Plain arch is great for gaming, no need for a gaming specific distro
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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+1 most differences between the common distros are package manager, de, and some defaults only so in theory they are all the same (yes I know some use musl or no systemd but that's besides the point).
You enjoy Arch but you're thinking of getting another distro based on Arch for gaming?
I enjoy Arch on my laptop but I am getting a new gaming PC pretty soon and I am wondering what distro to install there. Hope that makes sense.
When I bought a PC I just dd-ed the Arch from my notebook. Works just fine.
Nobara is a great gaming focused distro, it's a fork of Fedora by a well-known Red Hat employee.
It's by the GloriousEggroll guys, and I really liked it a lot. I would still be using it if it worked better with my laptop's hybrid Nvidia graphics setup. When I get around to swapping my desktop to linux, I'll almost certainly go with Nobara first.
FWIW, Pop!_OS is where I landed for great hybrid graphics support.
@shreddy_scientist @alehc Well, not just for gaming, but for beginners, or people who like the simplicity of the desktop environment, Linux Mint. I used it for quite a long time, and altough is has some quirks (as any linux distros do), it is a decent all-rounder, for everyday use and for gaming too.
That's what makes Nobara so rad, it works great for gaming because it has a number of the most downloaded packages built in!
I found the distro really doesn't matter much anymore for gaming specifically. You'll install the same or similar tools for gaming no matter if using Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc.
For gaming it sometimes can be useful to have more current Software especially if playing new games since issues might only be fixed on the latest version.
But aside from that one part I think you should go with the distro you generally prefer and game on that.
It will matter if your packages are so out of date that you can't run any games on it. Had this issue when I used KDE neon what uses an Ubuntu LTS release
Do you have any specific tools/software I should install?
I prefer Linux Mint, but I don't believe there is a "best" for gaming; simply select the one with which you are most familiar.
I'm sure u only wanted to tell us, u are using arch linux. You wouldn't switch OS only for gaming. Jokes aside, I would rather switch from nvidia to AMD instead of using another Distro. I use arch btw, for gaming and music production.
Regular Fedora Workstation is a good compromise between stability and new kernels etc.
Personally I like the KDE spin best: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/
+1 from me. Fedora is a nice middle ground - stable, polished, yet adopting new things fast.
It doesn't really matter as long as you're on something with recentish packages.
I've been on Arch for the past year or so and it's been working pretty well.
I've used openSUSE, Void, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu in the past for gaming and they've all been decent.
I'm just on Arch because I wanted a newer kernel and graphics drivers than Debian.
I've used arch for 7-8 years. I'm currently using Garuda for gaming, on year 2 or 3.
My recommendation is that if arch is working for you just fine, then don't bother switching. I only switched because I had a breakage and it seemed time to switch (only 2 significant breakages in those 7or 8 years)
If you hadn't started with arch I would in fact recommend Garuda first because the initial setup is much more hands free, start it and install stuff and it just works. Also Garuda comes preconfigured with an AUR setup and installers for that and for the glorious egg roll proton.
That is all crap you can simply set up yourself on arch, so there's no need for you to switch, if you're fine with the arch and slightly more manual configuration then you're all set with arch and have no real reason to change that.
Seconding this. Garuda has been great, all of the advantages of aur and bleeding edge with some fool proofing and ease of use features. It's like pop_os for folks who don't want to jump on the Ubuntu train.
I use Mint for gaming with a 6.1 oem kernel and kisak-mesa drivers. Works great, super stable with no issues. Most stuff has an Ubuntu LTS release, for everything else I use Flatpak.
I use Mint for my main gaming PC. Most things worked out of the box.
On my previous laptop everything worked out of the box, I jus had to install the nvidia driver. On my newest one the GPU required a newer driver than what was available for my kernel, so I had to experiment with various combinations of kernel and driver combinations before I found something that worked well.
I settled for kernel 6.0.0-1018 + nvidia 535.40.03 for my rtx4060.
I've had really good luck with Pop!_OS. AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU, so having the NVIDIA drivers bundled is nice.
Most games in my Steam library work out of the box with no tinkering of Proton. I've lucked out in that the games that do require tinkering work with Proton Experimental or Glorious Eggroll's releases. Lutris is the same, though I just default to the latest Glorious Eggroll release.
Gamed for years on Arch, few problems diminishing over time. Currently gaming on Kinoite immutable (with Arch in a distrobox) with even less problems and a (touch wood) virtually unbreakable system. Then again, I never went chasing those last few percent...
I built my Linux gaming PC with 23.04 Ubuntu. It has kernel 6.2. Easy to install. Uses my Xbox and PS5 controller. Runs great with my Nvidia graphics card.
But you may want to try a few different distro and see which one you like.
debian testing go brrrrr
I use endeavourOS with a nvidia GPU. Its basically arch - it works for me as flawless as it could with nvidia and x11 /xorg. Wayland might work but not as good as x11 - but this is another topic :D
I use endeavourOS with Wayland (hyprland) on amd hardware and haven't had any issues, performance or otherwise
I am sure its nvidia related problems I‘m facing.
I've been using Garuda since the beginning of the year, and I'm enjoying it. Having BTFS by default really helped allay my concerns about going to a rolling release; it's been pretty easy to just roll back changes when I needed to. Even that one time where I rolled back too far and corrupted my GRUB didn't take too long to get squared away; the forums have been super helpful.
I should look into how to do the rollbacks, I've noticed it doing snapshots but haven't needed to do that yet. Still should know before I do need it.
My worst problem so far was dual booting to Debian and having the efi entry for Garuda disappear and then not being able to get back easily without modifying debian's grub. Not fixable with snapshots but still simple enough for me to fix.
Rollbacks are super easy: there's a tool called Snapshot Manager or something (maybe just Snapper?) that gives you a list of all the snapshots on your system. You can just select one and roll back to it. If I'm about to try something weird, I'll make a new snapshot and give it a descriptive name so that I can tell which one to jump back to if need be.
I've been using opensuse tumbleweed for the past couple of weeks and it's working pretty well for me. KDE, AMD cpu/gpu, Wayland, etc
doesnt matter at all
The only thing you really need for a good gaming distro is to be relatively up-to-date.
If you want the optimisations garuda provides you can just install them yourself on whatever distro, though they will probably be rather negligible.
Any of them. I've gamed on Debian, Pop, Arch, Nix, Fedora, etc. Pick a DE you like, a package manager you like, a release cycle you like, an init system you like, etc and find the distro that matches. If you like Arch then use Arch. It's perfectly suitable for gaming.
~2017-2019 I used Ubuntu. It was fine, and I had no complaints. All the games I bothered to try including VR worked great. It was my work machine and a Windows update imploded everything. I tried Pop OS on a whim when reinstalling, and I had no complaints about that either. I barely noticed it was different to be honest. When upgrading the SSD last year I installed Fedora on a whim. It works fine and I have no complaints. I type dnf instead of apt now... that's the biggest difference. I haven't tried VR on it though. (I do VR for work and rarely want to use it during non-work hours nowadays)
I found Garuda to be bloated when I tried it out, but I didn't try it on a beefy gaming rig, so maybe my system was just underpowered? I use Pop!_OS on my gaming rig and have had very few problems with it (most problems I've had are because I use a(n?) Nvidia GPU) and those problems have been easily solved.
Arch is quite good for this. Even though things can break when Arch is too new, it works quite well from experience. I guess Arch is often well supported even though not official because many archers open issues early on and devs try to fix that stuff before the updates hit the slower distros.
Arch
...btw