Arch-Based Distros Dominate the Linux Gaming Scene

Once you're a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it's wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don't even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.

It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that

Ciao! When you are an Arch enjoyer but also too lazy to install it again.

Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or... Bazzite I think the other one is.

I'm about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven't decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it's not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn't do. Worried it'll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I'll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.

EndeavourOS user reporting in. Where are the other two?

I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah

There's dozens of us!

I've had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new .nix file with GPU tweaks and now I'm getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.

I've done some gaming in my nix laptop, no problem

I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.

Bazzite is by far my favorite linux so far and great for gaming

Fedora was going to be my plan. Arch just freaks me out, I don't want to do that much work. I think I know Ubuntu the best, but I haven't heard anything good about the direction Canonical is going.

I just want something that works good enough. I have a 3070 ti GPU.

This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

• SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
• Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

What's impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

Steamos identifies itself as "SteamOS Holo".

Also, that article isn't measuring SteamOS in the first place. When you look at the steam survey with the default filters it won't list SteamOS. If you switch it to Linux only it will show SteamOS as 36.47% of Linux installs (0.84% of all steam installs) so it's clearly not feeding into the Arch percentages.

The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.

How? SteamOS is still Linux.

I think we're probably counted under "Fedora"

Minty Bois unite!

We like our shit boring and working. Lol.

6 hours of Monster Hunter: World today on my Mint desktop while my wife hunted with me on her Steam Deck!

If Mint would just implement HDR now, it would be my perfect system.

mint's just as valid as any other distro!

I do most of my gaming on mint, but not for much longer as I am going to move my new configs and change to the same distro as my laptop at some point

There are dozens of us!

There's at least two of us.

all distro's are valid

lol, I'm sure you could just casually walk away from them in a serpentine pattern and avoid any harm. Likely they are too busy clearing Cheeto dust from their neck beard anyways.

Void and Nix aren't Arch-based.

Which one do we install for gaming

If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It's not Arch based, which is a good thing because it's going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.

Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.

If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I've heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you'll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.

I've been on Nobara for a few years and have generally loved it. Lately I've been thinking about switching to Cachy.

I've just been a little annoyed with Fedora in general recently, and I am nervous that Nobara is not only based on Fedora, but also is maintained by only one person.

How has gaming been overall on CachyOS? Any issues with Steam, Proton, Lutris, or any other gaming-related software?

I'm seriously considering installing CachyOS on my laptop. And now I'm wondering why I didn't come around to do it yet.

Unexpectedly outstanding distro. New favorite, by a lot.

I've thought about Void. And LFS. And I submitted some packages for Alpine, although I'm not running it anywhere except as container bases.

Last time I really strayed from the Arch ranch was Artix, and that was TBH pretty painful on a day-to-day basis.

I'd like something like Arch but with less systemd. ChimeraOS looks promising, once it stabilizes. But how's Void treating you? How's xbps? I'm pretty in love with pacman; rolling release is a must, but IME you really only realize how good or bad a package manager is after it's too late, and you've been using it long enough to hit your first dependency hell/upgrade issue. After years of hell with RPM and deb, pacman was a godsend.

runit isn't my favorite initd alternative (dinit ftw, at the moment), but it beats systemd and I don't have a huge amount of experience with it. Do you like it?

Critical to me is being able to easily toss together package manager recipes for stuff that isn't in the official repo; I really believe in keeping systems clean by only installing through the package manager. Pacman packages are stupid simple to write and easy to work with, and yay makes things even better. How's xbps in this area?

EFS boot is easy? Stuff like btrfs boot partitions and snapper support easily available? No idiocy like trying to force users onto Wayland prematurely?

I've been enjoying void on an old Thinkpad just to mess with. How's the gaming experience been on it? Any issues with Steam/Proton running well?

I've looked at Archcraft (not any of the others), and the only thing that seems unique about it is that it's riced (themed) out of the box and offers several DE options. Otherwise, there's not really anything that sets it apart from, say, EndeavorOS (which has a handful of DEs and a great install process) or CachyOS (which has a nice install process, an optimized kernel and packages, and as many or more DE options as Archcraft).

The other thing that gives me pause with Archcraft is the fact that it's maintained by only one person. What happens if/when they get burned out?

Its honestly kinda weird, bazzite and nobara are fairly big. Must be a bug

Edit: Looks like flatpack usage prevents them from monitoring OS, a lot of fedora stuff uses the flatpack for steam. Flatpack users are 5.73% of all linux users, most are on steamos.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux