What's the best Linux distro for videogames?

What's the best Linux distro for videogames?
Looking for a Windows (visual) experience, minus all the bloatware thereof.

Other urls found in this thread:

packages.debian.org/stable/games/
youtube.com/watch?v=Ww2xpxkhitk,
youtube.com/watch?v=yBI5tsa1inY,
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>Linux
>videogames
Pick one.

No, there are a lot of great games out there for Linux, I just need a stable distro not written by complete amateurs.

I'll pick 2 thousand

Linux Mint

Or Ubuntu Budgie take your pick.

I saw Linix Mint but it has several editions.
Can you give me a quick rundown on cinnamon vs MATe vs .....?

Why not use steamos?

because it's for steam machines

You can install it on a regular PC without problems

Cinnamon, mate, kde, xfce, etc are all just Desktop Environments, abbreviated to DE.
They just change the way your desktop looks. For example, cinnamon and kde both are similar to windows with one taskbar (usually along the bottom) and a start menu ish thing.

You can look up images of all of them to decide which one you want to try out. It's also worth noting that you can install other DEs than the one you pick during installation, and switch between all the ones you have.

For mint, I would recommend cinnamon since that's developed by the same team and created specifically for that distro.

Steam os has lower performance than other distros

VALVe explicitly states it is not meant as a desktop OS replacement.
Have you used it or do you think it will work better than Mint at all?
>lower performance
Videos I see show it to have less stuttering than Windows but what's the reason for the lower performance?

Mint is Ubuntu but shittier
Just install Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate

I use it on a PC connected to a tv all the time, so I rarely use the desktop.

However, it is just debian underneath. If you wanted a stable, relatively user friendly desktop Linux debian would be it.

Other distros will send you down the incompatible libraries rabbit hole for a bunch of games.

Try Ubuntu. See if it fits.

Sorry for sounding so stupid but is Debian a distro or an entirely new OS like it says on the website?
I've also used Ubuntu 16 and 17 and I hated having to check repositories that may or may not work at all.

>what's the reason for the lower performance?
Worse drivers, although that is becoming almost a non issue if you are using proprietary drivers.
>Sorry for sounding so stupid but is Debian a distro or an entirely new OS like it says on the website?
Both are true. A Linux distribution (which is exactly what debian is) is an operating system.
>I've also used Ubuntu 16 and 17 and I hated having to check repositories that may or may not work at all.
A packet manager has a lot of positives compared to "the windows way", especially if it comes to things like update.
But on Ubuntu you also have other options you can download and install things directly (like on windows) or use the software center (similar to an appstore).
Games you can download directly via steam.

Okay so I should use Debian over Mint because it has better program support?
I have a GT 750M and I had some relatively old and featureless proprietary drivers to choose from.

>Okay so I should use Debian over Mint because it has better program support?
Not necessarily, Mint is based on Debian and the program support should be roughly similar (also Mint has had some issues with their packages in the past).
Ubuntu is probably the best choice if you have no clue about what you are doing, while Debian requires you to know at least a little bit about what you are doing.
(There are some Ubuntu variants such as Xubuntu which vary only by their DE, the choice between these is not important as you can install any DE on any of the variants and you should go only by looks)
>I have a GT 750M and I had some relatively old and featureless proprietary drivers to choose from.
If you are installing proprietary drivers you should be absolutely fine running games. You also should be able to easily figure out how to use them with a quick google search. (If they are not installed by default)

Ubuntu. You'll get the best support from devs, easiest time finding libraries, and the least broken shit

I see. Will Mint/Debian (or as how you've gotten to call it, Mint + Debian) give me better performance in any way?

>Will Mint/Debian (or as how you've gotten to call it, Mint + Debian) give me better performance in any way?
No Mr. Stallman. (There might be very small differences, but nothing substantial)

Not OP but quick question, can you only install open source amdgpu drivers on linux?

Thank you very much and last question:
What's a good way to get a Windows appearance on Ubuntu?

Don't do it, it's a mess you'll never get right. Don't go down the ricing rabbit hole, just stick with some comfy defaults. Imo can't beat XFeCEs defaults, there's only like 2 settings I need to change from a stock installation for pure comfiness

Isn't XFCE mint?

You can install proprietary (not open source) amd drivers on Linux. For Debian there is is wiki entry how to do it and for other distros certainly too.

Linux is very customization. You should look into a few desktop environments and see which fits you the most (you can just look at some screenshots to get a feel). Some common ones are:
Unity (The standard for Ubuntu)
KDE (quite a bit like Windows with task bar at the bottom, icons to the right, a start-menu ,etc. (But A LOT more customizable))
GNOME (more Mac-OS like)
LXDE
XFCE
i3 (Very non-windows like)

But as stated, trying to get as close to Windows as possible is a bit pointless (although possible), you should use the customization Linux offers to get something which works for you.

