And for the love of God, no autism or elitism
I just want a name and the reason it's the best for gaming.
This is the fourth or fifth time I'm making this thread in the past two months and I still haven't gotten an answer
Which distro is best for gaming?
Windows 10 LTSC
Ubuntu LTS is the only distro besides SteamOS to be officially supported by Valve. If you just want a single name, that's what I'm giving you.
What kind of gaming?
I emulate consoles a lot, and most PC games that I like use a controller, so I don't even need a keyboard or mouse anymore. I started using chimera os which is based on steam os. Moved my pc in the living room and play games from the couch. It's great.
This is the fourth or fifth time I'm making this thread in the past two months and I still haven't gotten an answer
Then it sounds like you're too retarded for Linux. Go with WIndows 11.
Can steamOS double as a PC too, or is it just a bigger version of the deck? Stuff like browsing, Gimp, torrenting, etc
All kind. Emulation, triple A, abandonware, exe ported from Windows, etc
Linux Mint just works. Get Bazzite if you want something akin to SteamOS.
Nobara if you're lazy.
Arch if you're based.
Performance-wise they are essentially equal. Maybe Nobara has a tiny bit of more juice because of the Eggroll dev but Arch has custom kernels too. It more depends on your taste. If let's say you want a newly released source port of an old game, you only will be able to compile it (even on Windows) which is a pain in the ass by default. Which is why Arch scripts exist and imo makes it the best distro for gaming too.
No it's because nobody has given me a proper answer. It's always "X might work but it might not work" then I start asking more questions, and either the original anon stops replying or the thread devolves into elitism
making windows games run on linux is like trying to eat food through your asshole
not worth it really
SteamOS can double as a normal PC (even on the Deck), but it hasn't been released for desktop use by Valve since the Deck came out. There's the community Holo ISO but it's not really optimized or polished for desktop use. Especially not compared to Ubuntu.
Steam OS is literally just Arch + KDE + gamescope.
In comparison, how's Arch?
I haven't paid a penny for games in the past 25 years and I'm not going to start now
Just pick whichever you feel most comfortable using, something like Arch will have the latest stuff faster than the alternatives but it's not like you can't play vidya in a debian/ubuntu based distro like Mint, you'll probably have to rely on flatpaks but it'll work
It mostly just works nowadays, i do make linux elitists cry by using wine with half of the stuff i run.
I tried both Mint and Ubuntu, and a game like Resonance of Fate refused to go past 31 FPS on a 4070. I tried Steam, Lutris, Heroic, none of them worked. So I could only conclude that Debian based distros weren't strong enough to handle them
The question is more like "which DE i want to use?" Gnome is a fucking foot, KDE has a hot mascot, but XFCE is not fucking gigantic.
Things like arch/debian etc is just the "store" where you get shit from.
Is there a point in picking? Aren't they all basically empty shelves that I can customize however I want? So long as the performance is the best, I don't care what the distro is called
4070
just stick to windows
What's wrong with a 4070?
Welcome back to Windows 11, enjoy your stay until 12
Like I said, you're too retarded.
Lazyness, some come with better stuff installed from the factory, and some are gayass with the drivers.
For example
This dude Is probably having shit performance because the distro is installing the open source nvidia drivers (that are made out of reverse engineering and glue), instead of the proprietary nvidia ones
It's just a checkbox but you need to know it is there.
no autism
But you're literally asking for autism with a question like this.
Moreover, you will never get the internet to agree unanimously on anything, let alone the best Linux distribution for gaming. If you don't want endless debate and general autism, then just install Linux Mint and be done with it. Is it the "best"? For a variety of reasons that will differ from one autist to another, the majority would say no. But it absolutely can run games and (as far as Linux distributions go) is well suited to beginners, novices, perhaps even idiots who would unironically expect there to be an objective answer to a question like the one you're asking.
desu i wouldn't even bother with linux on anything nvidia. not worth the headache
Uhh I'm that dude actually...
