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Need distro advice (beehaw.org)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, gorgeous community!

My friend, a generally non-technical person is looking for a good gaming distro. He has been daily driving Windows and OS X before, his main motivation for switching Linux is to streamline his contributions to a game development project we have, that is largely Linux-based (we use Nix for dev environments and build automation).

The only Linux distro I've ever used for gaming is SteamOS, and all my other experience is in the Nix/Arch domain, so I am not sure what to recommend to my friend.

As I mentioned, the only hard requirement we have is a possibility to sustainably use Nix package manager with experimental functions (command, flakes), - and I am willing to help my friend setting it all up. But I also would like him to be able to use the OS for gaming whilst experiencing only the expected and acceptable amounts of pain.

So far we have Nobara and Chimera on our radar. Is there something you can recommend? Any advice in general would be helpful, thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

TLDR: You don't need a rolling release distro like Arch or its derivatives or any "gaming" distro for gaming anymore.

Many experiments have shown that these distros specifically "made for gaming" have no real advantages. If your friend is a beginner, I would absolutely not recommend Arch Linux, but rather Linux Mint. I have recently found this experiment: https://youtu.be/UtXw9on6qs4 (table at the end of the video) that supports this recommendation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Thanks for sharing that video. It's one of the most ambitious ones I've seen out there. However, if I understood correctly, only average fps is compared right? So not the (more important) 1% or 0.1% lows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I'd still recommend a bleeding edge distro if the friend in question has recent hardware and/or likes to play games on release. It doesn't have to be arch though, and you can probably grab a recent kernel on Mint too if necessary.