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Gaming Experience on Immutable Distros

Does anyone here have experience with gaming on immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinote, OpenSUSE MicroOS or any other general desktop variants? I know SteamOS 3 and ChimeraOS are both immutable, but they come with all kernel mods and libraries baked in.

Are there any issues with drivers or performance that otherwise do not happen on a more mainline distribution?

Do you have to deal with getting Nvidia drivers installed or is that handled by the system?

I'm asking because I'm considering making the jump to either Silverblue or Kinote, but I am curious to hear your thoughts.

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  • I fully switched over to using Silverblue close to a year ago now, it's been great for my needs. I have AMD hardware so everything worked nicely out of the box.

    There's some caveats to consider when switching to an immutable OS, especially if you're the kind of person who likes to make a lot of tweaks or (try) running very recent builds of certain packages. This will inherently be a bit less intuitive on an immutable system precisely because its entire premise is to not make many or any changes to the system bits -- though you can still do it if you want, of course.

    There's some minor nuisances like hardware accelerated H.264 and H.265 video playback not being available out of the box for system-installed (as in, non-Flatpak) apps, but whether that's actually a real issue for you depends on your use-case. If it is, you can either switch over to using Flatpak apps (probably the recommended way), or layer the necessary packages (next-best thing).

    Alternatively you could also consider using Universal Blue's container offerings, which has options for as close to vanilla Silverblue as possible but with some quality-of-life packages pre-installed, or ones with Nvidia's proprietary stuff pre-packaged, and more. Mind you, I don't have first-hand experience with Universal Blue's offerings, mostly as I deliberately stick with AMD hardware and like to keep my OS as close to vanilla Fedora as possible. Depending on what you're looking for, it might be recommended to try to stick as close to Fedora's offering too.

    Ultimately whether switching to an immutable distro is the right choice for you is really up to what you do with your machine, and what you want to do. In my case it was absolutely worth the switch as I want my machines to just work. And I just love how Silverblue updates work (download new base image, reboot, done) and how it offers ease of mind and the very easy ability to revert to a previous version, should that ever be needed. I primarily consider my machines for work first, so need them to be reliable.

    When I do play a game on one of my devices, they run great and I've basically never run into an issue with something not working because I'm running an immutable OS. Lutris is great for installing and managing non-Steam games, and the Steam Flatpak is fantastic. I just layered the steam-devices package so game controllerrs work as you'd expect.

    Hope this helps!