Pure or Gaming Distro? | Which one to choose?

[@MumblingHugo]

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[@rayrai982]

Fun fact :- as other distro including garuda offers a way to improve battery life by slowing down performance slightly, garuda offers additional feature which works in opposite way as cpufreq or other power saving tool does. Basically this feature improve performance at the cost of slightly more power consumption(or may be not consuming more power)

[@MumblingHugo]

That’s interesting, which proves why it’s the only distro beating the “pure” arch in all numbers, thanks for sharing

[@ZaberfangX]

Long term distro can be good option for gaming too, as its less things to break or change quicky.

[@MumblingHugo]

Exactly my experience, I made a similar presentation in Linux fest northwest yesterday, mentioned the same observations

[@pitape1822]

Very serious and relevant benchmarks. Some of these gaming distros have their own repositories and this is an additional risk. I would stick to a base one except for Bazzite which is really good.

[@MumblingHugo]

Thanks for the support

[@markdevaal4116]

This is why I stopped with installing gaming distributions. Arch based like Endeavour or Garuda are mostly better for performance. Always latest mesa updates and in my case with a 7900XT is this relevant.

[@Kai_Rengoku]

Been on arch for a while, recently (with the new isos) gave Garuda a try hyprland and dragonized-non “gaming” and I was actually very impressed with what they have done recently. Going to give it a fair trial

[@ZeDuck_]

i think the gaming version is just bloated, only good things installed are game launchers

[@etc83]

i just installed dragonized gaming edition yesterday and honestly (i have experience before with ubuntu and i am a windows user normally) it was amazing for me. I used Bottles app because I never tried it before. It run FIFA 23 (no mods), PES 21 (with mod), RDR2 (I saw 60fps with i5-4440 & RTX 3060 12GB). These are just I tried yesterday and I will try more games on it today. I am so happy about it. I will finally be free of Windows :D

[@shApYT]

Glad to see you're still improving your methodology! This video was much easier to watch and compare the numbers. I hope you can figure something out to get data from other games with cuts in their benchmark and cyberpunk 2077.

[@MumblingHugo]

I could use 1440p to run it, which will help with some more meaningful numbers

[@shApYT]

@@MumblingHugo You should do two separate tests. One where you are pegging the CPU and the other where you are pegging the GPU. At lower resolutions, you get higher frame rates, so the CPU will be the limit with the GPU not being fully utilized. At higher resolutions, it is the other way around. See which distros take more advantage of the CPU or the GPU. I don't know how meaningful or divergent distros will be in this regard, but it would be something interesting to see.

[@user-dc9zo7ek5j]

I am not into games, but setting up wine can be tricky. Sometimes, you need to add fonts or mount images as disk partitions and other things that are not directly said in the error logs for windows programs to run.

[@MumblingHugo]

Very true, wine needs a lot of tricks to be used properly

[@nehemiah9190]

Great video, very comprehensive and thoughtful. Interested to see how Bazzite (immutable OS) would do compared to Garuda and the other distros you tried out.

[@MumblingHugo]

Thanks for watching, I have plan to add more distributions to this list, please expect it to see in the coming videos

[@markdevaal4116]

Thanks for this test. Garuda Linux use zen kernel by default. EndeavourOS use vanilla arch kernel. I know that EndeavourOS will be faster with Zen then Garuda on my system, but not that much. Talking about less then 2%. My default system is EndeavourOS with TKG-Bore kernel. This runs like a charm with 10%+ in FPS (5800x3d + 7900XT) Other thing to mention is. NobaraOS use KDE by default and Fedora Gnome. Which Nobara did you used? There is a huge differents in performance between those DE's and Nobara didn't tweaked gnome that much).

