The point of "gaming distros" is that you get the most up to date hardware support and all the other stuff you need installed as part of the maintained and at least somewhat tested package.
The strength of Bazzite is in its stability and ability to rollback easily. You can also try out a beta version without worrying about botching your system. Just pin the latest stable and rebase the beta.
@@bobbybyrne1899That is literally the point. Bazzite is the SteamOS alternative, with more updated packages. It serves it's purpose by simply existing, it never claimed to be THE Gaming Distro.
tbh i don‘t need a gaming distro but gonna say i did switch from a debian based to fedora simply because of the hugely outdated drivers that made some games unplayable (nvidia drivers) then again it also introduced me to the pains that is wayland on nvidia
And Ubuntu please, thats still is the most used distro (unless someone believes the running joke from distrowatch that is bombarded with fanboy server clicks).
@@aspacegamer92Yep. It's all fun and games until you as a Linux newbie has a game that literally won't start for zero reason and no error codes to work with. I have seen people leaving ProtonDB reports in 2024 about Games being borked while running Linux Mint Kernel 5.18 when we are about to hit Kernel 7.0 like good lord. Ubuntu/Debian is for Stability & not for Gaming as a priority, as such when Wine or Proton does something experimental to progress Linux Gaming, you might not benefit from it, even if your kernel is up to date. Gamescope on Ubuntu is literally 2yrs old as a .deb & building it from scratch won't work because the packages you need are literally not downloadable ATM. Tested on Pop_OS.
You probably already know but, for the sake of any that don't, it was only called Genesis in North America. For the rest of the world it was called the MegaDrive.
If you are going to compare fps in games you need to compera de 1% and 0.1% lows, this is because on the same hardware the average is always going to be under the margin of error, the drops are more interesting to measure OS impact. Other than the point of gaming distros is to streamline the user experience and avoid having to waste time installing or patching stuff so you can teabag some noobs. And completely unrelated I recently discovered PikaOS which is technically a gaming focused distro and has a few interesting thing.
Average FPS is not the only important performance measure (1% low, loading times...), and these distros are not only about performance, there's also hardware compatibility, software compatibility, stability... A comparison with Windows could also have been interesting, just an idea Past this, great video, I was just wondering which one to try as I'm looking for a replacement for Arch (too many arches to manage at once :'-))
I'm honestly not surprised these results are so comparable. At the end of the day, for the most part, it's relatively the same software running on the same hardware, with different packaging strategies, but still the linux kernel running the same translation layers on the same hardware.
A number of Arch based distros not included here, such as Garuda. I would have been interested to see CachyOS also. They have a customised kernel out of the box and a bunch more customised kernels where that came from, so at least you could see what different kernels offer.
It would be interesting to do a deep dive on BAZZITE OS. I use NOBARA 39 for desktop and gaming purposes. I recently had to swap from NOBARA GNOME to KDE base as GNOME will no longer work with my processor (to old). My PC still runs an AMD FX6300 Black Edition processor (overclocked to run 4.5MHz) with an RX580 GPU, 12GB 1333MHz Corsair Vengeance Memory. Running the following trio of games - Battlestar Galactica: DEADLOCK, Control and Talos Principle 2 my computer can still run games a solid 60FPS, or very close to it. It would be interesting to find out if BAZZITE could do the same. I would also be interested to find out if BAZZITE works with older processors and motherboards.
Funny thing is that even TuxedoOS have a non standaard Tweaked kernel. Basically TuxedoOS is in the same category as Bazzite, Nobara, ChimeraOS and HoloISO etc.
The measure, as always, is to check and see how many contributors a distribution has. Most of these gaming distros are very small to one person teams. Debian with flatpak Steam and Bottles for everything else has been perfectly fine for me, performs well, and I know my OS will be well supported and stable. Not to crap on these other distros. The work is needed and vital to grow the gaming space on Linux. I know especially with Nobara, GE is considered an "end user" so he can ship a bunch of stuff in there that would get Microsoft's lawyers angry if those things were shipped with Fedora itself. I personally found Nobara incredibly unstable (and I'm running a full AMD setup 5800x3d and 6950xt). Sleep didn't function at all and sometimes it would just fail to boot completely.
Nice, wondered about this myself lately. Investigated it and concluded whats needed is only a simple script for minimal beneftis. Looking forward if I missed something. Going to look the video after this comment 😅
5:17 - No, that's not true, it's actually "Phenomenal cosmic POWWEEERR ... ity bity living space". 😉 Negative 15 points from whomever doesn't get the reference.
