The best Linux distros for gaming in 2021

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: slaapliedjeStill no one gives love to the mother of them all, Debian...

It's a long term relationship, 18 years or so. We no longer feel the need to be demonstrative.

This is true. With the exception of my move to 64bit, I still have the same running install of Debian on my server as I have since... 2000? Sure I've swapped out hardware many times, but it's the same install updated every time a new stable is released.

Quoting: BreizhI think that Manjaro can progressively replace Ubuntu (and not only for gaming) since it’s more stable than a few years ago. And that’s already what we can see (<troll>for example here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends#LinuxDistributionsSplit-top </troll>)

Because of some Ubuntu choices (like Snap enforcing recently), and because of the 6 months or 2 years upgrade vs rolling, I now recommend Manjaro for new users.

Manjaro for new users? Really? They purposely break important packages for various reasons. Recently, they even broke the Steam package. This was the final straw for me and why I moved back to KDE Neon.

If you want to recommend a bad user experience for new users then by all means recommend Manjaro. If you want new users to have a positive experience then recommend Ubuntu.

Thanks that you did not recommend Manjaro to beginners.

My son is actually switching back to Kubuntu.

Within 2 month he has to reinstall the 2nd time, because Manjaro does not start after an update is made.

"enjoy the simplicity" ???

LOL!

I am using Linux since 1998 and can not remember when (or even if ever) I had such an issue the last time with Ubuntu, Kubuntu or openSuse.


Last edited by einherjar on 31 December 2020 at 12:10 pm UTC

Quoting: einherjarThanks that you did not recommend Manjaro to beginners.

My son is actually switching back to Kubuntu.

Within 2 month he has to reinstall the 2nd time, because Manjaro does not start after an update is made.

"enjoy the simplicity" ???

LOL!

I am using Linux since 1998 and can not remember when (or even if ever) I had such an issue the last time with Ubuntu, Kubuntu or openSuse.

There was a period of time I'd recommend Ubuntu for beginners, but after having witness it completely trash someone's partitions (it looked like the drive was failing, but the drive was fine, Ubuntu just ate the install), I have just been setting up Debian Stable for people with backports enabled and that works very stable and doesn't break in weird ways, it's just the initial set up needs a little bit more work to be as smooth.

Then again the only steps I usually do are to set up plymouth, make sure the firmware blobs are installed for the hardware, and fix apt to have deb-multimedia, non-free, contrib.

For beginners, I usually recommend either Linux Mint or Zorin OS. I installed Zorin OS Lite on my mother's computer, it's butter smooth, she loves it !

But this article shows exactly that, as a beginner, don't make things more difficult if you want to switch to Linux, the mainstream distros (most notably Ubuntu) are completely sufficient.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: gardotd426New hardware needs rolling releases to work, unless you want to compile from source, use custom kernels, are comfortable in TTY's, etc.

No. You just need drivers (kernel, possibly Mesa) that support your hardware. If you can easily get those from a PPA or other optional repository, why would you need a rolling distro? You might have plenty of other valid reasons to prefer Arch, but they aren't likely to enhance your gaming in any meaningful way.

Sorry but thats simply untrue. Rolling releases is the way to go instead of adding ridicolous amounts of extra repositories, esp for a beginner, thats a very negative habit.

For a complete Linux beginner obviously Ubuntu is a neat starting place. Still I would also recommend against anything Ubuntu like.


Last edited by samurro on 2 January 2021 at 7:57 pm UTC

Quoting: samurro

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: gardotd426New hardware needs rolling releases to work, unless you want to compile from source, use custom kernels, are comfortable in TTY's, etc.

No. You just need drivers (kernel, possibly Mesa) that support your hardware. If you can easily get those from a PPA or other optional repository, why would you need a rolling distro? You might have plenty of other valid reasons to prefer Arch, but they aren't likely to enhance your gaming in any meaningful way.

Sorry but thats simply untrue. Rolling releases is the way to go instead of adding ridicolous amounts of extra repositories, esp for a beginner, thats a very negative habit.

For a complete Linux beginner obviously Ubuntu is a neat starting place. Still I would also recommend against anything Ubuntu like.

Ridiculous amounts or repositories? You find it hard to count to two? Because you won't need more than that if you just need a new kernel and GPU drivers.

