Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.
To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.
It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)
Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.
I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)
I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.
Isn’t it because SteamOS is based on Arch?
NixOS gamer here. I can’t be the only one!
There’s dozens of us!
I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new
.nixfile with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.I have to admit, that I have some experience with nix on 2 servers and 1 desktop, but installing steam was just 1 line in the config and everything worked. My biggest concern were the nvidia drivers, but that worked as well. Currently playing RE4 Remake.
I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah
I wanted to try nix, but gave up because it was too much too learn
Think you mean their configuration.nix file ;)
And their flakes
Nah, dotfiles is fair, it would be insane to put it in only one file, it is Kore like a flake.nix that glues a bunch of configuration files together :P
I’ve done some gaming in my nix laptop, no problem
Hmh. Guess with opensuse tumbleweed, I’m a minority of a minority. Oh well, I don’t mind.
There’s at least two of us.
Linux distro sib hug.
Well I use
ArchFedora btwBazzite is by far my favorite linux so far and great for gaming
Fedora was going to be my plan. Arch just freaks me out, I don’t want to do that much work. I think I know Ubuntu the best, but I haven’t heard anything good about the direction Canonical is going.
I just want something that works good enough. I have a 3070 ti GPU.
btw
Based
Holy shit there’s so many sub-distros in this thread:
Arch
- EndeavorOS
- Cachy
- Void
- Nix
- Manjaro
Which one do we install for gaming, or do we wait for SteamOS on Desktop?
Void and Nix aren’t Arch-based.
Which one do we install for gaming
If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s not Arch based, which is a good thing because it’s going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.
Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.
If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you’ll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.
It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.
Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo”.
Also, that article isn’t measuring SteamOS in the first place. When you look at the steam survey with the default filters it won’t list SteamOS. If you switch it to Linux only it will show SteamOS as 36.47% of Linux installs (0.84% of all steam installs) so it’s clearly not feeding into the Arch percentages.
This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:
- SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
- Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.
What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?
I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.
Good on you for owning up to it though. Cheers mate!
Never attribute to incompetence what may be attributed to sleepy posting.
Am I missing something or is 36.47% not greater than 9.7%? Why is SteamOS not shown as the most popular Linux distro without the Linux only filters?
This contradicts the article claiming Arch dominates the Linux gaming scene and not SteamOS.
SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.
The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.
How? SteamOS is still Linux.
Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck
While that may be true, I still use my Steam Deck in desktop mode for a bunch of stuff besides gaming. Writing, job applications and interviews, using reddit because it’s the only device I have that isn’t detected for ban evasion, watching shows/Youtube. Maybe I’m atypical, but I don’t see why the Deck would offer a desktop mode if it wasn’t meant to be used.
They’re all linux, friend.
Yeah, I misspoke lol. I meant to say Arch but I shortcirced or something.
I tried a few distros this year. Landed on vanilla arch using KDE Plasma. Love it so far. Unfortunately I do some hobbyist stuff with Fusion 360 and my friends and I started playing PUBG again so i need to boot into my windows partition for those.
I feel underrepresented as a Void user.
Although the absurd number of hours I’ve played a certain popular gacha under Lutris might not trigger the Steam metrics, I demand credit for dumping 45 hours into a poorly translated RPG Maker looking project!
I’ve thought about Void. And LFS. And I submitted some packages for Alpine, although I’m not running it anywhere except as container bases.
Last time I really strayed from the Arch ranch was Artix, and that was TBH pretty painful on a day-to-day basis.
I’d like something like Arch but with less systemd. ChimeraOS looks promising, once it stabilizes. But how’s Void treating you? How’s xbps? I’m pretty in love with pacman; rolling release is a must, but IME you really only realize how good or bad a package manager is after it’s too late, and you’ve been using it long enough to hit your first dependency hell/upgrade issue. After years of hell with RPM and deb, pacman was a godsend.
runit isn’t my favorite initd alternative (dinit ftw, at the moment), but it beats systemd and I don’t have a huge amount of experience with it. Do you like it?
Critical to me is being able to easily toss together package manager recipes for stuff that isn’t in the official repo; I really believe in keeping systems clean by only installing through the package manager. Pacman packages are stupid simple to write and easy to work with, and yay makes things even better. How’s xbps in this area?
EFS boot is easy? Stuff like btrfs boot partitions and snapper support easily available? No idiocy like trying to force users onto Wayland prematurely?
Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’
I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.
EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)
Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.
Thanks for the answers!
I used to do side installs, usually into /opt, which worked well, except when it didn’t. Usually when other things, like Python, expected stuff to live in a certain place and not somewhere unexpected, like /opt. But then, installing stuff manually would sometimes interfere with package manager files, which always ended up taking time and being a pain. I think that’s why I like pacman so much; making packages are trivial, and then all of the file management, clean uninstalls that don’t leave artifacts behind, conflict checks (if not resolution)… all of that stuff that was at times a PITA with autoconf/make install became non-issues.
I need to look at xpbs. I mean, I’m happy with Arch, but Void seems to be a little leaner, and Arch is fully onboard the systemd train, with Artix being am example of how hard it is to climb out of the avalanche.
I’ve been enjoying void on an old Thinkpad just to mess with. How’s the gaming experience been on it? Any issues with Steam/Proton running well?
Steam runs fine. I think I had to install some Vulkan packages manually because I was getting some hallucinogenic colours in Genshin Impact (installs fine via Lutris). I have a few minor issues with games not loving losing the mouse cursor if you move it onto another display, but I think you can tame most of them by running in Gamescope so it doesn’t realize there’s a second monitor the mouse can leave to.
