I’m looking for a specific distro to handle some tasks.
I got a second hand rig with Nvidia GTX 1050 that I want to use as a home server. I wanted to use HoloISO but it doesn’t support nvidia. If someone says “do it anyway, it’s fine” I’ll install it though.
The idea is to support a Jellyfin server and Steam Link gaming but steam is not big on Nvidia so it’s hard to narrow down “black screen” issues etc. I’m also planning to manage it via VNC and SSH.
I’m familiar with Ubuntu based systems since I develop software on Ubuntu based KDE distro but never had a graphics card.
So it boils down to:
- Ease of setup including nvidia drivers
- Ease of update via command line (I’m not going to download nvidia drivers from their website to update proprietary drivers)
- Graphics performance
- Prefer Ubuntu based
I’m up for Gnome, Xface, Cinnamon, KDE or whatever DE.
Edit: Changed title to better reflect requirements and not have misleading “headless” and “server” in it
Ubuntu is primarily Ubuntu-based for example.
I’m up for Gnome, Xface, Cinnamon, KDE or whatever DE.
…on a headless server. What does the word “headless” mean to you?
Nowadays, servers that are not connected to a monitor, keyboard or mouse are often referred to as headless. Regardless of whether they have a graphical user interface (which can be used with tools such as Guacamole, for example).
I’m not trying to say that this is correct, but simply to point out that the term “headless” is now often interpreted differently.
Fair enough. I felt tempted to reply something like “SSH, that’s all the DE you need”, but OP specifically says they’ll use VNC to access, so that answers it I guess.
That’s exactly it. No keyboard, mouse or monitor. Just a laptop connected to it via VNC.
I understand the desire to have some graphic interface, and it’s not a bad machine you have so the desktop environment shouldn’t take too much CPU and RAM from the server side of it. For my money though — and my significantly worse hardware — I’ll prefer to go completely headless and SSH in.
I like doing non-gui stuff and I do that for all the Jellyfin stuff in docker through ssh. But since I want to run steam games on it I’d prefer to have some DE since Steam primarily supports their GUI. I feel like if I don’t have a DE I might not be able to access all of Steam’s features, I could be wrong though.
Have you considered just having it boot straight into steam with gamescope like the steam deck does?
I would have to agree, I’ve seen headless referred to in both ways. The most common that I’ve seen is what you’re referring to now. Where a server or computer has no keyboard, mouse, and monitor and is primarily controlled over the internet with something like ssh.
Both ways can be seen as “correct” though. Just depends on how you view a “headless” system.
If he wants to use it for gaming over steam link, he’ll need a graphical interface. I use a PC this way as well: headless most of the time, although realistically you’ll want to use a monitor once in a while to configure steam and figure out gfx issues (and in my case, if it boots it defaults to a 640x480 display, which I need to fix by attaching an actual monitor, I’m sure there’s a way around it, but meh).
I’m familiar with Ubuntu based systems
Then use what you’re familiar with. Done.
Maybe better go with Debian for a server. It works mostly the same, behind the scenes.
I was hoping for a more specialised distro, another user mentioned Bazzite for example.
Why? People in this community waste a lot of electrons debating various distros. In the end its all running basically the same software though.
What do you think “bazzite” will give you that you can’t do now?
Support for game controllers, HDR, DisplayLink, VAAPI, nvidia Wayland patches, Sunshine and Moonlight.
Like none of that was in your original requirements. :-)
Most of that I look at and think “yeah - why wouldn’t that work on an Ubuntu-based distro?” I wouldn’t care about wayland vs. X11 unless you have some very specific requirement that’s met by one or the other. If it works what do you care which you’re using?
Just because one distro is “optimized for gaming” doesn’t mean others can’t do gaming. Steam works just fine with bog-standard Ubuntu 22.04 and an NVidia GPU. You just may need to take an extra step or two to install nvidia drivers (e.g.
sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:525).99% of the time I’d just say “install it and see if it works”. It’s super easy to just install a quick Mint/Pop/Ubuntu/etc. and see what happens.
Yeah, I didn’t know those requirements were a thing until a few hours ago. I’ve been running Steam on KDE Neon with Intel embedded graphics and everything is great out of the box or easily installed. I just had a feeling that there would be “SteamOS but with Nvidia” thingy for Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora that has some nice features.
