Define what you mean by smoothest. PopOS and SalientOS do have some software related to gaming preinstalled by default. You can however customize any distribution to your liking, as well as adding custom kernels that can increase your gaming performance. These tools that are preinstalled on these distributions listed above aren't distro exclusive but rather distro agnostic.

Last edited by Jared on 27 July 2020 at 5:58 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestWhat do you mean with "smoothest"? No Lags and such? How easy something is?

Anyway i would say: Every Distro can be "smooth". If you want the most out of your Distro you should go with Gentoo. But thats however not that easy as other distros. If you want a low resource system that can also be any Distro with any WM or a Lightweight DE such as XFCE for example. Depending on your Hardware you might need the latest Kernel in that case something like Manjaro / Arch / Gentoo would be good anything which is a Rolling Release Distro really. If you just want a simple click and go Distro i would suggest either Ubuntu / POP OS / Linux Mint / Manjaro and so on.

TLDR: Any Distro can be "smooth" and good. It just depends on your needs.

As long as the compositor is disabled for the given desktop environment or window manager, you shouldn't be seeing any loss of framerates. KDE, for example, disables its compositor by default, when gaming.

I just read something Like this

This Morning and it was explainning how POP os 19.04 was such native to Games and Steam

Quoting: firesI just read something Like this

This Morning and it was explainning how POP os 19.04 was such native to Games and Steam

With the two major exception being AMD's open source graphics drivers and advancements of wine on its newer versions, there shouldn't be much differences in the performance of games between distributions. I'm not saying all distributions are created equally as newer packages are generally preferred to than older ones. Hence why Debian Stable, Slackware static release version and CentOS aren't recommended as gaming distros. Ubuntu based distros and Arch based ones are typically recommended due to having the most support in this category, though Void, Gentoo and Solus can also suffice. With Gentoo, in particular, the problem is that you have to compile the packages which in itself is time consuming unless you have a beastly PC and the performance difference is usually non-existant in most cases, with the best scenario resulting in an increase of 1-2 fps. When people say PopOS is good for gaming, they don't mean that the results cannot be replicated on other distribution. They are mainly talking about its ease of use with most of the programs or software or drivers associated with gaming on Linux being preinstalled on PopOS or SalientOS.

Gaming ? FULLSCREEN EXLUSİVE ? KDE PLASMA wins.

Quoting: Jared

Quoting: firesI just read something Like this

This Morning and it was explainning how POP os 19.04 was such native to Games and Steam

With the two major exception being AMD's open source graphics drivers and advancements of wine on its newer versions, there shouldn't be much differences in the performance of games between distributions. I'm not saying all distributions are created equally as newer packages are generally preferred to than older ones. Hence why Debian Stable, Slackware static release version and CentOS aren't recommended as gaming distros. Ubuntu based distros and Arch based ones are typically recommended due to having the most support in this category, though Void, Gentoo and Solus can also suffice. With Gentoo, in particular, the problem is that you have to compile the packages which in itself is time consuming unless you have a beastly PC and the performance difference is usually non-existant in most cases, with the best scenario resulting in an increase of 1-2 fps. When people say PopOS is good for gaming, they don't mean that the results cannot be replicated on other distribution. They are mainly talking about its ease of use with most of the programs or software or drivers associated with gaming on Linux being preinstalled on PopOS or SalientOS.

Yes

thats exactly what i meant

Quoting: KuduzkehpanKDE PLASMA

I never had any Luck with KDE


i just dont know i tried installing 2 times and it just did not work for me

i liked very much openbox

I've always had excellent performance with games in Kubuntu

I think for Gaming the most important point is recent packages, so I would always recommend a rolling release distro (Arch (and derivates such as Manjaro), Gentoo etc.), because on Debian, Ubuntu etc. you got such old packages, some describe it as "rotten".

Recent packages will contain fixes, new features and performance improvements etc.

For easier setup you can also use programs like Lutris on these rolling release systems, so I don't see any advantage in "stable" distros.

The only difference is probably the system setup itself.
That can be a bit easier on "stable" distros, but this is also not always given.
Some people seem to hate tweaking configs so much, that even a one-liner is too much.
That said even on Arch it is fairly easy to setup everything, for example: just install the gpu driver packages (in my case: nvidia) and your gpu works.

Quoting: dr_jekyllI think for Gaming the most important point is recent packages, so I would always recommend a rolling release distro (Arch (and derivates such as Manjaro), Gentoo etc.), because on Debian, Ubuntu etc. you got such old packages, some describe it as "rotten".

Recent packages will contain fixes, new features and performance improvements etc.

For easier setup you can also use programs like Lutris on these rolling release systems, so I don't see any advantage in "stable" distros.

The only difference is probably the system setup itself.
That can be a bit easier on "stable" distros, but this is also not always given.
Some people seem to hate tweaking configs so much, that even a one-liner is too much.
That said even on Arch it is fairly easy to setup everything, for example: just install the gpu driver packages (in my case: nvidia) and your gpu works.

This is a common misconception from people that don't use Ubuntu or one of its derivatives.

The kernel and Mesa get regular updates through the Hardware Enablement stack. The Nvidia drivers get updated through the Stable Release Updates, the same as browsers and such. All packages get security patches and bugfixes backported over the course of the support period. Steam updates itself, obviously.

If you want software with newer features, there are PPAs, snaps, flatpaks, and appimages.

Gaming rigs aren't desperate for bleeding-edge LibreOffice.

People that want to use a rolling-release distro should definitely do so, but it is absolutely not the case that people that want to game must use a rolling-release distro.