So after a day of pouring due to a journey of to Scotland to see my best friend, I came back to continue testing Kubuntu.

My biggest problem with mint was that games tended to need a lot of tweaking in order to run properly... Sometimes I needed to update to a new Nvidia driver, sometimes I needed to go back to a very old one like 535. For some other games they would completely hang unless I remove the Nvidia driver and went back to Nouveau. After the last switch back to Nouveau. I kept it that way for several months and was able to play through quite a few games at really good frame rate with no crashes...

But after the switch to Wayland and then the switch to KDE because cinnamon seemed to dislike Wayland. I realised that it was probably better to go with a distro that was pure KDE and Wayland rather than shoehorn the two of them into Lennox mint...

The initial installation went really well as I described in my previous blog post.. but I was still having some problems with games not launching properly. The worst offender was a game that I'm really looking forward to called starship simulator. It needs DirectX 12 or Vulcan to run properly since it uses a lot of newer GPU stuff to render. Try as I might. I couldn't get either dx12 or Vulcan to work properly... Yet I had managed to get it working before using Nouveau with Vulkan...

So as with all things Linux I went on a journey of Discovery... Kubuntu is based on Ubuntu (no surprises there). Although I'm on the development branch of kubuntu (25.10), some of the libraries are still using older stable releases...

So I decided to try to use more modern ones. There was no way I was going to start compiling things from scratch though... I just want to be able to pull things from repositories. Luckily both Nvidia and Mesa, have their own repositories which can be added in with a single command,...

I upgraded my Nvidia drivers to 591 from 580. -591 is a bleeding edge release, but Vulkan and Wayland patches are mentioned in the release notes. Also, Mesa has been updated a couple of minor versions... I think the default is 1.2.3, and I now have 1.3.2...

The moment I had updated both of those, everything just started working beautifully. A quick trip into snow runner showed me that the frame rate was even higher than it had been before... The micro stuttering on texture load was non-existent.

My testing has been to take one specific truck out from one garage on one map and drive forwards watching the steams reported FPS counter. Giving the game a few seconds to stabilise I take the FPS as I pass a particular point marked on the ground. I've kept quite good notes on this and I think I've pushed it about as far as I can get so here is my table of results.

As you can see from the basic mint install with the basic drivers, I'm getting about 40 to 50% better frame rate on average, but when the frame rate went above 100. I was quite surprised. Whatever has gone into 591 has definitely pushed the Wayland support even better than it was before.

I don't know why changing the Mesa drivers and the GPU driver would have such a marked improvement, other than Wayland is getting an awful lot more press these days than it has been previously, so perhaps everyone starting to really take it seriously...

But what this does tell me is that there are some pretty impressive improvements coming down the pipeline for the normal users. Please remember that in order to get these I had to add the developer ppas too my APT sources list, which isn't something that most normal people would have a need to do.. it's only if you need to do testing..

Given Ubuntu's very conservative release strategy and mints even more conservative really strategy, I don't expect normal users to be getting these improvements for at least the next 6 months or so. It may not be for another 12 to 18 months before mint users get them!

While I am pleased with the improvements, I recognise that what I've done is absolutely not something that I would recommend for anyone else to do unless they are very comfortable with Linux. These are development branch drivers on a development branch operating system, and I'm only doing this because I was dissatisfied with the consumer branch and the LTS main trunk releases being so far behind the curve. That's also not to say that what I've done is incredibly complicated.. for the most part, all the information is simply available on websites like OMGUbuntu!

But what the table above does show me is that it's almost impossible to sort someone's problems without knowing exactly what version of Linux, their driver version, and so on. The experience varies so much between them. Even on the same distro the experience varies wildly. What I don't have in the table above is the received experience of playing the game... Some of the combinations above result in stuttering, while others will hang on alt tab, among other problems...

It also shows me that the main distros are focusing more on standard stable desktop experiences. Gaming, it often feels, seems a bit of an afterthought.

It does make me happy to see that many of the issues are solved in the upstream development branches, but I worry about how long it's going to take for them to make their appearance in LTS releases, which is what most standard users will be taking. Everything about your gaming experience with the system, it seems, is very heavily dependant on the particular graphics drivers that are shipped with it..