I mean, Linux gaming is moving so fast it’s hard to keep up. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 2025 we’ll have a distro that has “run as game server” and “use Steam” toggles in the installer and you can access it from an Android TV from first boot.
Bazzite user here. For gaming it’s great… Until it’s not. Let me explain.
Out of the box, as pure steam machine is fantastic. Everything just works. But if you try to deviate, thighs get hairy.
It’s inmutable, so almost all your apps need to be flatpack/appimages. If those don’t work, you need to pray distro box can help. For some uses I had to do a lot of weird workarounds.
The main problem I have is that every now and then an update breaks the system. It’s not a big problem as you can rollback easily, without affecting home, but it’s a learning curve and very infuriating to see AGAIN boot to black and hope next update will fix it.
I installed Bazzite on my system and experience so far has been great. It’s not what I would choose for a day-to-day workstation but for a computer that mostly just runs games and servers it’s been really nice.
Setup was super easy, installing packages with
rpm-ostreeworks very similar todnfjust takes very long. That’s a small price to pay for Sunshine/Moonlight with VAAPI hardware encoding and Steam optimisations in my case.
I think many here misunderstood your intention. The combination of “server” and “what DE?” is a weird thing for most of us, especially since you said headless, which usually means no desktop, only ssh and stuff.
But I think I understand what you are up to.
You want something mainly for gaming, where the PC acts as “brain” of the games, and you only stream them to a low-power device, similar to what Stadia was planned. Right?For that, I’ll recommend Bazzite with Moonlight or how it’s called.
Bazzite is a gaming oriented Fedora Atomic spin that has Nvidia-drivers already baked in, updates itself (you only need to reboot once in a while) and gives you a great experience, even offering to boot straight into Steam’s BPM.Moonlight/ Sunshine/ whatever is a screen sharing protocol or software that allows you to stream games without latency or much quality loss.
I’m no pro tho, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt :)
I would personally avoid any of those “gaming oriented” distros. They are very small and lack the support of a larger entity.
For Nvidia I would go with Pop os and or Linux Mint
Generally speaking, you’re right.
But Bazzite is different. It’s built on uBlue/ Fedora Atomic and therefore barely needs maintenance, both for the devs and the users. Keeping a distro secure and updated is a huge burden normally, but here, it’s done from upstream via Github-actions.Also, community wise, it already has a big one AND Fedora Atomic guides also apply to that, e.g. install scripts.
Another pro is that the Nvidia drivers are baked into the image, so if they break, they’re instantly fixed by the devs, because then everyone has a broken system. But that’s no problem, since you can just roll back in seconds.
For a pure gaming focused device like this one, a special distro makes sense. You’ll get a better experience and performance compared to Mint for example, due to kernel patches, built in tools, etc.
You’re spot on, I’ll give Bazzite a shot and see where it goes. Booting straight into BPM sounds very good. :)
If you want to also go down this route I heard that using a HDMI dummy plug allows GPU acceleration with Moonlight. It’s $2 on Aliexpress.
You can use Ubuntu, but I’d highly recommend Debian. You can expect all the package management stuff you know would work, since it also uses apt.
Ubuntu is fine. I’d personally go for PopOS right now for the ease of setup if I were to go the Ubuntu route based on current knowledge but since the Linux community has such a big variety of distros from Alpine to HoloISO I was wondering if there was a better one. Currently I think Bazzite fits the bill as another user mentioned here.
For server? Pop would have all the stuff you won’t need since it’s designed for desktop.
Maybe Vfio powered virtual desktop? You could install Proxmox and then pass though the GPU to a VM.
For remote access you could use Sunshine/moonlight
For Jellyfin I would create a different VM running Debian with your integrated graphics passed though.
You’d still need a base distro for the VM to run on. If OP goes the proxmox route they should do VGPU instead of pass through as it’s more flexible. Here’s the link to a guide on getting vGPU working with consumer grade nvidia GPUs
Ease of setup including nvidia drivers
Any mainstream distribution would relatively satisfy this requirement (Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu); however, Fedora might be slightly less amenable since it would require third-party repository RPM Fusion. Don’t get me wrong, it is a real simple process to add, but it can also cause some headaches.
