How well Steam/games works on Ubuntu Gnome?

[Drako Frost]

I'm considering installing Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, and I would like to know how well Steam works under Gnome. I tried in the past, but the games doesn't even launch, at least with an AMD graphics card.

Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 works well with Nvidia graphics cards?

How's the gaming performance compared to other DE's?

Does Gnome disable compositing for full screen windows?

Please, leave your comments.

Thanks.

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

GNOME works fine, after all SteamOS is using it.

Not exactly. SteamOS uses xcompmgr as compositor, whereas Gnome uses Mutter. Running a game on SteamOS is not the same thing as running a game on Gnome.

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

Originally posted by Drako Frost:

Not exactly. SteamOS uses xcompmgr as compositor, whereas Gnome uses Mutter. Running a game on SteamOS is not the same thing as running a game on Gnome.

Well, there is about 4,200 lines of code difference between Xcompmgr and steamos-compositor. I wasn't implying running a game on SteamOS is the same thing as running a game on GNOME (whatever that means, because you are comparing an entire distro with a DE).

Originally posted by Drako Frost:

Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 works well with Nvidia graphics cards?

As long as you are using the Nvidia binary drivers, yes. Don't use Nouveau drivers.

Originally posted by Drako Frost:

How's the gaming performance compared to other DE's?

There isn't much performance difference between DEs; unless your hardware is old you probably wouldn't notice.

Originally posted by Drako Frost:

Does Gnome disable compositing for full screen windows?

Full screen windows are automatically unredirected by Mutter.

Thanks for the clarification.

Do you use Gnome for gaming?

Also, these benchmarks done by Phoronix left me a little worried.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1410_desktops&num=1

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

I used to use Ubuntu GNOME. It was working pretty well, Steam and Steam games integrated decently and while alt-tabbed from Dota 2 a pop-up would appear telling me Match Making was ready (Unity also has this).

The results from that test are pretty strange. May have something to do with Haswell integrated graphics they used rather than the DEs tested. I have a Nvidia card and GNOME was the same for me as Unity and Cinnamon (in terms of gaming framerates). YMMV I guess.

I'm downloading Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, I think I will give it a try. I'm kinda fed up with a few bugs in Unity.

Thanks for the help!

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

No problem. Check out Numix theme and icons too, looks great with GNOME imho.

Sure! I always use them.

[Drako Frost]

I'm quite pleased with Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 so far. I just need to see the gaming performance later.

[underkjent]

Yup. Works like a charm (I think :3)

[The Letter M]

They work great. I've run Steam on Gnome in Ubuntu, Fedora, and Open Suse and never had problems on any of them.

[Drako Frost]

The game performance under Gnome is indeed great, but I have issues with the Nvidia drivers. It doesn't matter what DE I use, I'm experiencing repainting/redrawing issues in the desktop. It's not a Gnome problem, since it also happens in Unity and XFCE, but it's kinda annoying. Older Nvidia drivers didn't have this issue, I hope they fix this soon.

I switched to openSUSE 13.2, with Gnome 3.14, and I'm quite pleased with the distribution.

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

Did you have Sync to VBlank and Allow Flipping checked in the Nvdia X Server Settings?

Yes.

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

Try it out after unchecking Allow Flipping

If I disable Allow Flipping I have a nasty tearing in the desktop.

[Drako Frost]

Originally posted by Ghost:

If tweaking the settings didn't solve it just rollback to the driver that didn't have that issue I guess.

With Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 and Gnome 3.10 the screen repainting delay is awful, sometimes it takes 3 seconds to switch tabs in Firefox or Nautilus, but with openSUSE 13.2 and Gnome 3.14 the the delay is minimal, and doesn't happen always, so I will just wait until Nvidia or Gnome fix the issue.

There's an easy workaround, setting Nvidia's Powermizer to performance mode solves the issue, but the GPU runs a lot hotter, so I prefer to avoid it.

[alukortti]

They work well