Nothing untrue about what I said.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: samurro

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: gardotd426New hardware needs rolling releases to work, unless you want to compile from source, use custom kernels, are comfortable in TTY's, etc.

No. You just need drivers (kernel, possibly Mesa) that support your hardware. If you can easily get those from a PPA or other optional repository, why would you need a rolling distro? You might have plenty of other valid reasons to prefer Arch, but they aren't likely to enhance your gaming in any meaningful way.

Sorry but thats simply untrue. Rolling releases is the way to go instead of adding ridicolous amounts of extra repositories, esp for a beginner, thats a very negative habit.

For a complete Linux beginner obviously Ubuntu is a neat starting place. Still I would also recommend against anything Ubuntu like.

Ridiculous amounts or repositories? You find it hard to count to two? Because you won't need more than that if you just need a new kernel and GPU drivers.

Nothing untrue about what I said.

The problem is and has always been that those repositories are third party and don't always get updated in time or get abandoned.
This is why Snap and Flatpak are a thing as well, to try to get newer versions into Linux without having to resort to a rolling release.
Granted I just run Debian Sid on most of my desktops for the rolling release, which gives me a lot of benefits. :)

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: einherjarThanks that you did not recommend Manjaro to beginners.

My son is actually switching back to Kubuntu.

Within 2 month he has to reinstall the 2nd time, because Manjaro does not start after an update is made.

"enjoy the simplicity" ???

LOL!

I am using Linux since 1998 and can not remember when (or even if ever) I had such an issue the last time with Ubuntu, Kubuntu or openSuse.

There was a period of time I'd recommend Ubuntu for beginners, but after having witness it completely trash someone's partitions (it looked like the drive was failing, but the drive was fine, Ubuntu just ate the install), I have just been setting up Debian Stable for people with backports enabled and that works very stable and doesn't break in weird ways, it's just the initial set up needs a little bit more work to be as smooth.

Then again the only steps I usually do are to set up plymouth, make sure the firmware blobs are installed for the hardware, and fix apt to have deb-multimedia, non-free, contrib.

I went the same way for my mom's computer, it's a very good setup unless you need very new packages very fast for some reason.

Quoting: KohlyKohlManjaro for new users? Really? They purposely break important packages for various reasons. Recently, they even broke the Steam package. This was the final straw for me and why I moved back to KDE Neon.

If you want to recommend a bad user experience for new users then by all means recommend Manjaro. If you want new users to have a positive experience then recommend Ubuntu.

I already did and for now, concerned users are satisfied, with no problems. On the other hand, Ubuntu with Gnome is more and more slow, Snap is enforced with the problems of disk space, integration (locale and theme are often broken), and Ubuntu have still the same eternal problems of drivers that I never had on Manjaro.

In the worst case, Xubuntu have the advantage to be faster, and you can easily remove Snap (the standard Ubuntu use Snap even for the software center or the calculator…). Or Linux Mint. But Manjaro still the best, even more since the packages break you mention are now rare (I talk only about the main versions : XFCE and KDE (never tried the Gnome version). Community versions are still often broken…).


Last edited by Breizh on 5 January 2021 at 10:27 am UTC

Quoting: Breizh

Quoting: KohlyKohlManjaro for new users? Really? They purposely break important packages for various reasons. Recently, they even broke the Steam package. This was the final straw for me and why I moved back to KDE Neon.

If you want to recommend a bad user experience for new users then by all means recommend Manjaro. If you want new users to have a positive experience then recommend Ubuntu.

I already did and for now, concerned users are satisfied, with no problems. On the other hand, Ubuntu with Gnome is more and more slow, Snap is enforced with the problems of disk space, integration (locale and theme are often broken), and Ubuntu have still the same eternal problems of drivers that I never had on Manjaro.

In the worst case, Xubuntu have the advantage to be faster, and you can easily remove Snap (the standard Ubuntu use Snap even for the software center or the calculator…). Or Linux Mint. But Manjaro still the best, even more since the packages break you mention are now rare (I talk only about the main versions : XFCE and KDE (never tried the Gnome version). Community versions are still often broken…).

Snap is the reason I recommend either Debian or Pop_OS.

Quoting: Breizh

Quoting: KohlyKohlManjaro for new users? Really? They purposely break important packages for various reasons. Recently, they even broke the Steam package. This was the final straw for me and why I moved back to KDE Neon.

If you want to recommend a bad user experience for new users then by all means recommend Manjaro. If you want new users to have a positive experience then recommend Ubuntu.

I already did and for now, concerned users are satisfied, with no problems. On the other hand, Ubuntu with Gnome is more and more slow, Snap is enforced with the problems of disk space, integration (locale and theme are often broken), and Ubuntu have still the same eternal problems of drivers that I never had on Manjaro.

In the worst case, Xubuntu have the advantage to be faster, and you can easily remove Snap (the standard Ubuntu use Snap even for the software center or the calculator…). Or Linux Mint. But Manjaro still the best, even more since the packages break you mention are now rare (I talk only about the main versions : XFCE and KDE (never tried the Gnome version). Community versions are still often broken…).

I used the KDE version and it broke all the time for me. I didn't even use the AUR and packages would still break all the time. The worst part of this? The developers knowingly broke packages and didn't care.

In my experience, and I've been doing this since '93, if you recommend a distro like Manjaro to new users they will eventually run into the problems that I did. And when they do, they will go back to Windows because they will not know how to fix the problem (When the package manager broke on me earlier this year it took me 3 days to fix it properly an no new user is going to want to do this).

All distros have issues but in my experience every single person I've had install Ubuntu has stayed with it and not gone back to Windows. I cannot say the same for other distros.

Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: Breizh

Quoting: KohlyKohlManjaro for new users? Really? They purposely break important packages for various reasons. Recently, they even broke the Steam package. This was the final straw for me and why I moved back to KDE Neon.

If you want to recommend a bad user experience for new users then by all means recommend Manjaro. If you want new users to have a positive experience then recommend Ubuntu.

I already did and for now, concerned users are satisfied, with no problems. On the other hand, Ubuntu with Gnome is more and more slow, Snap is enforced with the problems of disk space, integration (locale and theme are often broken), and Ubuntu have still the same eternal problems of drivers that I never had on Manjaro.

In the worst case, Xubuntu have the advantage to be faster, and you can easily remove Snap (the standard Ubuntu use Snap even for the software center or the calculator…). Or Linux Mint. But Manjaro still the best, even more since the packages break you mention are now rare (I talk only about the main versions : XFCE and KDE (never tried the Gnome version). Community versions are still often broken…).

I used the KDE version and it broke all the time for me. I didn't even use the AUR and packages would still break all the time. The worst part of this? The developers knowingly broke packages and didn't care.

In my experience, and I've been doing this since '93, if you recommend a distro like Manjaro to new users they will eventually run into the problems that I did. And when they do, they will go back to Windows because they will not know how to fix the problem (When the package manager broke on me earlier this year it took me 3 days to fix it properly an no new user is going to want to do this).

All distros have issues but in my experience every single person I've had install Ubuntu has stayed with it and not gone back to Windows. I cannot say the same for other distros.

Pop_OS is the new Ubuntu. Ubuntu has too much of the NIH syndrome, and keep trying to foist their own stuff onto their users. Redhat does the same thing, the big difference though is that RH has the man power to make sure (or at least try their best) that the tech is stable. Canonical doesn't really have the people to go off and do their own thing and keep it supported and upgraded.
Arch Linux is great (I haven't ran Manjaro longer than to say it has a nice installer for Arch). There have been a few breaks, but they usually have the fix on their website as they are happening.
Ubuntu's history of starting something new, or specifically trying to compete with others has mostly failed, and they have gone back to just using what everyone else uses.
Ha, remember the backlash they got for suggesting they were going to drop 32bit support?

Manjaro Xfce provides the best gaming performance out of the box atm, atleast on my hardware. And being arch based its easy to keep it up to date with the latest software for best performance, and installing a custom kernel for performance in games like Xanmod-cacule is easy. And Ubuntu and pop OS uses snaps and flatpaks which makes them a very bad experience for a new user to linux, they dont follow system theme and crash alot and dont flat out start and brake very often.


Last edited by scirocco on 16 January 2021 at 3:49 pm UTC

Quoting: einherjarThanks that you did not recommend Manjaro to beginners.

My son is actually switching back to Kubuntu.

Within 2 month he has to reinstall the 2nd time, because Manjaro does not start after an update is made.

"enjoy the simplicity" ???

LOL!