And I went on Anon Babble for the problem regarding the performance, and they told me to install 570-open driver, which helped, for a moment. On 1080 resolution, I'm able to get 60fps, but once I bump it to 2k, the fps doesn't get past 31
Weird as fuck
Right now, I'm debating on whether to wait for official SteamOS or bite the bullet and try Arch as a third attempt. I really don't understand what I'm doing wrong, considering it's a fresh install
I'm dumb as fuck and am using nobara because it's maintained by the same guy that does proton-ge
Use CachyOS or EndeavorOS. If you want to figure out how to use a piece of software, then consult the Arch wiki on it. Avoid GNOME and just use XFCE or KDE.
That's generally going to be the easiest way to do things if you want to fuck around with gaming or just generally learning software. There's not a lot of fucking around with building github programs because of the AUR, so that's also a load off any beginner's back.
You could try Nobara if all you want to do is gaming, but I'm not that familiar with Fedora and its derivatives.
Distros are optimized for specific use cases, and those use cases can range from servers, to NAS to gaming. It's easiest if you choose a distro that already aligns with your use case somewhat.
SteamOS is just an Arch derivative. If you do try Arch, then read the installation guide, but just use Archinstall to save yourself the work. Follow that up by reading through a fresh install guide or something.
be me
a rich white woman with 116 IQ.
Daily driver is Linux
In practice, the choice of distribution mainly affects things like update schedule (rolling release vs point release; how thoroughly updates are tested before being pushed through), package manager, the choices of default software (you can install any program on any distro, but especially when it comes to desktop environments, it's preferred to stick with the options developers have made sure play nice), default settings when it comes to e.g. security (extremely hardened setup would occasionally have to pay in performance or convenience), philosophy in including commercial/non-free/patented software (like e.g. nVidia drivers).
None of this is directly related to games, and only some of it is indirectly related (for example, gamers probably want to get graphics API stack updates pronto, so that would be an argument towards rolling release or distros with fast release cycles, but even in e.g. Ubuntu that tends to be on the slower side, there are third-party repositories that let you install the latest graphics stuff but just the latest graphics stuff). Another point would be that I would reckon most PC gamers, already used to tinkering games with mods and such so as to get their desired experience, are probably philosophically predisposed to KDE Plasma desktop that has lots of features and is highly configurable.
TLDR: It doesn't really matter, you should make the decision based on some other criteria than games. But if you want a simple recommendation, I think
* Fedora KDE (point release but with up-to-date software, a very well-maintained no-nonsense distribution)
* Nobara (it's Fedora, except it has stuff like Steam, obs-studio, nVidia drivers, etc, pre-installed - which in a sense is pro-gaming, but you can get that stuff installed in 10 minutes and sticking with upstream has reduced chance of rug pulls etc.)
* Arch (rolling release with really good 3rd-party package support from AURs, best community support, but requires some tinkering)
are worth looking at
Archinstall
What's that? Is it just Arch but with the bare necessities already packed in?
white
woman
116 IQ
yeah, sure, prakesh. lol.
If you're a dummy: Bazzite.
If you're not: Nobara.
If you actively enjoy tinkering and don't mind your OS/software introducing bugs or breaking every 2 weeks: CachyOS.
All of these are best for gaming?
Yeah, Bazzite is built on immutable Fedora and is essentially SteamOS for desktop. Nobara is by the proton-ge guy and has a bunch of small tweaks aimed at gaming performance, and Cachy just has performance tweaks in general like a BORE scheduler that gives your game process priority access to hardware.
Ignore the other users. I recommend that you use Linux mint, it's out of the box and doesn't need any tinkering. I use Linux Mint all the time, and it's pretty much the only one you need. Most distros are a waste a of space and don't provide anything new.
What is the purpose of Lutris or Bottles when Steam just werks?
The only valid distros are Ubuntu / Fedora if you want stability or Arch / Tumbleweed if you want more recent packages.
When Blizzard decides to push an update that breaks battlenet for example, everyone is affected.
You should not be using distros that abstract everything away to the point you have no idea how your underlying system works, you're nothing more than an iToddler at that point.
How's Arch compared to them?
For Steam games, I'd say Lutris and Bottles are almost pointless, but not everyone wants to open Steam to run non-Steam games.
Lutris also has install scripts for non-Steam games and obviously Steam doesn't. (I've never used those install scripts but still, they exist.)