Part of the Arch games, Well I don’t exactly use Arch but it’s A Arch based distro for Performance (Cachyos) and I love how they leverage cpu instructions
I’m seriously considering installing CachyOS on my laptop. And now I’m wondering why I didn’t come around to do it yet.
If you are on another arch based distro you can also add their repos: https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/
The laptop I’m using is new and I didn’t bother with installing Linux on it because I was lazy and business was busy. But this weekend I’ll most likely install it. Thanks for the information by the way.
Yw
Unexpectedly outstanding distro. New favorite, by a lot.
I’ve been on Nobara for a few years and have generally loved it. Lately I’ve been thinking about switching to Cachy.
I’ve just been a little annoyed with Fedora in general recently, and I am nervous that Nobara is not only based on Fedora, but also is maintained by only one person.
How has gaming been overall on CachyOS? Any issues with Steam, Proton, Lutris, or any other gaming-related software?
In my experience, Nobara requires way less fiddling and works out of the box. CachyOS was way more fiddly. I have newer hardware so things are a bit weird for me in general.
Do wish Nobara had more maintainers. Cachyos isn’t a whole lot better in this regard either, if you wanted something for gaming that has a lot of maintainers you should probably go for Bazzite. Personally, I had issues with Bazzite as well, Nobara seems to play nicest with new hardware out of the box.
It doesn’t come with any gaming apps (but can be installed manually or use their package that installs all the essentials). they also have a proton/wine fork and has patches related to gaming no issues there, and later after some updates(idk how it gets it) you will get LFX (Latencyflex) you can enable it with LFX=1 In environment variables in games and there was no issues at all in gaming (Note you can view cachyos as more of a performance distro rather then a gaming one) .
Thanks for the info!
Yw
I am one of the few Ubuntu gamers. Please don’t hurt me.
all distro’s are valid
lol, I’m sure you could just casually walk away from them in a serpentine pattern and avoid any harm. Likely they are too busy clearing Cheeto dust from their neck beard anyways.
Hey! There’s not too much cheeto dust because I eat the cheetoes with chopsticks to keep my fingies clean and because the chopsticks are ₊♡⊹˚₊ kawaii ₊˚⊹♡₊
Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I’m one of the 0.06%! There’s dozens of us!!
Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or… Bazzite I think the other one is.
I’m about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven’t decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it’s not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn’t do. Worried it’ll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I’ll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.
If you’ve already installed vanilla arch on your laptop then you’re good to go, that’s the hard part. EndeavourOS has a very user friendly installer but still uses Arch’s official repos. I like to think of it as a quickstart installation, but still feels pretty much like arch. I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to a main computer, especially since I believe their gaming stack is optimized for AMD.
Gaming on arch/endeavour is pretty straight forward
- Install your nvidia drivers
- Install
steam - Go to
Steam > Settings > Compatibilityand enable “Enable Steam Play for all other titles” - Play your games
Thanks! That’s what I wanted to hear. When researching distros they always talk about them being optimized for gaming or what have you and I was worried some of that wasn’t as simple as installing the drivers and fixing steam.
I look forward to converting this weekend or next!
Optimized gaming distros often have stuff pre-installed, such as nvidia drivers, steam, heroic launcher… But you can pretty much install whatever you want and replicate that behavior.
Bazzite in particular provides a fantastic gaming experience but, in my personal opinion, a bad desktop experience. It’s great for devices used almost exclusively to gaming, not so great if you have to work every day.
I’m on EndeavorOS, but I basically use Arch’s wiki for any troubleshooting/guidance. I wanted Arch with an easy installation and I got just that.
No huge issues gaming-wise, but you do need to be comfortable referencing Arch wiki as needed regardless of your installation. My installation defaulted to the on-biard graphics processor instead of the gpu, so I had to install the proper stuff manually.
If you need help in the future, feel free to reach out.
EndeavourOS user reporting in. Where are the other two?
I am one of the two! Who is the last one?
hello!
Wait… There is another.
Yay!
I prefer
paruthese days.I’m one as well. Will be running the same install of EndeavourOS for 2 years next month.
Another one here.
I’m running EndeavorOS on three computers (2 desktops, one laptop). My wife uses the laptop, but TBH I admin it. She’s aware it’s Linux, but not much more than that.
Anyway, does that count for 3 (per boxen), or 2 (per person)?
Also, it’s running my MIL’s desktop that just streams classical 24/7, and she uses to check her bank account once a week. So that’s 4? 4 more EndeavorOS installs, ah, ah, aaahh!
I’ve got the same install on 2 different machines for over a year now, EOS is the best!
It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that
Boot up a VM and install vanilla Arch Linux using the wiki instead of archinstall. Notice that Arch Linux isn’t very pretty out of the box and take the time to set some “sane defaults”. Imagine having a person who is new to Linux to jump through all those hoops when they’re not even sure if Linux is for them. Imagine all the little things that could have gone wrong in this process and how a clueless person would react to them.
EndeavourOS is extremely easy to install. Next next next and it’s done. It looks pretty out of the box and has sane defaults. The only reason I don’t recommend Endeavour to newbies is because it lacks a software manager/store, which REALLY help newbies out. The very frequent updates are also not for everyone.
I love EndeavourOS but it’s certainly not for everyone.
Ciao! When you are an Arch enjoyer but also too lazy to install it again.
Definitely about ease of use. After borking my system a few times it was just easier to go with endeavor.
BtwOS is finally seeing proper representation :3
