Hey there, I’m relatively new to Linux, and I must admit, I’ve been spoiled by Nobara Linux. The gaming experience is seamless, with excellent performance and no issues so far. I know many people claim, “The distribution really doesn’t matter” or “There are only minor differences,” etc.
However, I don’t fully subscribe to this belief. Just recently, someone advised against recommending Linux Mint for gaming. If you take a closer look at the Nobara Project, Glorious Eggroll has implemented numerous patches, and benchmark videos do reveal a noticeable difference.
I’m eager to explore various distros, leading me to my question: How can one genuinely optimize their system for gaming? I’ve heard about applying kernel patches, but I’d love to hear more from those with experience. Achieving the level of optimization seen in Nobara Linux, thanks to GE’s efforts, seems like a lofty goal for me. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
The distribution doesn’t matter because the majority of optimizations made to “gaming” distros like Nobara are achievable on any distro. Here are a few things that you can do on any distro:
also installing an up to date mesa if you are using a AMD or Intel GPU - that’s where most of the graphics optimization work goes. Updating kernel is mainly if you need support for stuff rather than performance tuning, e.g soon the upcoming 6.7 kernel for overclocking/undervolting support for 7000 series AMD gpus and at some point in the future Xe driver for discrete intel gpus.
As someone who uses The Zen kernel, it hardly makes a difference for gaming.
The other patches to the kernel can be quite useful, though.
Isn’t fsync enabled by default with zen kernels?
The futex required should be enabled on mainline kernels beyond 5.16. It’s been a while since zen was required.
Additional note: If you’re on X11, yes. The compositor stays on in Wayland by default and has no “off” toggle.
True, I forgot to mention that. Although Wayland isn’t the best for gaming in general, so if a distro defaults to Wayland, I guess the first optimization would be to switch to Xorg.
Wouldn’t exactly downvote, it’s just a moot point IMO when they’re starting to yank out Xorg in favor of Wayland.
Wayland is the future , old man 😊 Been running Fedora as my daily for 2 years and I Haven’t had any real issues related to Wayland on my 3060ti. In all reality xorg is the past and Wayland/XWayland is the future.
Wayland may be the future, but it sure isn’t the present 😂.
Why isn’t wayland recommended for gaming? I just bought myself 2 screens, both of different resolutions and framerates, and as far as I’m aware x11 will set both to the same one because it doesn’t support different ones.
x11 does support 2 monitors with different rates, I don’t know what you’re on about
It does, just not very well.
If you want both displays to run smoothly, the refresh rates must be integer multiples of one another.
E.g: as 55Hz+165Hz, or 72Hz+144Hz would work, but not 75Hz+144Hz.
So you have occasional minor tearing on secondary monitor… okay ?
This guy flat out said that X doesn’t support 2 monitors with different rates which is false.
Ever since they made it possible in 2021 I’ve barely ever noticed it
X11 is going to be garbage in your setup. Use Wayland.
Not everyone needs tearing enabled in their games (tearing allows for some input latency improvements), which is why some people avoid Wayland. Enabling VRR is as good as allowing tearing in almost all games. Tearing support is coming.
why would x11 be garbage in his setup?
X11 can’t do different refresh rates on multiple monitors.
> X11 can’t do different refresh rates on multiple monitors
That’s just flat out wrong and has been for 2 years but morons like you keep flaunting the idea around and repeating it because you saw it on the reddit. You were a 30 second google search away from figuring it out by yourself
> Also you can’t do VRR with multiple monitors in X.
Fair enough
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/s/uXxUmUSDYc
Let me be more specific. It does support different monitor refresh rates, but Xorg itself can only refresh at one rate. So mixing indivisible refresh rates, like 60 and 144 will cause stutters.
I use VRR on sway, and it’s as low-latency as it gets.
Plus, no tearing nor juddering.
Wayland supports VRR and x11 doesn’t though to my knowledge.
Only with one monitor in X11 does VRR work. I wanted to try so I set my other monitors to another machine and use KVM software.
Not exactly true. You can enable it on xorg in your AMDGPU config, and Nvidia should enable it by default (the monitor needs to support Gsync though).
By default, Wayland forces vsync, even at the cost of latency. VRR doesn’t exist in the vast majority of desktops, and requires installing a patched compositor in Gnome. Only KDE supports it by default, but only in fullscreen applications.
You can find more info on the arch wiki
New to gaming in Linux, I use KDE, how much does it affect in terms of performance on disabling the compositor?
And is it only necessary on KDE or any desktop environment?
i used zen for years only to get a weird wake-up bug with newer amd gpus, the mainline kernel did not have this so i for the first time went to the barebones mainline kernel