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?
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.
I use EndeavourOS (which is almost the same as Arch) for gaming and it works great.
For the love of Tux, whatever you do install Arch on the btrfs file system so you can time shift back whenever arch decides to try and ruin your day on an update.
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.
Arch gamer here. I can confirm that it works well.
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.
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
Nix is just as configurable and you will have far less problems
After learning about nix, I’m surprised steamos isn’t built on it
Steam is its own package manager and native games usually assume that an FHS-conformant is present. Neither of those mesh well with Nix notoriously has nothing comparable to an FHS and usually requires everything to be defined in its terms.
There’s a limit to how much you want to tinker with the OS when customizing it.
Also, Arch has about 10k binary packages in core, extra and multilib.
I use arch for gaming btw.
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.
any distro can do anything another can, itll be fine for gaming and has a massive community
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.
Arch is perfectly fine for gaming. I use EndeavourOS with KDE and Steam + Lutris (as Flatpaks) on top. Quite similar to the setup you would have on Steam OS, but I would highly recommend using btrfs as your file system and setting up snapshots.*
While I have had little to no problems so far, compatibility issues can still occur on rolling release distros, and it’s extremely convenient to just be able to undo an update.
*This is quite simple btw., you just need to install snapper, snap-pac and btrfs-assistant. The latter serves as a GUI for btrfs setup in general. Create a config for your filesystem root (‘/’) under ‘Snapper’, and under ‘Snapper Settings’ enable ‘Snapper cleanup’. You can also set the number of snapshots to retain there, but note that two will be created per system upgrade by snap-pac. I would suggest to also enable balances and scrubs for ‘/’ and ‘/home’ in the maintenance-tab.
