Ubuntu No Longer Seen As Viable Gaming Distro (I Blame Snaps)

42 thoughts on “Ubuntu No Longer Seen As Viable Gaming Distro (I Blame Snaps)”

• Haha, i like your choice of words, DT; "married to .. snap & gnome." On a serious note tho, i too am not a gnome fan, i find it cumbersome to install all those extensions & add ons jus to get hot-corners for example working when all the other desktops jus come with it. All it takes is a configuration. i think ubuntu can be turned around, but the top echelon has to do a lot of listening 2 their users if they want that to happen

• 2:11 Canonical is a distribution now 🙂

• Linux is generally not a good option for gaming except some games which works well with Wine/Proton and the native games of course.
  If you choose to game on Linux you choose tinkering and performance loss in many cases…
  Unfortunately Linux was never designed for gaming, because game makers don't give a shit to GNU/Linux, except some of them like Valve.

  If your primary goal is videogaming, you have basically 3 good options:
  Windows, Playstation or Xbox.

• Ubuntu… God what happened to you? You smell like hard liquor, you haven't cleaned yourself in two years, I can't even get any relevant use out of you. You're sitting on the street, begging for attention. Trying to force "Snaps" down my throat.

  However, it's not THE WORST. I used Zorin OS (based on Ubuntu) for a very long time and I had an excellent experience. However, the cracks were slowly forming and 22.04 was around the corner. I could either choose to stay with Ubuntu, or move to Fedora and get a nice blend of rolling release and stable release. I'm sure you can guess what I did. I've had my fill two-year-old packages.

• I've been using and gaming on Linux Mint for months now and is been great. Will point out that by default snaps are disabled on Linux Mint.

• The gaming distro, the gaming OS, is Steam. It took the power of Steam to finally put PC gaming on the path to transcending Windows. The winning Linux distro for gaming is any distro that doesn't get in Steam's way.

• i fully switched dover to manjaro kde plasma about four months ago and do a lot of gaming and love it. i havent looked back and have had a mostly great experience with it.

• I still finding it funny that as a linux user and windows user that when it comes to gaming I still stick to windows because of newer software. Even micorosoft that doesn't do rolling releases can give you a "feature" update every 6-12 months but ubuntu can't give it. you need to "wait" for a new LTS if you want the newer features. Sure its great for office work but then again. even windows is used for office work and can still give you feature updates as they come and ask the IT staff. Do you want to install this feature pack on your users pc's or not

• Is not Pop!OS actually ubuntu, beyond a few small visual elements? So when you say ubuntu is losing ground in the desktop space, do you mean only ubuntu, or all its derivatives together losing ground against arch based distributions?

• I kind of disagree with you on this point. It only takes a couple of adjustments to Ubuntu to make it a great gaming experience. You don't need the latest kernel, you just need the latest graphics drivers. Ubuntu maintains 2 PPAs that have the latest graphics drivers (AMD/Intel on one and NVIDIA has it's own). It's really not that hard. Pop OS includes those PPAs by default (or at least the latest drivers in their own repo.

  But if you want the latest kernels on Ubuntu (or anything Ubuntu based such as Pop OS or Mint), there are multiple ways to do it. The easiest is the Liquorix Kernel, it's a fork of the Zen Kernel. All you need to do is add their PPA and install it to your system.

• sudo apt purge snapd

• Realy great video

• He keeps talking about how ubuntu isn't used for gaming because it's kernel and packages are out of date, but cites pop os as one of the new distros gamers use. Doesn't pop os use the same package repository and kernel version as ubuntu? Also the new "cutting edge features" for gaming like proton are installed by steam, not by a package manager. Is there even any evidence to suggest that ubuntu has failed as a gaming distro?

• I leaved ubuntu and switched to MX Linux.
  No container apps please.

• They should just say out loud that their focus is no longer on desktop, everyone can tell they are focusing more on servers and that's fine. Snaps were never meant to be used on desktop, Nextcloud snap is a great example of this. Holding packages from the repos shouldn't be done in any desktop distro, it's horrible for perfomance and for security. Canonical is going in a different path but they are afraid of admiting it

• I've been thinking of trying Arch Linux but the only thing holding me back is the Arch Linux home page. HTML only and a big unprofessional mess of a page but I'll try digging through the Arch Linux HTML mess and try it out soon 🙂

• Man I don't even like linux to know that alllllllll the s..t you talked in this video is bull… Tell me one f..ing game that plays on others distros and don't play on Ubuntu? Or at least plays with a fps diference of 6 to 10? Linux sucks at gaming period. And will be that way forever.

• This gaming cult is what keeps people using proprietary systems. You can have fun playing the simplest of games if you let yourself. Why should Ubuntu make itself less stable in package versions it uses to just suit the gaming demographic? I honestly hate what gamers are trying to demand of each distro. Ubuntu sucks for its own reasons. Snaps are terrible because 1) who wants to decompress every time they launch an application?, 2) who wants the same dependencies included in multiple programs you run? that's a simple waste that ignores the type of system they are even being used on. 3) Canonical has effectively locked it down where they are the only ones who can host snaps.

• that position sounds like they want someone to promote Ubuntu gaming, and push Ubuntu gaming, but not really make changes for Ubuntu gaming. I'm afraid they think its just a messaging issue and not a technical one.

