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Comment by q0uaur

2 years ago

it was a couple years ago, but when i tried to game on Debian i was shocked by some 4+ year old packages that i wanted to try gaming with, nothing worked.

it's probably better today, but i definitely recommend a very up to date distro for gaming, and arch is literally the most up to date there is. happy with arch myself, except the nvidia issues, if you run an nvidia gpu i don't recommend it just yet (getting better really quickly though)

IMO the best approach is to use PCI passthrough to give the Nvidia GPU to a Windows guest, especially if what you're trying to do is game.

Arch wiki has a great write-up on it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

TL;DR you boot your Linux host kernel with special VFIO params to ensure the entire IOMMU domain of your Nvidia GPU is ignored, and pass that to Windows guest (which sees it as an entirely normal nv GPU).

(My hope is that in the next couple of years the open source Nvidia driver landscape dramatically improves, and modern distros ship with rock solid Vulkan/OGL impl for all Nvidia cards made in the last decade or three)