[@MumblingHugo]

I see, thanks for your data, and glad to see that we have similar experiences I’m using every in it’s default state aiming to help more viewers who don’t want to spend effort to play games after the system installation. I was using nobara with gnome because when I tried the plasma official version nvidia driver was broken after the initial system update. I will give it another try in my future videos

[@ant9610]

This might be an ignorant opinion but isnt the only difference between a gaming spin and their mother distro the configuration that the spin makers do for you? Like if i had pure arch, i could go through a lot of work and essentially remake Garuda. Same for fedora and nobara and so on. I think that the most informative part of this videos are the cross distro performance and the discussion of a convenient setup vs troubleshooting near the end. In this vein, i would be interested in watching a video that discusses the necessary steps different distros have to take to be game ready, e.g: nvidia driver set up, wine installation, etc and where distros sit on a continuum from ready to play ootb to barebones. I imagine it would be something like nobara on one end, ubuntu/mint in the middle, gentoo on the other end. That way viewers can follow along from the not highly doccumented gamer to extremely supported "standard" distros.

[@user-dc9zo7ek5j]

Yes, they are just regular distributions. The definition of a distribution is just a bundle of programs and tweaks.

[@MumblingHugo]

Essentially yes, but a lot of them claim they have boosted gaming performance, good thought about making a spectrum about the difficulty to make them game ready per distribution

[@etc83]

I just installed the Garuda dragonized gaming edition and it was a real time saver. And of course it was worth it.

[@GikeroMage]

I subscribed after watching your presentation at LFNW 2024. Great job!

[@MumblingHugo]

Oh thanks for the sub and support

[@TheDesertBlizzard]

Garuda OS is a good balance between a distro that has the gaming tweaks and included packaging for gaming, and is close enough to pure Arch that thus far anything I have needed to research, which is not a lot to be honest, applied perfectly fine with Garuda's spin on Arch. As for the default theme? Seriously, if anyone cannot change to a theme they prefer on any distro, then that is another problem altogether.

[@MumblingHugo]

Or they can just use the vanilla theme instead

[@GabrielVilanova-n3p]

How about Nobara that's based on Fedora? I just want something stable for my old AMD APU Vega 8, mostly light gaming (minecraft, some indie games, terraria, warno etc). If it doesn't break often, I'll go for it.

[@TheDesertBlizzard]

@@MumblingHugo vanilla is only a few clicks away. These arguments on KDE based Linux are pointless. If it were Windows/Mac that would be different.

[@TheDesertBlizzard]

@@GabrielVilanova-n3p I tried Nobara for a while. It was not bad. The three things that stood out that I did not like was the lack of pre-set gaming tools, the dev team being little to nothing (yes Glorious Eggroll is a legend but still.) and the lack of tools anywhere close to what Garuda has for tweaking things important for gamers. Nobara is a great bundle of packages and has a good set of defaults, and GE address things important for streamers, but it’s not better than Garuda, and I say the objectively. Garuda is well maintained. It has not broken on me yet but even if it does BTFRS snaps are easy to roll back to. (Something Nobara doesn’t have) I’m about a year in problem free with it now. Updates come every single day and never has it broken on me regardless if I update every day, or on any other cadence. I does break when I do something stupid, but BTFRS snaps saves the day.

[@geoffreyrenemoiens3089]

Thank you for the hard work!

[@dovedozen]

I really do respect the way the garuda folks MEAN things; they genuinely seem to have worked hard to create a distribution that makes "install this and then play a video game on it" as easy + enjoyable an experience as possible. every time I test a game on garuda & then go test it on some other distro, garuda's seamless and the other one takes at least one extra Effort Unit to get up and running.. of course, they would have won my heart anyway just by actually USING the kwin effect that makes the windows wobble around when you move them (which I have COVETED yet BEEN UNABLE to get working ever since I found out it exists), so. I'm biased. dr460nized is cool!! and scythes are cool and gunblades are cool and shadow the hedgehog is cool. I mean it. great video; I've been wondering about this & it's nice to see some data!

[@MumblingHugo]

For sure, glad to help

[@philliplee7658]

Great content and I appreciate that you shared your methodology

[@deladismarketing]

I'm a new linux User. I Use amd gpu. I tried many distros (not all distros). From my perspective. My best setting now for gaming is Arch with CachyOS kernel. But the FPS results are only few different. But Arch is the easiest to have a gaming setup for me.

[@MumblingHugo]

Thanks for reporting, curious what is the benefit you got from cachyos kernel?

