TL;DR: Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro? Or is it more of a “this is the least work” to get setup?
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I run EndeavourOS on my desktop and haven’t had any issues with performance. I just like playing with new things and learning from the experience.
I’ve seen loads of people recommending Bazzite as a gaming distro for various reasons. It’s gotten to the point that I installed it on a second SSD to do my own testing but I’d still like to see others perspective.
From my research, there doesn’t seem to be that much performance to be gained (generally speaking). I’ll be testing this on my own hardware but is this generally true?
I think a big draw (especially for new users) would be that these distros would require very minimal work to get up and running into a game.
I think the TL;DR at the top best describes my question. I’ve just been thinking about this and haven’t been sure how to express it in a clear manner for others to understand. Also, this video got me thinking more.
EDIT:
Glad to see that I’m not alone in my thinking. Biggest benefit of a “gaming distro” is the convenience of having everything setup and there is no real performance difference.
I’m in the same boat as you. I tried running Bazzite a while back. Most of my Linux experience has been with Pop!_OS, and gaming didn’t seem easier than what I was used so, because Pop is already ridiculously easy to run. I’d love to know what I’m missing.
The cool thing about Bazzite is, you can run their Arch container in Distrobox on any distro you prefer. I just have to run it with Podman, games load super slow using Docker.
Specific ISOs tailored to specific hardware. Just makes it easy for a user to jump right in, without configuration if their hardware isn’t available in the default install…as well as other tweaks to make a good user experience.