I am using Linux since 1998 and can not remember when (or even if ever) I had such an issue the last time with Ubuntu, Kubuntu or openSuse.

Wierd I had the exact oposite experience Manjaro has been rock solid, but Ubuntu keeps breaking for me alot. Apt system is really bad, and snaps and flatpaks just plain suck, they brake all the time and wont follow system theme, and makes it hard to access files in them or system files from them, makes for a really bad first time impression of linux. Thats why I recomend Manjaro to new users.

Quoting: pb

Quoting: Redface

Quoting: pbI'm gaming on SteamOS 2, but eagerly waiting for SteamOS 3.

I liked SteamOS too for the PC I have connected to the TV, but it has got no updates including security updates since summer 2019, so I gave up on it. I doubt SteamOS 3.0 will ever be releases, and if then how can we trusty Valve to not also drop support on that without any announcement?

I trust it will, or maybe they will skip a number or release SteamOS 4 (because 3 was already in the works but they scrapped it - https://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/dists/clockwerk/). I seem to recall they planned to base the new version on another distro, perhaps Arch? There is certainly something going on here: https://repo.steampowered.com/arch/

Sadly its a ppa for gamescope their new display manager, and its based on wayland so it will not be usable for the majority of gamers since Nvidia is the most popular gaming graphics cards according to steam statistics.

Quoting: sciroccoManjaro Xfce provides the best gaming performance out of the box atm, atleast on my hardware. And being arch based its easy to keep it up to date with the latest software for best performance, and installing a custom kernel for performance in games like Xanmod-cacule is easy. And Ubuntu and pop OS uses snaps and flatpaks which makes them a very bad experience for a new user to linux, they dont follow system theme and crash alot and dont flat out start and brake very often.

Pop_os uses neither by default. Which is why it is on my laptop. They also have a more integrated way of dealing with nvidia hybrid crap than any other distro I have tried.

I was however debating if I should set up Arch on my newly built 'for the big tv' setup, maybe put Gamehub on there along with Steam and Launchbox / big box.

I strongly recommend KDE NEON as it follows;

1) Neon is a rolling release of "K Desktop Environments"
2) Based on most supported and app rich and secure distro as its Latest UBUNTU LTS. (stable speedy for regular user and they dont give a shit about intermediate stability and speed)
3) KDE is more user friendly and faster than anyother DE. for whom moving from "mac os" or "windows". (yes u cant suggest gnome to anyone with "you cant put an icon on desktop" argument)

Quoting: KuduzkehpanI strongly recommend KDE NEON as it follows;

1) Neon is a rolling release of "K Desktop Environments"
2) Based on most supported and app rich and secure distro as its Latest UBUNTU LTS. (stable speedy for regular user and they dont give a shit about intermediate stability and speed)
3) KDE is more user friendly and faster than anyother DE. for whom moving from "mac os" or "windows". (yes u cant suggest gnome to anyone with "you cant put an icon on desktop" argument)

I'm sure KDE is good, but Mate and Cinnamon make pretty dashed good migration-from-Windows environments. Not sure about Mac--I don't know Mac well, every time I've tried to do something on a Mac I found it a confusing headache, so I don't know what kind of DE would give Mac users what they like/expect.

Quoting: KuduzkehpanI strongly recommend KDE NEON as it follows;

1) Neon is a rolling release of "K Desktop Environments"
2) Based on most supported and app rich and secure distro as its Latest UBUNTU LTS. (stable speedy for regular user and they dont give a shit about intermediate stability and speed)
3) KDE is more user friendly and faster than anyother DE. for whom moving from "mac os" or "windows". (yes u cant suggest gnome to anyone with "you cant put an icon on desktop" argument)

You can put an icon on the desktop. But frankly I hate desktop icons. I like a pretty wallpaper if I'm not running anything. Most of the time I have tons of windows open though so desktop icons are pointless anyhow. Being able to hit a key, search for an application to launch and then hit enter (or maybe arrow keys if you have multiple matches) is so very convenient to my work flow, it's crazy. Other than that gnome just stays out of your way, like a good DE should do.

The third part really is based on opinion rather than fact. Some DEs are more friendly and there definitely are ones that are faster, but it depends on what 'faster' means. Like is it faster to launch applications (the reason behind a DE), faster to whip open the control panel and find / change a setting? Or just moving windows around?