Ease of update via command line (I’m not going to download nvidia drivers from their website to update proprietary drivers)
The best way to install the Nvidia driver is through your distribution’s system package manager. In fact, it is never recommended to download from Nvidia’s website. If you do, you’re flat out doing it the wrong way…
Graphics performance
The graphics performance will mostly be the same since you are using Nvidia and relying less on open source components; however, you still would want a distribution that is updated relatively frequently; therefore, I would suggest Fedora or Ubuntu.
Keep in mind that SteamOS is based on Manjaro (Arch), so I’m sure it would be fine as well, but Arch based distributions are more “rolling” and can experience their own issues.
Fedora has its own quirks as well; therefore, I would recommend hanging back one full release. For example, right now, Fedora 39 is the latest release and that means you should likely install and stay on Fedora 38 until Fedora 40 releases.
Prefer Ubuntu based
Your best option would be to use Ubuntu / Ubuntu LTS
SteamOS doesn’t support Nvidia even though Arch does. It also has a lot of optimizations that are made specifically for AMD cards which could cause a slowdown.
I originally planned on using Fedora or PopOS but I thought I would ask around to see if there’s something that’s more specialised for a local “cloud gaming” setup.
SteamOS doesn’t support Nvidia even though Arch does
You misunderstood what I wrote… (I could have worded it better), but I didn’t mean that SteamOS was a viable option; instead, I meant Manjaro (Arch) was a viable option.
Not sure why someone down voted my post as it is technically sound, but to be 100% transparent, I’ve been running a headless linux Fedora server on Nvidia hardware for this very purpose (among others) since 2017.
I would still strongly recommend that you use Ubuntu since that is what you are most comfortable with, but Fedora or Arch is viable as well.
I don’t know why someone downvoted you either, it was a good post and way better than the “just use Ubuntu” which contribute nothing to the conversation. Everybody in this community knows Ubuntu works and you can do pretty much anything with it. I liked your comment so you can take my upvote to offset the other one. :)
On another note, do you use Moonlight, Sunshine, SteamLink or something along those lines? And do you use a dummy HDMI plug or have a screen connected that’s turned off or some sort of virtual display to get the GPU acceleration up and running after restarting without a monitor?
do you use Moonlight, Sunshine, SteamLink or something along those lines?
My linux server is wired to the router, but I use SteamLink hardware with 5GHz wifi. I haven’t tried Moonlight & Sunshine, but I have tried a myriad of different hardware running the SteamLink app, but the SteamLink Hardware > RPI 4 > RPI 3 > CCwGTV. For me, the SteamLink hardware has always been reliable enough that I didn’t need to explore other options, but YMMV.
I would strongly recommend that you disable Wayland and continue to use X for various reasons, but the three most important reasons:
- Nvidia and X allow you to inject a custom EDID so an HDMI dongle isn’t necessary `Xconfig: (Option “CustomEDID” “GPU-0.DFP-3:/path/to/edid/file”)
- Wayland doesn’t support disabling V-Sync (it may now), but if not, you really do not want V-Sync enabled when streaming
- XWayland is gonna drop your performance 1-10% depending on the game and situation…
If you end up switching to AMD GPU in the future, you still don’t have to have an HDMI dongle, but the AMD process of injecting an EDID is much less user friendly to the point where you will want an HDMI dongle. :-)
I connect to my server via SSH and if I need to see the screen, RealVNC on my phone… no monitor, keyboard, or mouse connected except when I might want to update the BIOS or something.
Oh wow, you saved me a lot of trouble by telling me about EDID. I borked a test installation by doing hacky stuff instead of waiting for HDMI dongle. I think this is the last piece of the puzzle for me to set the system up. Wish me luck 🤞 and thanks again. :)
Good luck; let me know if you have any other questions :-)
If you familiar with Ubuntu and its derivatives, just use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu provides a server version called Ubuntu Server alongside the desktop versions if needed, and Ubuntu provides easy access to things like ZFS.
You can always switch in the future if you find you have server needs or preferences the Ubuntu doesn’t suit.
Ubuntu Server seems the obvious choice. Just roll with the DE it will install as dependency for one of your needed apps.
After doing some research I’m surprised that nobody here mentioned Nobara. I think it fits neatly here.
I’ve had decent experience with nobara with a 2080. I had a couple hiccups early, and had to reinstall basically right away, but after that it’s been solid.