Bottles also has built-in installers for certain programs, like Battle.net (even though Blizzard keeps breaking that shit), and Steam doesn't.
Bottles and Lutris also offer different Wine builds than Steam's Proton. They might sometimes be better for some stupid reason you don't care about.
Kinda.
Bazzite is basically the same kind of distribution as SteamOS, but not designed to be Steam Deck exclusive. That includes having stuff like Steam, emulators and game managers (like Lutris) pre-installed, but like SteamOS (and console, smart TV, etc, operating systems) it's "immutable": you can't (easily) go about tweaking the system partition, which means you cannot possibly brick anything, but you also can't do customization you could do with a regular operating system
Nobara is a regular distribution (based on Fedora) but it has software like Steam pre-installed so you don't have to
CachyOS is performance-oriented distribution. If you run gaming benchmarks, it will probably come out on top in most of them (although not all, because in computing there are always some kind of tradeoffs: to spout some jargon, a scheduler for instance might optimize for throughput or reduced latency, but that necessarily comes at a cost of metrics like fairness), and that's of course something gamers want. Compared to e.g. Ubuntu that even in its desktop versions has a kernel optimized for server-like workloads, desktop experience might genuinely be noticeably snappier. But you shouldn't go expecting more than a few percent performance increases in games tops, and people making mainstream distributions aren't idiots: if there were "free" performance-increases, then they would take them (the tradeoffs might include e.g. stability). And it's really just a couple of guys recompiling Arch packages with their own settings, so the changes aren't properly tested.
Notably, aside from CachyOS, neither option really offers anything other than better defaults compared to regular distros. You could install Fedora and make it work like Nobara in 10 minutes if you had a checklist at hand. And CachyOS is something of a DIY distro (like Arch it is based on), and you could plausibly fuck up some setup such that you won't actually see any performance increase after all.
Why should we use Ubuntu or anything Debian based? If it's for games, shouldn't we be using something that does rolling updates? instead of big releases like Ubuntu?
gentoo or debian
sorry but you have to read and use the CLU
No, archinstall is just a TUI installer that gets packed into Arch.
It doesn't give you as much control as manually installing Arch, but it is functional enough if you grab an up-to-date iso.
Using a statistic where at least 20-30% of the participants are lying
To make statements about a few % of variation in Linux users
You really just need to look at the the correlation between the unknown OS % and Windows OS % to get an idea of what's happening. Statcounter tracks hits, not unique users, so a large quantity of the data is likely just tracking bot traffic with spoofed user agents or some variation on that.
I was with you on Bazzite until you mentioned lack of customization
gaming
Windows 10 TSMT
How's PopOS? I hear that being thrown around a lot for gaming
but not everyone wants to open Steam to run non-Steam games.
This is how I wanted Battlenet to be. But Lutris is a pig disgusting application to use. All these install scripts are fucking vile I genuinely have no idea what the fuck its doing to my machine. Bottles is similar, but at least its tidy.
The problem I'm having is both of their runners are flat-out dogshit compared to Steam. Proton really is a fucking marvel.
Arch is just Cachy without the optimizations; it's good if you know what you're doing (i.e. wanna do it yourself) and it has a lot of software support thanks to the AUR but you might as well use Cachy since it's built on it. SteamOS on the deck is built on Arch.
You can customize Bazzite, I use it and managed to install Cloudflare WARP as a VPN. I just added the repository to my sources and then installed it via command line. Granted it's not how you *should* do it (ideally you'd use flatpaks for everything) but it's possible.
PopOS hasn't been relevant in a long time, they're currently working on a new version which uses a Rust-based Desktop Environment (Cosmic) but it's still in alpha testing.
Every distribution is fucked in some unique way and the only fix you'll ever get for that is people telling you to change to a different distro until you give up and decide that dealing with Microsoft's bullshit is easier.
Linux is for ideologically motivated people. Not users who want things to work.
Linux apparently has bad Nvidia support, but it's unclear how bad and how much of that is freetards refusing to install official drivers because those aren't freetarded enough.
NTA but you could always just check the scripts, I don't even use Lutris but I occasionally peep them just to check what winetricks parameter I might need
For games? You shouldn't.
