MudMan

FFS. I mentioned G Sync because they have a logo. VRR is so common an ubiquitous that there is a VESA certification for it now and a default standard for it for both HDMI and Display Port, no Nvidia required. It doesn’t matter if you have G Sync, AMD’s Freesync (which is an open standard) and can be used by any brand of GPU or generic VRR.

You having had your head in a hole about what the average display features are in 2026 for even an entry level gaming display doesn’t mean they aren’t common, important or widely supported. When Nintendo has adopted a universal technology and you haven’t you know you’re behind the tech curve.

For the record, plenty of Linux distros have full support for HDR and VRR. Mint just happens to… not.

There were literally huge G-Sync logos in the boxes of the last three TVs I helped people buy. When you plug in a game console and press the settings button on my current display in game mode it pops up a large HUD element that says “VRR” and displays the type of VRR currently active and the current framerate. Every other option and metric is hidden away in a sub-menu.

Not that this matters, because the point of VRR is you don’t need to know it’s there. If it’s working, the drivers and the display should talk to each other transparently. The end result if you have a Windows machine with VRR and a Linux machine that doesn’t support it and you plug them both to the same display is, again, that the Windows game will look smoother, regardless of how many fps it’s spitting out.

And as always, a reminder I’ve given many, many, many times in my life, both personally and professionally, “it works on my machine” means nothing and doesn’t mean there’s no bug or that your code isn’t crap. Your anecdotal experience and my anecdotal experience aren’t the same, because I have a showstopper bug and your seven friends don’t, which still means there’s a showstopper bug.

Yeeeeeah, so “reinstall your OS from scratch” is a dealbreaker. You realize that if we’re on SMASHES WINDOWS territory you can’t ever, ever, EVER tell people to reinstall their OS from scratch, let alone what is, from a normie’s perspective, an entirely different OS. I’d argue that even the relatively simple rollback in Bazzite/Fedora atomic distros in general is a dealbreaker for most normal users, at least with the current UX.

BTW, just to clarify how far from ready this is for mainstream adoption, Mint is a no-go because last I checked they still had no official HDR support (or VRR? Not sure about VRR, which is its own issue), so it’s just missing mandatory features for my gaming setup. Ubuntu has its own set of problems. Back when I was distro hopping for this setup Bazzite ended up being the only thing to simultaneously do surround sound out of the box (kinda, close enough) and VRR/HDR out of the box as well with embedded Nvidia drivers. Things may have changed, but I’m not distro hopping anymore.

I have a different thing with Cachy on it and it’s… fine? But the Arch-ness of it all rubs me personally the wrong way. Either way I’m not wiping my OS. If Fedora doesn’t work then it’s gonna be Windows because I have better things to do with my time.

So that’s how mainstream adoption works, for anybody keeping track.

The update to Nvidia’s 590 drivers just blew up GPU acceleration on my Bazzite install, so now every window visual effect is blank and I get errors in desktop accelerated software all over the place.

Today is not the day to poke me on “SMASHING” anything. I’m only typing this from Windows because I needed to get work done, so I can’t spend the day playing the “tweak Linux until it works” videogame.