3mo ago

Gaming on Linux, How openSUSE Stacks Up for Gamers

news.opensuse.org

18 comments

Are there distros that are actually unsuitable for gaming, besides ones that are designed to be CLI-only or specific to antediluvian hardware?
I feel like gaming-specific distros just include stuff that you could otherwise just manually add to any other distro and make it suitable.
- I will say there is something to be said for out of the box experience. Im on zorin mainly because it has a lot out of the box. Granted its not a great gaming one necessarily as it is stability focused over bleeding edge but I could see ones where the gaming elements are ready right after install as being desirable.
  
  Agreed, I've been running gaming-focused distros mostly because of the convenience of everything being ready and set up, but I've never had any issues on a non-gaming distro to set it up for gaming either.
- Depends on what you want to play. If you want to play current games with current hardware then current kernel and drivers help a lot. A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
  
  A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
  Can you please elaborate on why? I'm running Debian stable with NVIDIA drivers and... it "just works". I'm using Steam to get Proton and game content (e.g. was playing Elden Ring minutes ago). I didn't tinker much so wondering what I could be missing.
- I have yet to find a distro that doesn't run my favourite game
- Bit of misinformation on this thread, but generally the only thing that can actually get in the way of someone dedicated enough will be compatibility and security systems.
  You probably won't have any luck getting nvidia drivers on android for example, nor take the time to back port those drivers to an outdated kernel.
  I suppose you could also have an OS that takes most your system resources for non-gaming tasks, making games unplayable. Something like nixos is non-gaming centric and could reasonably be more optimised than bazzite, less background processes making games actually run better on it.

I have a dual-boot Windows partition just for games and I keep using it less and less. Valve has done incredible work with Proton. It has been months since I have booted into Windows, and that's with a weekly games night where we are generally trying something new every week.

They could have talked about how also flatpak gives access to other games and emulators or even steam if you are so inclined

18 comments