Debian is for servers and Ubuntu is for office workers.
I think you're overestimating the value of rolling updates for gaming. Is there even a single game that requires newer packages than you'd get from Ubuntu? I doubt anyone can name one. So all the same games work, and maybe you get a 1% performance boost from yesterday's driver updates, assuming the driver doesn't crash. On that note, the point of distributions like Ubuntu is stability. The biggest problem is not being able to compile the latest version of gamescope with LTS Ubuntu's version of wayland-server or whatever package it is.
Thing is, I tried Mint for a few days, and I really like it. But there are so many bullshits that makes it terrible to use. The simplest thing is gestures. I'm so used to the touchpad gestures on my spare laptop, but Mint's build in and Touche as so barebone and don't function as smoothly as Windows. Especially pinching in for zooms and using 3 finger gesture for swiping between apps
Honestly, it's up to preference. Do YOU want to update your machine every half a year (modulo security updates) or new updates being pushed daily (with upside of getting to enjoy new features earlier, and potential downsides of updates breaking your workflow and having to beta test the programs for point release folks)? With one caveat: sometimes you might actually see noticeable performance increases for newly released games from having the latest versions of Mesa (AMD/Intel) or nVidia drivers. However, there are third-party repositories available (e.g. launchpad.net
Personally, I think the best balance is offered by point-release distributions that get you the latest stuff (like Fedora: Ubuntu for example often doesn't include the absolute latest packages at the moment of its release) or that let you selectively pick bleeding edge packages (like Gentoo - which for the record I would no longer really recommend, but package masking undoubtedly is/was a really big boon for Portage - or Ubuntu in the presence of aforementioned PPAs).
I've built up enough stupid preferences that getting Windows to work the way I want it to requires Linux knowledge anyway.
Windows, Linux has no games.
I don't have that game, but I use Mint and have a 4070 with proprietary drivers, and I have no problems with low frame rates. The Steam forum has threads like steamcommunity.com
The problem with Debian is that its repositories are very conservative. It's routinely several full versions behind other distros for the same packages. That makes it very stable, which is the point, but it doesn't always work for gaming because there's so much work being done on getting games to run on Linux. For a gaming machine you want more of a middle ground, neither cutting edge like Fedora nor conservative like Debian. That's why I went with Mint on my gaming computer even though I usually swear by Debian.
All the comments online about that made me pretty scared since I am on a 970 which is old as fuck and I had some issues with hyprland a while back.
Now I'm on KDE and I've been playing V Rising and Monster Hunter Rise with no issues.
Windows is best. No Linux will ever run modern games sorry
My pirated copy runs at 60 fps on Windows, and I used the same files on Lutris and Heroic, but they wouldn't go past 31 fps on 2k resolution
Debian Testing
There really isn't one universal answer it all depends on how much you want or like to do tinkering with your PC. Linux is primarily not for gaming, everything will run games one way or the other but it's a hobbyist OS.
If you want something that just installs and more or less werks Ubuntu or Mint will do just fine.
If you like tinkering and want access to freshest cores and packages for a gamble of either sudden extreme boost of performance or something breaking unexpectedly Arch or Gentoo will be better.
OP here. I think I settled with Nobara
Arch
debian
A server OS and nothing else
gentoo
If you want someone to hate EVERYTHING about Linux because they waste time compiling
Or alternatively something in between like Fedora, which is the first to introduce technology like PipeWire (which everyone loves and is the de-facto standard right now) and systemd (which some people seem to hate for some reason, despite it also being the de-facto standard too) while not being cutting edge with its packages and introducing bugs all over the place.
Been using CachyOS for a month or so and it just works, it's nice. I use NixOS on my servers
nobaraproject.org
This can't be the Nobara official page. It literally looks like a virus site from 2008
he's not a webdev bro
I use NixOS
I still don't understand how that shit works.
I heard that CachyOS is the hot shit for gaming since the beginning of this year. It's a fork of Arch with the best compatibility out of the box, with about 95% of the games past and present, and of course future.
Bazzite for a living-room PC/console.
