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?
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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.
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).
Someone without any Linux experience thinks it’s all the same.
Someone with minimal experience will tell you they’re completely different.
Someone with some experience will tell you only the package manager changes.
Someone with lots of experience will tell you it’s all the same, only philosophy matters.
Any distro can be made to be the same as any other, your choice should be on the path of least resistance for you, if you need every last frame something that updates the drivers more often is preferable, otherwise you would need to update your driver’s manually, bit it’s never impossible, it’s just more hassle.
More like iam35andthisiscommonlogic but hey, if you think that’s deep, who am I to judge.
I’m going to say this in all Caps because I’m sick of this question:
THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS. ITS ALL THE SAME PIECES ASIDE FROM HOW THE OS IS MANAGED AT THE PACKAGE LEVEL. DISTRO X WILL NEVER BE MORE PERFORMANT THAN Y IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY.
I feel like I need to start a voice channel for people to just be told “no” at this point. There is literally no difference.
Gentoo’s benefits come from having software specifically compiled for your specific CPU, which can take advantage of its quirks. Technically that’s achievable with other distros as well; it’s just a lot more work when it isn’t built into your package manager. You can also eke out additional performance by building a custom kernel and removing various features that are meant to protect against bugs or security concerns, and while Gentoo doesn’t push custom kernels as hard as it did twenty years ago, the capability is still readily accessible.
So: Gentoo makes it easier to access methods than can in theory be used to speed up any distro. The gains are either quite modest (for custom compilation) or not necessarily that good a tradeoff (disabling Spectre mitigations and other protections in the kernel). 🤷
(Yes, I wrote a serious response to a joke post. Bite me.)
Phoronix many benchmarks proves the opposite. There is differences, even at the same Mesa/Kernel version.
The difference between an hyper optimized distro, like Clear Linux (optimized for Intel CPUs), and more general ones (Ubuntu, Fedora) can be huge.
Even between those general purposes distro, the technology choices (filesystem, scheduler, etc.) can make a considerable difference in some games/workloads.
Please read what I said again, and don’t confuse the situation. You’re discussing performance differences of an overall system being benchmarked. I’m discussing gaming performance. No one distro will outperform another in any meaningful way. Don’t start being pedantic and throwing around minor benchmark differences to be “that person”.
Pedantic? Say the person that immediately assume anyone with a different opinion than his is a morron and did not read his previous message ?
Here is some gaming benchmark. It is from 2022, sure, but is still relevant today to illustrate that gaming performance on Linux isn’t as easy as being the “same software with different configuration”.
And I could go on with other games, which had different results.
There are many variables that can affect those performance. Obviously, the Kernel, Driver and Mesa version has a big influence, but so have some less obvious causes like the filesystem used, the compiler options used, or even the compiler itself. That’s why those performances can vary so much in benchmarks.
Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro?
No. Gaming distro is a “regular” distro preconfigured for gaming.