If you don't get over 100 fps in Windows, don't migrate to linux for gaming, otherwise you will stuck with less than 60 fps in most games with muddy graphics. I have R9 280X and Dota 2 gives me 120 fps in Windows 7, tried to switch Ubuntu once and installed everything to get 50 fps in same game and had input lag and other shitty stuff. AMD gpus have shitty drivers in linux, if you have nvidia you may not experience same things with me.

No, the DE on Mint is Cinnamon. XFCE is installed by default on Xubuntu but is available from any installation.

>muddy graphics
Why?

Have I been lied to?

because my GPU is GCN 1.0 card which doesnt support proprietary drivers in latest distros, and had to install open source drivers which lack graphical features.

>Not a bad idea, but Vulkan and the open source AMD drivers are removing the performance gap between Windows gaming and Linux gaming.
Plus Windows 10 no longer really natively supports older win32 software and runs it through a compatibility layer similar to Wine.
In some ways Windows 10's compatibility layer is better than Wine, mainly when it comes to D3D11 support, but Wine is already better for older software and catching up on D3D11 fairly quickly.
We'll probably see a situation like what happened with Microsoft's DOS compatibility layer back in the day where everyone just started using DOSbox and eventually Microsoft dropped their shit.

Of course you might find like I did that even with only playing Linux native games you'll have a backlog you can't hope to clear.

>
It isn't, but GNU/Linux based OSes are.

For AMD hardware Windows just isn't a good idea anymore. You're stuck with no support for Ryzen on 7, and no options other than the official graphics drivers which are slow and buggy.
Luckily the Linux-exclusive open source drivers for AMD hardware are much faster, more stable, and even have features like native D3D9 support for playing legacy Windows games.

>One of the better games for GNU/Linux. Really exposes just how piss-poor the official AMD drivers are compared to the Linux-exclusive open source drivers.

such as?

>Have I been lied to?
No, why do you think that?
I personally can't say anything about the amd drivers, but I have had absolutely no problems gaming on my Computer with an nvidia GPU.

If you look at this
>because my GPU is GCN 1.0 card which doesnt support proprietary drivers in latest distros, and had to install open source drivers which lack graphical features.
You will see the issue. Using open source drivers you will have worse performance and they are less suited for gaming.

Yes. They are the best.

Is there something better than Wine for playing games?
Last time, I had to try 10 different repositories to get it going, and a game I tried - IVAN - crashed when alt tabbing.

Sounds like shitty Ubuntu with ancient packages. Did you try with mesa 17?

older cards: proprietary -> fglrx / open source -> radeon
newer cards: amdgpu, which is open source only

>Using open source drivers you will have worse performance
nope, it ranges from as good to much better these days

games on linux suffer from input lag. CSGO runs native but it's actually not worth while

You can try something like playonlinux, which is essentially wine, but tweaked according to the game.

Why do they suffer from input lag?

As I said I can only personally testify that NVIDIA GPUs run pretty decent with proprietary drivers, I have absolutely no clue about AMD.

Solus

something about optimization. There are people employed to work on these issues but when i was playing it (2 years ago) it was pretty bad

What is the equivalent setup for nvidia?

he mentioned GCN 1.0, which is AMD cards

ps. there's another advantage to use open drivers for games, which is that you have access to gallium nine with wine, meaning native dx9 support, which is usually much faster than translating to opengl like you'd have to do otherwise

>We'll probably see a situation like what happened with Microsoft's DOS compatibility layer back in the day where everyone just started using DOSbox and eventually Microsoft dropped their shit.
Not unless Wine gets ported to Windows at least. DOSbox runs on everything, unlike Wine which only runs on *nix.

Though yeah, if Microsoft drops win32 support, there's probably going to be a massive Wine porting effort.

i've never experienced this

Nvidia is proprietary all the way. Open source sucks.

You fags can use virt-manager and run your windows games with no performance impact. It's super easy.

Should I go with the nvidia website or some SVN link?

you should use the packages provided by your distribution

Get them from your repo only.

Ubuntu or anything derived from it.

By installing Kubuntu, ZorinOS Lite, or ZorinOS Core. ZorinOS is pretty much made for windows users.

I never had this problem with dota2

You mean the Ubuntu Store thing?

openSUSE (kde) is the only usable linux

i guess
last time i used ubuntu, the graphical package manager was synaptic

>yast and zypper
how can anyone fuck up package management that much?

Yes. You probably have a choice during install to pick proprietary or open. Pick proprietary.
glxinfo

Will tell you what you have installed now

Use synaptic package manager, or use command line apt

He wants videogames. OpenSUSE may be the best and most professional distro but thank Steam for only officially supporting debian instead of going with suse and fedora.

