get frustrated over some things don't work it's not just install steam and NVIDIA then go. Other libraries can help make the games run better, and distributions like Ubuntu don't have it out of the box. That's why i would never recommend Ubuntu as a gaming distribution unless you know what you are doing i only used Fedora once. I was not too fond of it, but i heard many are. For me, it didn't feel like a great experience when i was gaming on it, so i stopped using it. PS. Installing Nvidia is easy on Ubuntu-based distributions i always use sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa and then sudo apt update to make sure i have the newest stable driver, and for steam, that easy that sudo apt install steam. I have not seen Ubuntu-based distributions yet where that doesn't work, and on the arch, it just sudo Pacman -Syu since it should be in the kernel if it's an Nvidia-based distribution, from my understanding, and sudo Pacman -S Steam for steam.
 
Some distributions set up the Gaming aspect for you, like Garuda. Make sure Native steam and Runtime steam is up and running out of the box, the same with Proton and Mangohud, gamemode, and so on, so it's all there, and you don't need to do anything besides logging into steam and play. POP_OS has some of the stuff, so it's a little easier to get up and run, but Ubuntu has non of them installed, which means you have to install it all by yourself and compile it unless you know what you are doing; you may end up installing the wrong things and break the system or just get frustrated over some things don't work it's not just install steam and NVIDIA then go. Other libraries can help make the games run better, and distributions like Ubuntu don't have it out of the box. That's why i would never recommend Ubuntu as a gaming distribution unless you know what you are doing i only used Fedora once. I was not too fond of it, but i heard many are. For me, it didn't feel like a great experience when i was gaming on it, so i stopped using it. PS. Installing Nvidia is easy on Ubuntu-based distributions i always use sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa and then sudo apt update to make sure i have the newest stable driver, and for steam, that easy that sudo apt install steam. I have not seen Ubuntu-based distributions yet where that doesn't work, and on the arch, it just sudo Pacman -Syu since it should be in the kernel if it's an Nvidia-based distribution, from my understanding, and sudo Pacman -S Steam for steam.
So Garuda already has the drivers installed?
 
So Garuda already has the drivers installed?

Garuda KDE Dragonized Gaming Edition does, yes, it comes with all you need as a gamer, even comes with about 20 native Linux games, and it asks you if you want to start their assistant to help install other programs you may need that you just choose from a list and then when you done it install it for you.

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you can check out my channel most of my live stream was done on that distribution.

 
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"PCLinuxOS is a user-friendly Linux distribution with out-of-the-box support for many popular graphics and sound cards, as well as other peripheral devices."

Also, is it recommended for gaming when compared to Ubuntu? Ubuntu is main recommended distro for gaming.
PCLinuxOS is an okay distro and for the most has always worked on most every desktop I've used it on OOTB.

PCLinuxOS is a hands on distro with none of the bells and whistles that the mainstream distros come with.

You update it manually using the terminal.
I've never seen any proprietary graphics card drivers.
I don't know that I'd say it's a good choice for a gaming disto.
There is a bit of a learning and it has a good wiki how to guide.

I use PCLinuxOS and I like it.



 
You update it manually using the terminal.
That's how I always do. I hate to use the GUI. It doesn't tell you anything, and if somthing goes wrong, you are in the dark. But, on the other hand, using the terminal will tell you everything, and if somthing goes wrong, you now have a log you can look at or take a Screenshot to ask on the forum about.
 
Other libraries can help make the games run better, and distributions like Ubuntu don't have it out of the box. That's why i would never recommend Ubuntu as a gaming distribution unless you know what you are doing
I'm curious to know what other libraries you are talking about? Now days I install Steam, Lutris, gamemoded, gamescope, Wine and ProtonGE. All my games run fine there is rarely one that isn't playable or that crashes. I've gone through a lot of gaming websites articles and Youtube channels and the only game tweaking they usually do is various Proton forks, launch options and kernels with different schedulers etc, I can't recall any extra libraries mentioned anywhere?
 
I was having a look to Garuda's gitlab repos and all the added tools, and it turns out that many of them do not have an open source license; not just a free software license, not even a license: all rights reserved then. Proprietary software with the only curious fact that you can look at the code. But only look, unless you contact the authors.

I'm not sure on how do I feel about that.
 
PCLinuxOS is an okay distro and for the most has always worked on most every desktop I've used it on OOTB.

PCLinuxOS is a hands on distro with none of the bells and whistles that the mainstream distros come with.

You update it manually using the terminal.
I've never seen any proprietary graphics card drivers.
I don't know that I'd say it's a good choice for a gaming disto.
There is a bit of a learning and it has a good wiki how to guide.

I use PCLinuxOS and I like it.



Though I would not count PCLinuxOS as a gaming platform. It's a good Desktop OS. It does come with many Nvidia drivers pre installed. Updates are done via the Synaptic package manager. It's what I would call a semi-rolling release It's the only distro that I know of that is .rpm based and yet uses apt for package management. I've used it over the years on many different boxes and it's always been good out of the box. It's normally very solid. and some have used it for years with out a total system reinstall. They have one of the Linux Worlds best monthly magazines also.
 
I was having a look to Garuda's gitlab repos and all the added tools, and it turns out that many of them do not have an open source license; not just a free software license, not even a license: all rights reserved then. Proprietary software with the only curious fact that you can look at the code. But only look, unless you contact the authors.

I'm not sure on how do I feel about that.
The world is yours ;-) Well, until you start selling the software...
 
I was having a look to Garuda's gitlab repos and all the added tools, and it turns out that many of them do not have an open source license; not just a free software license, not even a license: all rights reserved then. Proprietary software with the only curious fact that you can look at the code. But only look, unless you contact the authors.

I'm not sure on how do I feel about that.
At the bottom of the gardualinux.org website it says.
I would think that is a license reference?
 

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