@@LordHonkInc It got remade and it's an absolute classic, which they probably grew up watching dozens and dozens of times. E2A: And ... they probably have more internet points than they know what to do with, so it'll be like a nepobaby and parking fines. 🙂
At 0:32 "....three cubic meters worth of space...." You have computer cases that big in France?? Can you post some pictures?? What type of rig are you running inside those cases???? Totally awesome!!
@@TheLinuxEXP I remember a case that I got back in the late 1990s. It was a case that was recommended by MaximumPC. Really nice case!! Came up to mid thigh on me, and solidly enough built that I sat on it on occasion. (I weighed 225 lb, or 100 kilograms) It had four 5 1/4 drive external bays drives, I don't know how many 3 1/2 external 3 1/2 drive bays. It had a huge amount of internal 3 1/2 inch bays. It was also pretty wide....it was huge. I built six different computers in that thing....still one of the best cases I've ever had.
I actually choose bazzite for multiple reasons 1. It isn't just maintained by one person 2. preinstalled steam works without any issue. I installed some other distros before I tried bazzite (fedora, taxedo and opensuse tumbleweed) and they all had problems with steam. I now learned the fix. But on bazzite it just worked 3. The immutable part can be good, because I know it should just work every time I want to use it. This also has some drawbacks, like custom icons not working for me that well 4. It is mostly easy to use. There are some tools I needed to use the command line, but even that is rarely needed So yeah for me, it feels like a normal distro but ready to use the moment you are done installing it
Nice comparison :) Its good getting a general idea of performance differences between distros every once in a while. Its not something thats often covered.
Been meaning to get into Linux for a while as a Windows user. The recent recall feature really pushed me. I tried Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora on VMs and finally decided to go with Fedora. Downloaded Fedora Worstation 40, burned it to a USB, but no matter what I do, the installer was stuck at "_" and apparently its a common issue for certain generations of Surface owners. Arch installer boots no issue. So I went with the second best in my head, a Fedora based distro. Went with Nobara. Sure, I'm a bit bummed that it ain't Fedora 40, but it performs better than W11 in many ways and I'm just happy to be out of W11
One gaming centric distro that does have a purpose is lakka. It's perfect for making a custom controller friendly emulator console type thing. You could always just use retroarch too but the idea of having an OS that is entirely meant for emulation means there's no additional bloat and it can even run on a raspberry pi with the ARM ISO. Perfect for making a tiny little console you can plug into your TV and tuck away and game on the big screen. 6:07 i didnt see the sponsor tho, I have sponsorblock... Now I'm kinda curious as to what it is.
Your TuxedoOS uses an older Linux Kernel 6.1 LTS right? I wonder how different the results will be with a new Linux kernel like 6.8 . The new Ubuntu 24.04 uses Linux Kernel 6.8. For other a1rm4x on youtube shows many other OSs for gaming; he seems to like CachyOS the most and with the new Nvidia drivers 555 his RTX4090 works better using wayland.
Tuxedo OS has additional repo and comes with the newest kernel and drivers. That on itself is good for gaming, but in my experience, the old Ubuntu base caused some issue with Wayland, scaling or with tools like Mangohud which was pretty old and once it interacted with the newest Vulkan, it created a massive memory leak. So in overall, I don't recommend Tuxedo OS for gaming, at least right now. After the new Ubuntu based will be used, it should improve, at least for the time being.
I use MX Linux KDE and even use the Flatpak version of both Steam and Heroic lol. The main games I play (Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, MechWarrior 5, CS2) work great in either the latest Proton GE (Proton-Up-qt) or the basic Proton Experimental that comes with Steam. They work so well, in fact, that they ALL run better than on Windows, in terms of FPS, which is hilarious, considering CS2 is the only native game out of that bunch, and everything else is running via Proton. RX 5500 XT, Asus 75 Hz FreeSync monitor, and I use the framesync. I was running HoloISO for over a year before packing my computer away to make room for an addition to the family and to move, and as soon as I got setup in the new place, installing MX Linux KDE was first in priority.