• Zorin OS is quite good imo.

• Ubuntu is good for business, so it's great for the server. But I agree, Ubuntu isn't on top for gaming. But there are a number of challenges with Linux gaming–particularly with AAA games. I think that Linux does get a bad rap, but the fact it can run software designed for another operating system at all is still very impressive.

• You got that right

• I game on ubuntu and it does fine

• People not trying distros because it only features one DE is so spot on. I hate Gnome nowadays but love Mate because it's how the old Gnome I loved used to be. Recently I had to reinstall linux on the work laptop so I decided Pop since it always worked well but I decided to run I3 with it instead and it's so much nicer to use even though I typically don't like tiling WM's but this one works for me and I've used at least 10 different DE's since November last year. Arcolinux really helped me figure out which DE's and WM's I liked and which I disliked and that was thanks to this channel

• Ubuntu is the Windows of…. Well, windows.

• Meanwhile Fedora quietly pushes the projects forward with common sense and general approval

• I run Pop because of it's simplified NVIDIA CUDA stack for AI. I couldn't care less about gaming. As far as I know, you can't easily do any sort of data science on Mangaro or any other Arch Linux. Ubuntu has been the standard OS for AI for decades. Pop!_OS just adds a few things to make all that a bit easier. So I use Gnome, or should I say Cosmic? 😉

• I'm still trying to decide what my next distro should be, if Ubuntu ever goes down the toilet. Canonical giving up up is a big issue, because Ubuntu was essentially the "Standard distro", if they go become crap with those awful snaps we don't really have a standard, consistent, non-DIY focused stable platform.

  I have hope for the Ubuntu derivatives, Deepin, and Mint, eventually Linux gaming should reach a good enough point and be doable on a stable OS.

• Ubuntu needs to get its app store to the standards of other operating systems. All other operating systems have left Ubuntu app store in the dust. Can't buy movies, books, and much more. Lacks the same discoverability of software and games. The details view for software and games lacks the needed details to really sell the software to the user.

• While I'm against companies aiming to be like Microsoft, I also know those kind of companies generate traction which is needed on Linux desktop in order to be relevant as a gaming platform.

  The analogy may be a bad one but I think it could apply : third world countries before a dictatorship government were lacking resources and international investment for improving their infrastructure , while the regime lasted kinda focused on that at the expense of freedom, here could happen the same Canonical would improve Linux chance as a gaming platform at the expense of losing their freedom to choose which way to achieve it. It'll depend solely on their part as we already saw on snaps .

• Arch, Manjaro, ClearLinux, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo (if you are a masochist and you know what you're doing) are all better for gaming.

• Ubuntu is just really, really slow, compared to other distros, needs manual user intervention in order to get the latest drivers and the use of Gnome as the default DE isn't ideal either, since Mutter still doesn't support Adaptive Sync, despite the issue being tracked on their Gitlab for over one and a half years now. What I also don't like about Ubuntu and Debian is their "distroisms". I.e. the use of non-standard paths for configuration files, abstracting away some of the system configuration with dpkg-reconfigure and still not having fully transitioned away from SysVinit-style runlevel and service definitions. The paradigms and philosophies implemented by Ubunto by far aren't state of the art anymore and actually work against the user.

• You wanna know why Ubuntu sucks and should never be used again for anything big.
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt upgrade
  sudo apt dist-upgrade
  sudo apt auto-remove
  Then the terminal displaying a bunch of useless URLs.
  Then the update process pauses because some of the packages require user prompts for the update to continue.
  etc………..

  compared to:
  pamac update

• I am against Snaps. If there is a way to run snaps that isn't a train-wreck, then they should say how this is achieved because I don't see this manifest in the apps I run..

• i hold no ill will toward snaps or flatpaks, i include them because they are dependencies for pamac-all in stormos and stormfish OS. But as you did say derek, not everyone likes using them which is OK. But yeah Ubuntu is likely not a likely good gaming distro.

• when did he dye his 'hair' purple?

• Lutris, Steam, Epic is working great under ubuntu 21.10. No problems. Snaps working very fast. So what is the drama?

• So much respect for actually putting your reasoning in title xD

• It's the bloat.

• I have Pop OS, and I love it, but I wish System76 would add company support for other DEs. Yes I know you can install them yourself, but that's not the same. A Poptheon or a Popin would be even better for new Linux users.

• Hi DT
  There is a whole world out there that are Linux users, Window Users. They are not all gamers.
  Recently, we read about Germany moving 25,000 terminals to Linux. The distribution has not yet been chosen, but it is likely to be OpenSuse (leap 15.x).

  You mentioned a disdain for snaps and flatpacks. The flatpack is a package that is designed to be written once and used everywhere. Snaps are, thus far, an Ubuntu only product.

  Were I in business, and I had to deal with operations in the USA, Latin America, France and Asia, and elsewhere, that is 4 languages and possibly 4 different Linux distributions. Would the business want a lock in to Ubuntu, or the ability to go with flatpacks and any Linux distro?
  Games built with flatpacks will run identically to those that are specifically tailored to your distribution.
  Do you have differing opinions? Have a great day. (A trilingual English-French-Spanish Linux user).

• I don't want the snap version of Firefox, give me a deb or a flatpak…

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