I’m thinking about switching to SteamOS since it’s built for gaming. Most of my games run fine on Linux Mint, but not all of them. I also heard Valve say “it’s just a PC”, does that mean it’s suitable for software development too?
I’m thinking about switching to SteamOS since it’s built for gaming. Most of my games run fine on Linux Mint, but not all of them. I also heard Valve say “it’s just a PC”, does that mean it’s suitable for software development too?
We can’t know for sure, but if I had to make some guesses:
It could have been something as simple as Nobara using GE-Proton instead of just defaulting to Steam’s proton. You could do the same thing on Mint, just by either manually downloading the zip from Github and extracting into Steam’s compatibilitytools.d/ directory (or, as most people do, use protonup-qt to install/manage proton versions).
Also, Mint uses a different Desktop Environment than Nobara. Mint has a custom DE called Cinnamon while Nobara uses the most popular DE, KDE Plasma. So there could be differences in how Cinnamon and Plasma implement Wayland that were causing hitching.
The Kernel also was recently(-ish) updated to include NTSYNC primitives which makes Wine’s not-emulation a bit smoother in some games. Different distros update their kernels at different times (I don’t know how nobara and mint do this, one could be behind the other)
I’m glad it worked for you, it’s frustrating to have to deal with poor performance and sometimes just rolling the dice on another distro will fix everything (and also, swapping distros when you’re learning is great experience!). Learning the process of tracking down problems will serve you better in the long run, even if it is frustrating. If you get lost or don’t know where to start, make a post in this community, no question is too dumb. At worst, some people will be assholes because it’s social media in 2026 but you’ll usually find someone to get you pointed in the right direction at least.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I will try to follow your advice the next time, I run into problems.
I thought it might be a bigger problem with mint, because eldenring is not a new game and i also found posts of people running it on Linux without any problems about 3 years ago. So I figured it should run well with the state of the art version of things without having to update to any special new versions.
You mentioned distro swapping. So far I deleted all partition when installing a new distribution. (Happened only once, and i did not setup a lot before the new install) Can i just switch the distro without having to redownload every game as long as i do have them on another partition or are they kind of dependent on the used distribution?
You can keep your steam library across distros. Games are usually Windows executables, which run through WINE so they’re completely independent of the distro.
A common recommendation is to make a partition for your home directory and another for your system directory (they can be on different disks too if that’s easier). That way, if you decide to try a different distro then you will still have all of your data/games/settings/etc. If you do this, then everything will move between distros because you only need to overwrite the information on the system partition.
If you just want to keep the Steam stuff, it is typically in ~/.local/share/steam (~/ means your home directory, if you didn’t know). If you move it into that same location on your new distro then Steam will see all of your installed games.
Thanks for the explanation. So it works similar to the system partition on windows. I somehow struggle a little to understand the role of distribution. When researching how to install Linux, it seemed like an important choice with lots of differences between the various distributions. Some are based on arch, some fedora or ubuntu. It seems like all need different types of packages to install software. And so on. A little ironic, that this is less a problem when running Windows executables through a compatibility layer like wine.
Yeah, same bit. Just put everything on another drive/partition and then mount that on /home (so you get /home/user) and that’s it.
Distributions are essentially just a selection of the basic software required to make a system work. Things like, what version of the kernel you will start with, what init system (systemd is the current popular choice, but sysvinit is still widely used). Then there is the package manager, which is responsible for installing/updating all software on your system (you can install software without the package manager, but here there be dragons) and often a distro will include a Desktop Environment (which is, itself, another package of various software maintained by another group) like KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc and some default software packages (like, LibreOffice, Firefox, or Steam).
There’s a ton of little differences between distros in how they do things. Like one distro may release a full system update periodically and that update will have been in testing for months to ensure stability (Debian). While another strives to ensure the most current version of all software is available (Arch).
Often, groups will like how one system works, let’s say Arch, but want to try something else, like adding a graphical installer, and adding some additional software and they’ll create a new distro that is built on top of the work done by the Arch distro. This is why you see them described as Arch-based(EndeavourOS) or Fedora-based(Nobara).
That being said, there is no major differences between KDE Plasma that was installed on top of Mint and KDE Plasma installed on Arch. They may have different versions which are available in their respective package repositories, but it’s the same software. Mint may not be on the same Kernel version as Nobara but they’re all using some version of the same underlying Linux kernel code. Systemd is Systemd on Bazzite, Mint or Debian, etcetc.
I’m glossing over quite a bit and there are exceptions to almost everything I’ve said but I’m just trying to give you the broad strokes.
Part of the draw of Linux is the ability to swap all of these different components around as you will. Distros are simply popular configurations/design ideas that have a community built around them.
That helped a lot, thank you.