Egee, has some benchmark and comparison videos between distribution and DE, not really scientifically made, but it can be instructive.

I just can't get behind KDE's design, look and feel.

Gnome 3 feels much more homely to me, still customizable, but simpler, and more elegant.
And it has come a long way in its 9 years of development in terms of performance and polish.

Whether using Ubuntu, Pop!OS or Manjaro, you'll have a great experience on all three, it's all about personal preference and how up to date you want your software to be.

I use vanilla Arch for the latest and greatest, and because I feel like Debian-based distros tend to be a bit more of a pain to tinker with. And also, I just dislike spins of spins of spins of distros.

I wanted stable framerate on games, squeezing all the performance I could out of my hardware and saw big improvements with the following:

- Kernel: tkg-pds, present on the chaotic-aur: https://lonewolf.pedrohlc.com/chaotic-aur/
You need the package that works with your CPU architecture, in my case an i5 6600k, nicknamed Skylake, I, therefore, got the linux-tkg-pds-skylake and linux-tkg-pds-skylake-headers packages.
FYI: If using nvidia, also recommend getting the chaotic-nvidia-dkms-tkg package along with the other ones (settings, utils, opencl, etc..) in the same repo.
Although normal nvidia-dkms should also work, it's just not quite as good from experience.

- WM: mutter-performance in place of just mutter
- And for wine games, GloriousEggroll's latest version of Proton: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom#installation
- Disabling mitigations (spectre, meltdown, etc..) for intel CPUs with grub cmdline parameters: https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ (only recommended if behind a secure network, and on a desktop, at home)
- Oh and of course, feral's gamemode, do yourself a favor and just use it: https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode

And if the Arch install scares you or you simply don't want to deal with installing it "the arch way", this Calamares installer does the job just fine, I recommend it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/blue-arch-installer/files/arch-installer/

There you go!

Last edited by Akitake on 19 September 2020 at 7:29 pm UTC

Quoting: JaredDefine 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.

I'm running Salient XFCE (with Zen kernel) and absolutely loving it. Silent Robot has set it up with damned near everything, and has his own repo to ensure ongoing compatibilities. Just started playing Resident Evil 2 Remaster and it's buttery smooth. I highly recommend giving it a try. The Plasma version is also gorgeous, though it was affected by the massive botch update KDE pushed out a month ago.

Salient's nice yeah, only issue I had with it in the past is the slow release cycle. There can be 2-3 months without an ISO, and by then installing and upgrading will cause issues.
But if an iso came out within the month it should be fine.

I found the answer Manjaro works best for me