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.

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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.

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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!

  • _abysswalker@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    1. choose a rolling release distro (either arch or openSUSE TW) or leading edge point release like fedora
    2. compile the kernel yourself with march=native, LTO, O2 or O3 (requires benchmarking but O2 is a sane default), apply patches if any, optionally choose a custom scheduler. linux-tkg is good for this and really easy on arch since it has a PKGBUILD written for you
    3. compile everything else that is important for performance: RADV/nvidia-dkms, proton (maybe), etc
    4. run games in gamescope without a DE/WM (like the steam deck), try performance governor and/or gamemode

    I’m pretty sure that’s it, with this setup you will squeeze every single digit of FPS you can

    otherwise, go with openSUSE since their packages are compiled with x86-64-v3 support, -O2 and LTO which seems to give it an edge in benchmarks

    • Hollow333@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thx. Yes I really would like to try a rolling release. What do you think about Debian Sid? Tbh, I dont think I can do everything, you just mentioned by my own, still need to learn a lot!

      • _abysswalker@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think distros like sid or rawhide are worth it for daily use, they’re more geared towards developers to adopt changes early.

        I’ve been researching for a long time upon the topic of performance and distros, and my conclusion is that there are only 2 rolling release distros worth your time: arch (big community and very helpful wiki) and tumbleweed (if you want both stability and rolling release without a hassle this is the way)

        the rest are either based on arch, are a sort of testing ground for the main spin or are just niche, like gentoo

        from the above, compiling the kernel will have the greatest impact, and like I said, really easy to setup a kernel like tkg. in short, you clone the repo and just run a console command, makepkg -si

        after the compilation is done, you have your kernel! the rest is a matter of setting up your bootloader, afaik for grub it’s automatic but I use systemd-boot so I had to add the entry manually. that takes 5 minutes at most

        applying the said optimisations is trivial as well, you don’t have to know pkgbuild or gcc for that. tkg made sure that anyone can do it, the pkgbuild has plenty comments to explain which line does what and you only have to modify one line to add optimisations. I’ve never compiled kernels before compiling linux-tkg but it was easy to figure out. but all if this only applies to arch

        I also disabled CPU mitigations and SELinux, that’s a couple of fps for a more vulnerable system, but I’ve been rocking this way for 3 years or so and got no problems whatsoever, just be careful when you use the AUR if you go the arch route

        and don’t listen to people saying whether it matters or not, you should try it yourself first and then judge which is the case

        • Hollow333@alien.topOPBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Thank you. Yes I also did a little research and read that Tumbleweed, Arch and Sid are very good rolling release distros, but I’m just too afraid to try them atm. I’m still a Linux virgin.

          I will also look into the kernel part . . . . .