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?
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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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-ostree works very similar to dnf just takes very long. That's a small price to pay for Sunshine/Moonlight with VAAPI hardware encoding and Steam optimisations in my case.
I do use it for day to day, even work. Not saying it's bad, but when you have an issue, you're basically alone. For example I'm still using the image from Feb 14th because all the newer ones boot to black (clean image, nothing layered).
I'm hoping at some point a newer one will eventually work, the same way it stopped working on Jan 16th and worked again early Feb.
I can sort of deal with it, but wouldn't recommend based on my experience.
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 :)
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.
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 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.
I would use Bazzite 100%. It's an atomic fedora spin that aims to replicate SteamOS. It has a KDE Nvida variant, and comes preinstalled with all of the gaming software and optimizations you need out of the box. All that is required to update it is a restart.
Just switch to X11 from Wayland after first boot and you're as good as gold. (If Wayland works fine with your card it may be a better option because I think it plays more nicely with BigPicture mode if you need that)
I really like what I'm seeing with this project, and the opensuse spinoff.
VNC is a security hole unless you route it through an SSH tunnel. If you're managing a docker container for jellyfin there's not much UI work to be done anyway.
I also want to run steam games on it so VNC option is preferred. It can be temporarily turned on via SSH with a some configuration and bash scripting.
You can also set up a wireguard VPN to run VNC over, that might be easier instead of using SSH tunnels.
Ubuntu Server seems the obvious choice. Just roll with the DE it will install as dependency for one of your needed apps.
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
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.
I would recommend ublue bazzite or secureblue (nvidia userns kinoite). Never used VNC on wayland as clients that dont need static IPs suck or have no wayland support. KDE has software for that.
Bazzite would be the easy solution as it is a very well curated image (with lots of variants) for gaming.
Secureblue is not for gaming, so you will need Flatpak for Steam, Bottles, Lutris and PupGui or whatever you use. Or you layer everything, which will slow down updates but as a server its not that bad. But secureblue is a "proof of concept" of a secure Fedora. You might encounter new bugs as its currently not meant for gaming, and this will be helpful to improve radical security trends for Fedora (secureblue does lots of things Fedora doesnt, as it is a clear secure distro, not "it works kinda and always").
Ublue (and all derivates like bazzite or secureblue) has the drivers preinstalled and if the addition breaks something you will likely just not get an update, rather than have a broken local system.
Please report your findings!
After doing some research I'm surprised that nobody here mentioned Nobara. I think it fits neatly here.
Nobara is a half baked not well maintained and very hacky fork of Fedora.
It is substantially less secure, even though you might squeeze out some performance percents using their hardware optimizations.
This may not be worse as it fits the purpose, would still kinda advise against.
Can you elaborate on the "substantially less secure" part?
- very slow and seemingly manual updates, unlike the CI/CD of ublue
- replaced SELinux with Apparmor, not sure about the used profiles but just assume that this "at most few person" project is less secure
- bundling in a ton of fixes that may break
It is a cool project as a proof of concept, but extremely hacky with drawbacks
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.