Moved over from Mint to Arch for gaming, which has some additional benefits:
more up-to-date kernel and more up-to-date Mesa, which brings very noticeable improvements in frame rates - in Elden Ring for example, 45 fps outside in Mint to 60 fps outside on Arch
my desktop soundcard isn’t recognised properly by PulseAudio but is by PipeWire. It’s hard to be sure that PulseAudio is completely gone when you uninstall it then reinstall something else. Arch, I just installed what I wanted in the first place
some utility programmes, like CoreCtrl for graphics card fan and power tweaking, and emulators like RPCS3, are the Arch repositories but not the Mint ones. Much easier to keep them up-to-date
for a gaming machine, no more ‘mystery services’ that I don’t know what they are. I quite like having everything quite stripped back for a gaming machine. On Arch, I know what everything does because I installed it. That’s not the case on Mint.
Obviously, I installed the Cinnamon desktop as my GUI choice - there’s certain things about Mint that are tremendous and worth sticking to.
Not just more up-to-date, but always up-to-date, because it’s a rolling release distro. I have a computer that I installed Arch on in 2014 and is still on the same installation, yet completely up to date in terms of installed packages. You can’t do that with any other distribution.
At the same time, this relentless march forward is also its biggest weakness because occasionally you do get hit with new bugs, incompatibilities, regressions, breaking changes, … Most of the time this is nothing serious, and the Arch team does perform QA before they release something, but nevertheless it means that every now and then you will have to actively do something to diagnose and fix a problem.
So if your idea of using a computer is install and forget, Arch is probably not for you, but if you don’t mind manually intervening every now and then, I can’t think of a better choice of distro.
Moved over from Mint to Arch for gaming, which has some additional benefits:
more up-to-date kernel and more up-to-date Mesa, which brings very noticeable improvements in frame rates - in Elden Ring for example, 45 fps outside in Mint to 60 fps outside on Arch
my desktop soundcard isn’t recognised properly by PulseAudio but is by PipeWire. It’s hard to be sure that PulseAudio is completely gone when you uninstall it then reinstall something else. Arch, I just installed what I wanted in the first place
some utility programmes, like CoreCtrl for graphics card fan and power tweaking, and emulators like RPCS3, are the Arch repositories but not the Mint ones. Much easier to keep them up-to-date
for a gaming machine, no more ‘mystery services’ that I don’t know what they are. I quite like having everything quite stripped back for a gaming machine. On Arch, I know what everything does because I installed it. That’s not the case on Mint.
Obviously, I installed the Cinnamon desktop as my GUI choice - there’s certain things about Mint that are tremendous and worth sticking to.
What GPU are you utilizing?
RX6700XT, on a 1440p monitor.
Not just more up-to-date, but always up-to-date, because it’s a rolling release distro. I have a computer that I installed Arch on in 2014 and is still on the same installation, yet completely up to date in terms of installed packages. You can’t do that with any other distribution.
At the same time, this relentless march forward is also its biggest weakness because occasionally you do get hit with new bugs, incompatibilities, regressions, breaking changes, … Most of the time this is nothing serious, and the Arch team does perform QA before they release something, but nevertheless it means that every now and then you will have to actively do something to diagnose and fix a problem.
So if your idea of using a computer is install and forget, Arch is probably not for you, but if you don’t mind manually intervening every now and then, I can’t think of a better choice of distro.