I’ve been using fedora but I would like to try something new and I think about arch linux but I don’t know if it’s good for gaming. What do you think?
well … SteamOS is based on Arch …
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.
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.
any distro can do anything another can, itll be fine for gaming and has a massive community
It’s good. The steam deck’s version of steamOS is arch based, so that should tell you a lot about its capabilities.
I’d recommend choosing an Arch-based distro like Endeavour or Garuda so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of installing vanilla Arch.
Arch documentation is great, if you’re only doing it once it shouldn’t really be a concern.
How about doing it never.
I’ll never understand why some people think that the arch install is such a transcendental event that you absolutely must subject yourself to.
And even if it were, sometimes you just want to install Linux not have a life-changing experience.
It’s pretty damn informative, that’s why I encourage people who are interested in Arch to do it once.
I agree that if you are doing it several times it’s a waste to do manually all the time.
people using a system should understand how it works and theretically every linux user should do lfs atleast once
Neither installing Arch nor doing LFS will teach you how Linux works. They’re at least one or two steps removed from the system’s inner workings.
Secondly, that’s way too high a bar.
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.
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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.
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.Disarm? I don’t remember having to do anything like that…
Pretty much everything in the General Recommendations section.
Arch-install had me create a user iirc. Most of the rest of that page was done by installing the KDE meta package for me.
A lot of the things on that page are FYIs, not things you need to do. I still don’t know what you mean by detonate or disarm .
Satire, the stereotypical “Arch just breaks after some time” trope. I’m saying that trope is correct if you don’t fix it.
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.
Echo nobara.
Been the most stable nvidia experience for my odd setup.
Able to handle an ultrawide and normal monitor 1440 at different hz and one is display port other is hdmi.
Would run into the occasional hickup with manjaro. Been all good on nobara
Fedora > arch confirmed
Have you heard of Garuda Linux? It’s arch based and is great at gaming.
As someone who uses Garuda Linux as my main OS, I agree! Gaming works right out the box and the OS is incredibly stable. If hiccups should arise, timeshift makes booting into a previous state very easy.
Is Timeshift installed Standart? Also the snapshotsnin grub?
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.
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.
As others have said I doubt you will see a difference but I can attest to arch working just fine for gaming. Between steam and Lutris I haven’t run into any real issues.
So if you’re wanting to try arch go for it with confidence that your gaming experience likely won’t be impacted.
I use EndeavourOS (which is almost the same as Arch) for gaming and it works great.
Its the best distro for gaming. Valve is using it, rolling distro.
I don’t think Valve is rolling it though, I’m pretty sure they do feature freezes for stability.
It’s fine. Only issues I’ve had is occasionally some modifications to glibc will break anticheat but that’s only happened to me twice in the past 8 years.
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.
I use arch for gaming btw.
