As a few others have said, most distributions are good for gaming. Arch, being a distribution that requires lots of manual configuration, requires some setup for the best performance.
Read these two articles throughly and use the tweaks that apply to your system/needs.
Arch works well for gaming. However, depending on what you’re doing, you should keep this in mind:
on any distro, updates may break things or change the behavior of apps. The difference in arch is that youll update no less than weekly on average, maybe biweekly at worst. This would matter more if you have a complex setup. If you’re just using steam, I wouldn’t worry
arch only uses the latest versions of software. If you ever install something from outside the arch repos, you have to make sure it is compatible with recent versions. Sometimes it may not be.
For the love of Tux, whatever you do install Arch on the btrfs file system so you can time shift back whenever arch decides to try and ruin your day on an update.
Im on EndeavourOS like a lot of other folks here, which is basically Arch with an awesome installer, a handful of convenient extra tools, a sensible default confuguration and a fancy theme. It’s been awesome so far, hell I’ve just been able to install and run an EA game from steam with minimal fuss yesterday, just the help of lutris to install EA Origin to authenticate. Shit just works.
That being said, Arch can occasionally blow up at your face for no fault of your own and it’s a very different environment from fedora (love fedora btw), so there’s a bit of a learning curve that you’re gonna have to accept to climb if you want to maintain your system.
3 years (or is it 4? What is time?) on arch exclusively and I do quite a lot of gaming. It’s been great. There were a few occasions over the years where something didn’t work, while others on ProtonDB had seemingly flawless experiences, but it was always just a few minor tweaks. Much better experience than what I had on Manjaro prior to switching. Also, this is all on Wayland (sway) and even with that, it’s been great. BTW.
Whatever you use, make sure it’s the furthest upstream. Everything else is dependent on the upstream to update systemwide. Yes, some downstream distros will fix certain issues before upstream does, but because their teams are generally smaller, they won’t fix all the issues in any given distro. And feature/major version updates start at the top and trickle down.
Steam is its own package manager and native games usually assume that an FHS-conformant is present. Neither of those mesh well with Nix notoriously has nothing comparable to an FHS and usually requires everything to be defined in its terms.
I’ve been using Nobara for some time and it’s amazing. Nice installer and gets all drivers and fixed applied from the get go. Also it is maintained by GloriousEggroll himself.
Arch installs aren’t too bad, it’s the post-install setup that’ll get you though since a fresh install is guaranteed to detonate if you don’t disarm it.
It doesn’t even have to be complex anymore thanks to archinstall.
While SteamOS is Arch based, i don’t think they really use it the Arch way. It’s run as an image based immutable OS, so they control the packages and not run at the bleeding edge.
You might run into problems more likely than SteamOS will.
Although i didnt’t have problems gaming on Arch, it’s not the same
I think they confirmed in an interview at one point that they don’t roll with it. They take the binaries they need from it, test it and freeze it. Initially they were using Debian but ended up needing more recent package versions and apparently Arch binaries in core and extra were more suitable to their purposes than Debian testing.
Valve was using Debian way-back-when, but the pace of getting new stuff into debian proper is too glacial for Valve. Valve is putting a lot of work into “making the linux graphics stack rather good for games”, and having those improvements integrated upstream quicker means that Valve can get to work on the next set of improvements.
Valve is still using Debian as the basis for their runtime environments for games (pressure vessel). Debian’s slowness is great for providing a stable ABI for the parts that come into contact with (seldom maintained) game code. There is some amount of magic that goes into gluing the stable runtimes with rapidly changing stuff like Mesa.
it definitely taught me about how linux works, at least the parts that are relevant for most users. starting from a clean install without any kind of gui (or common networking tools) really made me understand all the building blocks modern desktop linux uses. sure, installing a full blown desktop environment skips most things, but going with just a window manager and adding required features package by package really does help with understanding, and if a problem does pop up later you’ll know exactly where to look, instead of having to search super generic terms.
Just because Linux as an operating system can have that experience, doesn’t mean everyone wants or, really, needs that experience. Some people buy cars to drive and want it to just work. Others buy cars to play with. Some people dj music that is already made, others buy a guitar.
They can all be good for gaming. The distro doesn’t matter. Use what you find efficient, pretty, customized to your liking. They can all game. Don’t install Popos because it’s gaming oriented you can game on vanilla arch if you wanted to or debian. Arch won’t matter much unless you have the newest hardware.
LTS distros and extremely delayed packages can give you problems for sure, the components used for gaming are very fast moving pieces fixing latest issues constantly.
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