If performance patches in these gaming distros have any significant impacts they would probably mainly affect things in CPU and/or io-limited schenarios rather than when you are limited by the GPU (which you likely will be with this system in most cases.) Granted as you and others have noted I think the main thing that makes a difference is using date graphics drivers and base system. (and also avoid steam snap if using ubuntu.....)
i can say for myself having just switched yesterday from Win 11 to Linux myself - gaming distros make a massive difference. i run a brand new RX 7900 GRE with my R7 5700X - tried Ubuntu and Mint and fount out neither had a kernel that supported my GPU, it was too new and obscure. so i went ahead and installed Garuda, and it worked smoothly out of the box. if you're running new or cutting edge hardware, you might need a bleeding edge gaming distro, like it or not.
@Cresimi i tried Ubuntu 24.04 first actually, the logic was that it would work with my GRE right off the bat given it's a brand new release barely over a month old - unfortunately it didn't, got consistent game crashes over and over (Resident Evil 4 Remake, Immortals of Aveum, Hellblade 2) and nothing booted. the problem is GRE stands for Golden Rabbit Edition, it's a China exclusive card that just got a worldwide release a few months ago. it's pretty new and (frankly) niche, enthusiast and weird XD it's a cut down 7900 XT that costs about $530 ish and uses a cut down N31 die with 80CU's, so significantly more than the 7800 XT, but it's paired with 16GB of 18GB/s memory to keep costs down. it's a weird card but an enthusiasts dream that overclocks nicely
Fedora, Fedora, arch, arch, Ubuntu. In general, having a good kernel version and AMD hardware helps tons, particularly on the graphics end. Nobara can game, but it is NOT gentle on light hardware configurations.
Maybe I should give Nobara another shot. 🤔 Garuda is my choice for Arch-based distros and it's been smooth sailing. The opposite of spartan, I'd say. 😅
@@TheLinuxEXP i recommend to buy quest 3. You can play without PC or play with good graphics when connected to PC. Or work in VR with virtual monitors even under Linux (immersed app)
@@deladismarketing don't expect anything crazy, it's just 2 patches away from upstream: nvidia reflex stuff for dxvk and winesync instead of fsync (not ntsync yet, though). the fact that they do it at all is a proof that CachyOS considers itself a gaming distro
Interesting that the only distro among those that came with gnome gave lower results. Maybe it could be useful to make performance omparasion of dekstop environments? Also why just average with no 1% lows?
I was looking for a video like this. Very nice. It would be better to include 1% lows [someone else already mentioned this]. Also, adding a comparison between Windows 10/11 and Linux distros would be great. I'm considering abandoning gaming, on Windows 11, but I'm not 100% convinced yet.
Could you compare those result with their performance on Windows? Just for comparison between gaming Linux distributions and Windows 11 gaming performance on those titles. Thank u for this benchmarking.
I would never dare to change the simple installation of steam and x game on windows for the stability comparation, installation of many apps+thousands dependencies on Linux
Running Linux Mint, no real issue with playing games on it, I think i stick with mint because it just works. I did some hooping but always come back to it.
I think that the main point about gaming distros is the user experience, not the performance. I'm using Nobara on my living room console PC and I'm quite happy with it, a dedicated video from you would be much appreciated. :-)
For very gaming-centric distros that are meant to essentially act like a console, I probably would have preferred the results in gamescope. ChimeraOS especially really isn't meant to be run in the desktop environment.
Im curious about the GNOME results. Obviously its one example from one distro but I have an image of gnome being somewhat bloated. So this reinforces that impression, but not sure how true that is. I don't hate gnome btw its generally my prefered experience. I just get the impression it uses more resources that most other options.
I would love to see Garuda Linux and Regata.. not necessarily for performance, but ease of install, ease of getting games up and running with different launchers (Epic, Steam, etc).
Bazzite is probably the only thing I'd actually recommend tbh because it focuses on just getting a gaming capable linux setup going easily without yanking your hair out while being rock stable and not going over the top. Now if we're talking about a BAD gaming distro? Fucking Garuda
well, this video has its problems as pointed in some of the comments. like no 1% lows, desktop mode (for distros that are supposed to be gamed on in console mode) and not testing cachyos (which is great in my experience, doubling fps in a 1000fps game (osu!, of course it doesn't scale like that to normal games), and less xruns in music production), Garuda and some others
And where did you compare it with a non gaming distro? Were are the fps graphs to see the stability of the fps? You can have an average of 500 fps, but if your game goes 2fps, then 1000 fps, then 2 fps, then 1000 fps every 2 seconds, no one can play that. You need to study a bit more how to do decent benchmarks for gaming. It's more important to have 60 stable fps than to have 120 fps with a lot of dipping into single digit fps counts. That's what makes the steamdeck great compared with the competition.
