TL;DR: Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro? Or is it more of a “this is the least work” to get setup?
——
I run EndeavourOS on my desktop and haven’t had any issues with performance. I just like playing with new things and learning from the experience.
I’ve seen loads of people recommending Bazzite as a gaming distro for various reasons. It’s gotten to the point that I installed it on a second SSD to do my own testing but I’d still like to see others perspective.
From my research, there doesn’t seem to be that much performance to be gained (generally speaking). I’ll be testing this on my own hardware but is this generally true?
I think a big draw (especially for new users) would be that these distros would require very minimal work to get up and running into a game.
I think the TL;DR at the top best describes my question. I’ve just been thinking about this and haven’t been sure how to express it in a clear manner for others to understand. Also, this video got me thinking more.
EDIT:
Glad to see that I’m not alone in my thinking. Biggest benefit of a “gaming distro” is the convenience of having everything setup and there is no real performance difference.
In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.
For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.
However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.
Small nitpick; layering is technically only a thing on Fedora Atomic. Not all immutable distros subscribe to it.
From what I’ve seen, there’s no real performance difference with a gaming distro. What they tend to offer is an out of box experience that is more tailored towards gaming than a regular distro (think ‘game mode’, Steam, Proton, and maybe Lutris pre-installed, Nvidia drivers if you need them).
I would gander that a “gaming distro” is more aggressive at chasing the latest video drivers, stability be damned.
I heard Catchy got the 555 driver out in like 30min lmao.
Last year, this piece was written on it. And, based on an extremely small sample size (N=1), the takeaway was basically that the 1% lows (and the 0.1% lows) do seem to benefit on some games.
But, there are so many factors at play, it’s pretty hard to back up any claim of performance increase (or decrease). However, if you’ve got the time and you want to play around, then please feel free to benchmark the 1% lows (and 0.1% lows) of the games you play on different distros and come to your own conclusions.
I’m in the same boat as you. I tried running Bazzite a while back. Most of my Linux experience has been with Pop!_OS, and gaming didn’t seem easier than what I was used so, because Pop is already ridiculously easy to run. I’d love to know what I’m missing.
The cool thing about Bazzite is, you can run their Arch container in Distrobox on any distro you prefer. I just have to run it with Podman, games load super slow using Docker.
Specific ISOs tailored to specific hardware. Just makes it easy for a user to jump right in, without configuration if their hardware isn’t available in the default install…as well as other tweaks to make a good user experience.
I view the gaming distros as being about out of box. I don’t see anything improving performance outside of how the kernel compiles but I doubt any do anything special.
I just installed Nobara on my gaming laptop. The benefits are preconfigured settings, and apps like Steam and Lutris come preinstalled. These distros are a convenience over trying to trudge through all of that stuff yourself. I was able to get things up and running quickly because someone was nice enough to trudge through that stuff themselves.
Both. TheLinuxExperiment and MumblingHugon have made videos about that.
Bazzite is especially stable, reliable and works out of the box. Others may have better performance, but the cost is pretty big
Gaming distros sometimes can have slightly worse performance than normal ones due to bloat and aesthetics features (especially blur). They might have optimizations for some hardware but the difference is like 2-5% at most. Other than that they’re just more convenient and faster to set up for gaming. If you want good performance, use a rolling release to get latest drivers and try both X11 and Wayland to see what works better in the games you play. A lightweight DE/WM can give you a couple extra FPS in some cases too
Lightweight ≠ Optimized
Yes but sometimes it helps. Look at the real tests
What tests?
Lightweight has many many things that might decrease performance, for example
- bad multithreading
- bad available RAM utilization
- general under-supported and thus not supporting the latest stuff (like vsync)
- not supported by Valve, which is likely a big thing
But for sure having less bloat helps, but that is constant, while optimization helps relatively to the load.
Light sway might have a smaller constant footprint, kwin a bigger one. But kwin might scale better.
The software you run is often waaay bigger than the Desktop etc.
-
bad multithreading: that means more cores are free for apps
-
Bad available RAM utilization: in my testing distros that used “free RAM is wasted RAM” philosophy were always slower than normal ones
-
less stuff = more performance and vsync is bad
-
BRUH what? What does Valve have to do with DEs? You definitely lost me there
I get that you’re a Plasma lover but don’t say bad things about others DEs because of it. Also I am saying once again: go take a look at real life tests online if you don’t believe me. Word against a word doesn’t lead to anything except for a fight. And please stop trusting theories without trustworthy experimental proofs. That leads to trusting Big Tech or other scammy people/companies.
If you could show me some links that would be helpful.
https://piped.video/watch?v=aHt8qIOMiTc
I like this one. It’s quite new (so you don’t say that the situation has changed) and I think it explains quite well. I can’t give you many links because I don’t have much free online time anymore. I guess you can try to find more comparisons and real researches by yourself and I do apologize for the inconvenience
Interesting channel, he also reacted to TheLinuxExp.
Valve uses KDE, for Gaming. The so called “gaming” highly relies on Windows software translation stuff so I assumed it also has to do with optimized compositors.
Lets see.
-
It really makes no difference other than them installing a few drivers. Some talk about customized Kernels but cmon anyone modifying the kernel is merely pretending. Not even SteamDeck does it I think.
Some kernels trade efficiency with a bit more power. Setup (like, schedulers) is probably optimized for this too. Gaming features like esync fsync ootb enabled. Integration of some launchers/services. That’s the main differences.