9mo ago

Gaming vs Regular Distros

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.

38 comments

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).

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.
- Yep. I run Garuda and the main pull is that it's a more user-friendly Arch with a lot of stuff I want to use preinstalled. I don't really care about how XTREME it is or whether I might potentially get 1 FPS more.
- iam14andthisisdeep
  
  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.
- Psh, that’s just because you don’t use Gentoo.
  
  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.)
- THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS
  tbh, I’ve always had that feeling but never had enough experience with Linux to be 100% certain.
- True, it's the desktop manager that can make a difference but you can install any DE on any distro.
- 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".

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.

Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro?
No. Gaming distro is a "regular" distro preconfigured for gaming.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no such thing as a gaming distro. It's just what packages are installed by default.

38 comments