[@adrianomuller3569]

Not meant to make you work more but PopOs wasn’t considered to these benchmarks?

[@MumblingHugo]

Yes I am planning to add more to the list, 8 distributions was my maximum capacity for this content, I was trying to meet the deadline for the sponsorship but was occupied by work for most of the month, thanks for the support and please look out for the new content when I add more

[@adrianomuller3569]

@@MumblingHugo Maybe you do that when alpha cosmic desktop from system76 is lauched! Again, no pressure! hehehehe

[@MumblingHugo]

Yes, That’s in my list for very near future thanks again

[@polo199199]

Sorry but it is not clear to me (honest question): in your trials do you actually say that a Nvidia driver which broke under PikaOS broke that same driver in RegataOS? Because it was the same issue with the same driver on both distros? Or because one distro actually broke the other distro install? (is that even possible??) In any case, great content. Another KZbinr opinion was to just install Kubuntu with the most recent kernel available and go from there.

[@MumblingHugo]

Sorry I didn't make it clear, I was meant to say I was dual booting these 2 systems for several weeks on 2 separate SSD and one day after I did a system update on PikaOS, Nvidia driver broke, and I saw the same issue on regata when I booted into regata

[@juhatalimaki6664]

I dont know if it like this on other distros? but in Garuda I install Steam and Heroic games (for my GOG and Epic games), install the games I want and play (like Baldurs gate 3, Starfield and Fall out 4, all in 4K) I dont have to do anything else than that, no tinkering with Wine or anything else, just install and play, it is as easy as in Windows, as it should be. But I will try Opensuse Tumbleweed (I am kind of hooked on rolling distros nowadays) to see if it as easy to use for gaming.

[@lucasfreire8360]

Im migrating to Linux from windows and need to find a good balance between gaming and development, i found that EndeavorOS will support most of my monitor technologies because of KDE, i ll go with that one, Fedora is a good one too.

[@mehmetugurcesme4352]

I still using garuda i installed 2 yrs ago

[@eddyclow]

Missing the best CachyOS

[@MumblingHugo]

I put it in another video, have you seen kzbin.info/www/bejne/mmbJoXSFgt2lqLM

[@fixerage]

Very nice and detailed video thank you for your hard work, and you can see GTAV for benchmarking due to its world optimized algorithm.

[@MumblingHugo]

Thanks for watching, I really wanted to include a rockstar game

[@CompuB1t]

For reinstalling my system I will choose probably EndeavourOS or Garuda KDE Lite, both Arch-based distro easy to install and much faster than configured Vanilla Arch (via scripts or manually). The only difference between these two distros is the bootloader systemd-boot (ende) vs GRUB (garuda) and ZRAM usage (in Gaurda). Another thing I like about EndeavourOS is that you can select or deselect packages from the GUI installer. Edit: actually EndeavourOS is 2.7 GiB and Garuda KDE lite 1.6 GiB.

[@MumblingHugo]

You can choose grub in endeavour now

[@CompuB1t]

@@MumblingHugo oh I didn't know, one thing that I don't understand is that ende is 2 GiB bigger than Garuda KDE lite, and there not many packages that differ.

[@MumblingHugo]

Haha that’s really wired I agree

[@XxMaxLetsPlaysxX-hh6pu]

very interesting video 👍👍

[@vladimir_fomin90]

Manjaro?

[@MumblingHugo]

Will add data in future videos

[@vladimir_fomin90]

@@MumblingHugo thanks for your reviews! I have 3 computers at home, all running Manjaro Kde. Manjaro is more convenient for home use even than Linux Mint.

[@MumblingHugo]

Oh really? I was thinking about settling to mint in the near future

[@vladimir_fomin90]

@@MumblingHugo My daughter has 3 gigabytes of RAM on her laptop, I installed linux mint(xfce) and mx linux(xfce), the laptop was not as fast as I expected. Then I installed Manjaro Kde for the sake of experiment, and was surprised at the speed

[@MumblingHugo]

Wow, I remember about 2 years ago,Mx was the fastest on my fathers 10 years old laptop, we also tried manjaro (probably xfce) it was not as fast. Thanks for the info, I’ll keep it as a future reference