So, pretty good across the board, plus no MS logins, no spyware or telemetry. Cons - no anti-cheat so no Fortnite, or other EA titles. Can you run Rockstar launcher for it's titles? And I'm assuming, you installed the games through Lutris? Please correct if I'm wrong.
Ok, just out of curiosity. As far as I know, every distribution does provide the Linux kernel with a bunch of tools. The kernel provides some switches that might impact the overall speed. But with all distributions using the same kernel, assuming they did not apply some wonky patches and kept them to themselves. They all use the same infrastructure in the sense of systemd and wayland. So, the only difference would then be the choice of tools, pre-dominatly the desktop. But everything could've been the same. Even the drivers. I would expect a meaningful difference inbetween different kernel releases. I actually won't expect a meaningful difference between those variants and my default debian sid. Although, that would be interesting. The gaming distributions remind me a bit of the tonewood discussion when it comes to electric gitars. They are purpose build, slick feeling things. But at the end it does not improve the perfomance.
I ended up going with Nobara simply because Fedora 39 had some pretty weird issues "out of the box" where Nobara just worked. Pretty happy with it so far.
As a digital artist I've always been entertaining the idea of switching to Linux. But the performance has to be at least very similar and user experience needs not to disrupt my workflow. As such I've always been hesitant to make the switch as I fear there's going to be lots of errors and barriers. Would love to see how does Unreal Engine, Blender, Houdini and other similar software would work on Linux. If you're interested in making linux videos I'm sure videos about Windows programs running on Linux would get a lot of clicks.
well that's actually good to know. it doesn't matter what distro (gaming) you use. You know what I think... the Proton was created and optimized for the steamdeck to run Windows games minus the tomb raider that has a linux version. So... the reason that it doesn't matter what system you got, the fps stays pretty much the same or worse, coz it's simulated the steam deck hardware and power. I guess valve played the safer and can't allocate the full power from a windows game which it can reach a whopping 144hz even in 4k if you have the best pc. Still the proton it's a huge mile stone I can't even imagine how hard it was to program it
There are no performance issues with Gnome and Wayland according to my own benchmarks. KDE Wayland runs just as well as Gnome Wayland. I ran 7 gaming benchmarks the past 2 days on a Gnome Wayland Desktop and KDE Wayland desktop using the exact same hardware. As it was mainly to test differences in two different distributions it turned out that the one using Gnome even scored higher. But I do not expect this to be related to the desktop but rather the distro itself. But also I need to admit that I run a nvidia GPU and not an AMD GPU which might play a role here as well?
I don't understand why distros don't use LXQT or Openbox as the DE for the system... Is lightweight on resources and would boost things a little bit for games (as far as I've tested)
LOL at all the Arch BTW users sitting there, looking at Ubuntu with the highest numbers. You know FOR A FACT they would have just rubbed everyone else's face in that single frame per second if an Arch-based distro had produced it. Naturally since an Arch-based distro didn't win, they're all telling you that you cared about the wrong test, or shared the wrong results. Here's some more straws, boys. Keep grasping.
patches are generally meant to increase compatibility and stability, you tested neither by running only known games and measuring averages only. saying that gaming distros don't really matter bc of average fps is very shallow.
Why would you install gaming distros with dedicated gaming sessions and then run the benchmarks in the desktop mode? This comparison is completely useless. I also disagree with the idea (which was repeated several times in the video) that gaming distros are not useful unless they provide increased performance. The entire purpose of the SteamOS-like distros is to provide a console experience. You even tested on hardware built for the purpose of a console experience, but completely missed the mark by only using and testing the desktop mode.
any arch distro can be a gaming distro if you know what to look for, BUT some distro like bazzite has special feature like game mode and patches preconfigured. I just prefer setting it up my own way, if I dont want a feature, I dont want it in my system
I think you measured wrong factors. FPS should be same on all gaming distros and almost the same on other distros. you should have measured UI/UX. Like how user friendly the Installation process is or how hard it is to install an emulator.
I think Linux will finally see mainstream adoption when people stop making distros for every single use case out there. Hopefully Steam OS or something like it becomes the default Linux based OS so that people don't need to worry about which distro to use.
