Gaming on Linux, How openSUSE Stacks Up for Gamers
Millions of gamers are facing a critical decision; upgrade their operating system, invest in new hardware or explore alternatives like Linux with the end of ...
The distribution doesn't matter, as long as you can install Steam on it.
The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.
I have to disagree. Mint had far worse performance (basically unusable) than Pop OS for me. Not sure why, I had proper drivers in both cases... Just saying, installing steam is not all.
Nowadays I recommend Bazzite for gaming
you using a laptop? maybe it used the iGPU, I've heard of that being a problem. on my rig, mint actually has a few fps more than on nobara for example. and some old games won't launch in kubuntu. the distro definitely does matter, one just has to find the right one.
I actually like what Steam did for Linux gaming in general, but in the end it is slowly becoming a crutch. Why should I spin up the Steam client (that is neither fast nor easy on resources, too) every time I want to play a non-steam game?
Again... it's nice what Valve is doing in general and that most of the stuff is open source and thus can be back ported to Wine.
I however find it concerning that the number of people doing so seems to be constantly decreasing. And I don't actually understand why the majority of gamers -people that are insanely obsessed with very small FPS or other perfomance increases sometimes- seems to be content with using Steam as the one-size-fits-all solution for games. Just simple Wine Staging can often match the performance for older games, for all games once you start backporting some patches and fixes developed for Proton. And yet the contributors seem to get less by the day and a lot of projects pre-compiling patched Wine versions are vanishing for a lack of interest.
In short: I don't get that voluntary lock-in to Steam for very little convenience of having a fancy interface for starting your games.
Not everything needs steam. Lutris opens up a whole wider ecosystem while taking advantage of the wine and proton advances valve brought us.
Because it's not "just a fancy interface"?
It makes the entire process from purchase to playing completely painless, on top of a large community of people, guides, achievements, etc. I think I'd maybe improve my performance by like...a fraction of a frame per second. Good trade off.
And as others have mentioned, Lutris does a good job if you don't want steam.
Steam is optional for gaming now.
I largely agree with ya. I bet someone can cook up some edge cases where the newer kernel might matter. I like that this article lays out how to setup the GPU. But I know Ubuntu has a nice gui for installing proprietary drivers.
I used to use opensuse and it was always a solid distro. I switched to manjaro after because I wanted to try an arch based system, that was not arch btw, it was also solid. I have settled on fedora though for many years now and I doubt I’ll ever switch again. At least for me, it does give better performance in games like csgo/2, not as good as windows but I also didn’t have any issues with the last of us, after a few patches anyway. Red dead redemption 2 runs better than on windows with fedora (for me).
I use fedora btw.
Nice guide. I'm glad to see they mentioned GPU switching. It's really underrated.