How's CachyOS vs Nobara. I narrowed everything between those too. I wanted to go for Bazzite, but limited customization turned me away
Bazzite
This one is strictly for console-type PCs that you plug in your living room TV. It's not for a desktop computer.
CachyOS vs Nobara
I only watched a video from a profesionnal Linuxfag making a tier list for gaming-oriented OS. He ranked Cachy and Nobara both at S-tier, but with Cachy being better than Nobara in his final ranking of the 6 OS he ranked at S and A. Here's if you want to watch the video: youtube.com
Apparently Cachy, since the beginning of this year, has immensely upgraded in terms of backoffice stuff. UI is better, it's super beginner-friendly, extremely quick response time for the new drivers and compatibility solutions, etc. The guy made other videos introducing Cachy because he made it his main OS since recently.
Don't know about Nobara though but it's a close second, I assume it's more for specialist Linuxfags, but it's good as well. I don't know the specifics because like you I'm going to switch to Linux soon before Windows10 gets terminated and I'm strongly interested in Cachy from what I can see.
This one is strictly for console-type PCs that you plug in your living room TV. It's not for a desktop computer.
If you want my personal opinion, I use Arch. Most up to date packages (and it matters in gaming if you want to have the latest versions of Wine), and a pretty good wiki that helps you with setting up almost anything. If you don't like the autismo of configuring most of the system through the terminal, you could try a branch of it, like Endeavour.
In the end, it doesn't even matter as long as it does your job. Distro choice is a meme anyway, choose what you think fits you.
Is CachyOS better than Endeavour and vanilla Arch?
CachyOS has optimized packages for CPUs with AVX512 support (Zen 4, Zen 5), so it's the fastest distro by far for new Ryzens.
None
You cannot use many, many modding tools or even Cheat Engine's speedhack on it
This means that the majority of newage slop with its 'slow down the game by triple the time due to padding' is a problem
No actual gamer will use Linux as it is due to this issue
You could try Ubuntu and an AMD gpu if you really want. The ones like PopOS!, etc are usually just shitty, fucked up versions with hacks implemented that won't work properly
Either go Ubuntu or else CentOS and learn from there
Ryzens.
I use Nvidia sadly
I can't give you an opinion on that since I haven't checked it, like at all. I didn't distro hop a lot, after seeing that NixOS was cool in concept but didn't have some packages, I switched to Arch. From what I have heard, it is fine, but idk what it comes preconfigured with.
nobara
handles a lot of gaming shit by itself so you dont have to configure it if you're a beginner. the guy who makes it also makes proton ge which is what you'll mostly use for gaming.
cachy os
supposed to be optimized to the fullest at the cost of stability, to squeeze every single extra frame.
my second distro now.
both have been good to me.
you stupid nigga?
Ryzens are the CPUs, dummy.
R2ModMan and Prism Launcher work for me.
Cheat Engine
It's malware at this point, I wouldn't recommend to use it.
Sorry, meant to say Intel
R2ModMan and Prism Launcher work for me.
Latest proton fixes dinput8.dll loading without having to use a launch option, too. So stuff like REFramework modding works out of the box.
Arch is your best bet for having the ability to get as much stuff to work as possible, since that is what steam OS is based on. Mint is a good compromise for ease of set up and use.
I still want to use Cheat Engine and I will not settle for a shitty trainer or that Web-whatever it was called
I mean it literally contains malware from the official site. Is there something I don't know about a non-pozzed one or?
There isn't really a "better" distro for gaming.
Really you're going to pick between
Debian: Older packages
Fedora/RedHat: Moderately Fresh packages
Arch: Freshest packages
Anything that's "not" one of these three, is probably one of these three but with some software included by default.
If that's what you want, go for it.
It's not malware, it's a false positive detection unless you can prove that it indeed is a trojin or cryptominer
It includes literal adware, I am not talking about it being detected due to memory manipulation.
Is it compatible with the CE tables?
I think everybody is running Mint now.
None of them are. Stick with Windows because that's the system the software was made to run on. Running windows applications on linux is, and always will, be a novelty and should be treated as such.
just wait for SteamOS on Desktop, Linux Mint if you really cannot
Arch and set up proton on a properly formatted partition.