Don't use the fucking store, it's a buggy piece of shit and shouldn't even ship with Ubuntu. Just paste a few commands in terminal it's not that hard. Or use this

>2 thousand vs 2 million

Wow u sure showed me

Just spin up a VM. Everything works, and now you have no excuses.

Debian Jessie. Go to packages.debian.org/stable/games/ for further info.
>inb4 Steam games
Oh you meant Steam games? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... Well I'll let you know that only like 30% of the GNU/Linux games actually work. Of those you need tweaks to run 20%, and for the other 10% you still need to tweak stuff in order to solve non-fatal errors (i.e. the game has no sound, or you can't see the cursor) in like 5%. The other 5% that works OOTB will run perfectly, and so far I've confirmed this group to be conformed exclusively by Terraria, Plague Inc., Don't Starve, and Don't Starve Together. In every other game you will get inferior performance; a difference which I've observed to be as big as 210 FPS even in games that allegedly should be properly supported, such as CS:GO and Dota. All you sweet summer children who think that games with GNU/Linux support actually run on GNU/Linux like this dumbfuck are sorely mistaken; this kind of statistics are grossly inflated by engines that allow porting the game to several OSes, such as Unity. However, these games suffer a big performance hit because those engines are built by stacking many abstraction layers over each other -some even translate the engine calls to Linux calls (notice proper usage of the kernel name) using Windows calls as an intermediate step, which is easier for them but basically means that you're using GNU/Linux to emulate a Windows emulating a GNU/Linux that's running the game; no wonder they run like shit-, and will never compare to a game written specifically for GNU/Linux, which doesn't really exist on Steam.

TLDR: Retards think that Steam gaming is even remotely good on GNU/Linux and clearly never tried it. Stick to the games in the list I posted, hipsters.

I've no idea what any of that means

Type
glxinfo
And post results.

Your a fucking idiot if you haven't figured out how to set up a VM.

>Your a fucking idiot if you haven't figured out how to set up a VM.
No newfriend, you're the idiot if you think that a VM will get anything near native performance. On top of that it's pointless to do it, since the presumption is that you game on GNU/Linux to avoid Windows, so then your solution to the inferior gaming performance is to... Install Windows on a VM inside GNU/Linux?! Absolutely retarded. If you cared about privacy you wouldn't do that, and if you don't care about privacy then you would run Windows natively and get better performance than a VM. I understand that people who never actually tried gaming on GNU/Linux want to believe that their OS is great for gaming and are unwilling to believe that it's shit, but that doesn't make it right to talk about stuff you don't know or to recommend stuff that you haven't even tried. Get real kid.
>inb4 my GPU passtrough
>inb4 muh other light emulation meme techniques
Cool. Show me evidence of your performance on such setups, and I'll show you evidence of an even superior performance on native Windows; and that's without having to do stupid shit on the computer, just installing and running. Fucking neo Sup Forums.

KVM/qemu will give you 99.5% performance.

why run two operating systems when i can run one

>2 million
You're retarded. Windows has far from 2 mil games unless you also count emulating consoles and browser games, both also fully available on Linux.
Steam has over 12'600 games, out of which 3000+ are on Linux. (24%)
GoodOldGames has around 1900 games with around 650 being on Linux. (34%)
Humble Bundle has over 4800 games, 1700 of which are on Linux. (35%)
So yeah, Linux doesn't lack games. It has access to roughly a third of PC games and all console/browser games. And this is not counting the fact that you can try using wine yourself, or even better make a pci passthrough.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Games that don't work properly on Linux are only those with shitty wine ports. And yeah, a lot of games are ported using wine and available on Steam like that. And it is true they lose performance because of that, roughly 20-50% (this includes Terraria and Don't Starve, which you've mentioned as good ports). Any """port""" in wine will have shittier performance. That's why developers shouldn't be lazy and should make their games native to other systems instead of using the abomination that is directX. If you actually cared about performance or gaming you'd get a console instead of using your PC for gaymun.
>games made in Unity
I expect games made in a garbage engine to be garbage. I avoid this even on my windows machine.
Here: youtube.com/watch?v=Ww2xpxkhitk, VM performance. Roughly 95% of the host machine, which is better than using wine.
Also: youtube.com/watch?v=yBI5tsa1inY, comparison of windows and linux in gaming.

>If you cared about privacy you wouldn't do that
what a retarded argument. shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. If Linux gamers cared about privacy that much they wouldn't use Steam or even be on Sup Forums.

If you have no need for Linux, don't bother. I don't like it for a variety of reasons, but I do have a VM set up for w7 when I want something Windows. I use "virt-manager" and it takes 6 clicks to set it up. You don't have to fuck around with the multitude of cli commands to get kvm-qemu working properly.

>And post results.
I'm still on Windows

Then pick the proprietary option when you install whatever. If you use Nvidia. AMD is open source.

>KVM/qemu will give you 99.5% performance.
That is not true, but even if it was, Windows installed natively would give you 100%. I want to point that you are trying to weasel word it by implying that it will run 99.5% as fast as in Windows, but you're intentionally ignoring the fact that your host OS requires resources too, and such resources would be available if you were running native Windows. I don't argue with retards, so please provide source of your claims; as I said, show evidence of performance on your setup and I'll show you evidence of a better performance on a native Windows.

>You have no idea what you're talking about.
Wrong.
>Games that don't work properly on Linux are only those with shitty wine ports.
So if I find you one single game on Steam that isn't a "wine port" (which isn't even a thing) and that runs with inferior performance than in Windows you will accept that you're wrong? You are making a very wild claim, you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about. Please reply yes or no, so I can find you one single game and BTFO you already.
>posts videos saying that performance on VMs is inferior to native Windows and that performance on GNU/Linux is inferior to Windows
That's exactly what I've been saying all along.
>If Linux gamers cared about privacy that much they wouldn't use Steam or even be on Sup Forums.
Listen kid, when you grow up you will understand that not everything is black or white, many things allow degrees. Maybe you don't want everything you typed anywhere in your OS to be recorded and forwarded to some server, but you're fine with your gaming habits being analyzed and used for marketing purposes, more so if in exchange you get to play games. I want to take you seriously but you come across as a child who just had to type something in reply, to be honest. Let's settle this: show us evidence of you running Steam games on your GNU/Linux, let's compare it to your Windows performance right now.

Reminder that if you run VAC secured games on a VM it will kick you for "authentication error" because it detects a hypervisor and Valve is paranoid that you could cheat and avoid detection by doing something in memory from the host operating system.
Not sure was it possible to hide that the OS is running on hypervisor, too lazy to look up

Just something to keep in mind if you are going to play VAC games online

This is old news, you seem to be the mis-informed one here. Look it up, it's very simple.

>would give you 100%
Except that windows is a resource hog with a shitty kernel.

It's only been a problem in csgo for me

>[dodgy answer], 'find the source to my claims yourself'
>meanwhile it's -still- common knowledge that GNU/Linux sucks for gaming
Consider yourself checkmated then.
>Windows wouldn't give you 100% of the performance that Windows can give you
Thanks for activating my almonds fag. They're over 9k now. Really made me think. WTF I hate Windows now!

>Linux is literally a video game OS

LOL

You might be right, I don't find any reports about this happening on other games than CSGO indeed. I haven't seen anyone make a cheat which would work by accessing the virtual machines memory from the host operating system, yet they protect themselves against it causing headache to the legit players wanting to play through a VM while their shitty anticheat cant even detect $5 pay2cheats except maybe once in a year few of them gets detected in a wave.

>not knowing how to make any distro look how you want but thinking youre qualified to call people amatuers
Neck urself

Debian testing or if you really have time to waste, then gentoo or arch.

I'm not here to make distros, I'm here to use them, retard.

Too bad that you can't use them either, since they're shit. Why are you fags not running macOS right now? Queers.

Checkmate? You haven't even looked it up. It's not a "fight" or something, but I am right, and you would find this out with the most basic of research. Your too lazy to set up a VM, and too lazy to do a Google search. Stay ignorant, friend.

u dont have to be able to make a distro to configure ur desktop, and the fact u dont know that shows u dont know what the fuck ur talking about and havent even bothered googling it, so do the world a favor and sterilize yourself

Then tell me how the fuck i can increase the GPU memory

I'm quoting what you said. Also my time is more precious for me than some basement dwelller's ego.

>wrong
Another sign you're retarded and have no idea what you're talking about.
>wine port isn't a thing
Another sign you're retarded and have no idea what you're talking about.
>compare it to your windows
I don't have it anymore.

Maybe you should do some research before trying to argue. I hope you're just baiting.

Don't use fucking virtual box or whatever else shit you are doing. Virt-manager and kvm/qemu is what I keep telling you to do. It's GPU passthrough that gives you 99.x % performance.

Wendell on YouTube did a spot on it if you can't read. Look it up.

That picture is from fucking virt-manager its locked on 16MB i cant at least increase it to 128 MB to just test it?

That's not even an option for me, I have no idea what you are doing.

Should've used Windows. Checkmate'd.

Post the entire screen. Checkmate.

>I'm an idiot
>guess I should've used a different OS! :^D
Changing your OS doesn't make you less of a retard. You should use ChromeOS or Android. I doubt anyone is stupid enough not to know how to use those.

Windows is the supreme plug n play OS.

Yes, it was designed with Grandma and retards like you in mind.