2w ago

Best Linux gaming distro for 2010's hardware.

This is a bit of an updated post for some hardware that sort of fell into my lap that I'm trying to decide what to do with. I found a rig on the trash that has a GTX 970 and after taking off the cooler I learned it has an i7 4790 CPU. For the time it came out, this was pretty top tier hardware, but obviously today it's dated.

So I was thinking of doing a living room emulation build with this, for games up to wii/PS2, and maybe some older PC games as well. I was originally thinking of going with batocera, but considering I would like to do retro PC gaming as well, I'm not sure this is the best option. I don't know if bazzite would be the best option either, since that usually focuses on modern pc gaming.

So any thoughts on the best software for this rig, for the uses I'm thinking?

26 comments

Your PC that you found in the trash has better specs than the first one I installed Linux on a few months ago as a newbie: 770, maybe an i5.
Pop OS was super user friendly for a new user and handled drivers and everything really well for me. I've only played some less intense games from my steam library, but I'm not noticing any severe lag. I bet it could handle retro gaming/emulation easily.
- @ThePicardManeuver @korendian POP is continuing to kick goals.

That hardware isn't even bad, was top tier at the time and still will play any DirectX 9/10/11 game you throw at it at 1080p.
Linux runs great on my i5 4690k and GTX 750 Ti, so you're all good with 4790 and GTX 970.
EDIT: with 16GB RAM you're golden, happy gaming

It doesn't really matter unless you install a distro that's not using Plasma or Gnome. Just pick one of the popular distros, and you're good to go. CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Bazzite, Garuda, you name it.
- I agree. I don't quite understand why this is even a debate. Just pick anything that looks neat and 99% of the time, it's gonna work fine. That's the beauty of Linux.
- I fully recommend Cachyos. I run it on my HP z620 (Xeon e5-2667 v2, GTX 1070ti) and it's great. Best distro I've used so far (30 years using Linux)
  
  I use that myself, and I hadn't thought about CachyOS for hardware that old.

Memory is going to be the big decider, and the GPU will be the weakest point for gaming. Nvidia is also probably dropping GTX hardware in the rolling driver updates next year-ish.
If you're talking about gaming, all distros will be the same, as they are in any other metric aside from memory consumption (there are some tuned distros meant for low memory consumption). As long as it has 8GB of memory, any distro will be fine.
- Between the two computers (because I have two older systems I found to work from), I have 40gb of ram, but obviously not all of that will fit in one system. The best ram I have speed/size wise is 16gb of ddr3 1866mhz fury hyperx. That was what I was thinking of using for the gaming system. So I should be good in the memory department.
  If they are dropping GTX driver support, what would you recommend I do?
  
  16GB is plenty, so just install whatever distro you want.
  Re: Nvidia - They're not dropping it entirely, meaning the drivers stop working, they're just not going to be including fixes for older devices in the rolling releases anymore. Those cards are almost 10 years old, so that's not shocking at all. For $40 you can get a card 2x as powerful as that one right there.
- @justanotherperson @korendian What are those low memory tuned distros?
  
  Lubuntu and AntiX are the two I hear most often, but there others. There are only a few geared for desktop usage.

I have a laptop with almost those exact specs. I maxed out the RAM (just because I'm a memory goblin), and I'm currently running Bazzite, Nvidia version. Runs everything great!
Feel free to DM if you have questions.
ETA: I opted for the KDE version, since it has better multitouch support than Gnome.

If your plan is emulation, Bazzite makes setting up either EmuDeck or RetroDeck very simple.
Just make sure to grab the Nvidia driver variant.
You can pick from KDE or Gnome, Bazzite does both.
A whole main, original thrust of Bazzite was to make it much more simple to set up emulation on a SteamDeck, uses a 'everything is flatpaks' approach by default, to keep things simple.
I run Bazzite on my Deck, works great for emulating older games, running modern games, I even set up a debian environment inside it via DistroShelf to do more complex dev type stuff.
With those specs, you should be able to run HL2 or a PS2 emulator just fine, I'd think, just keep the resolution at 1080p... maybe somethings you could take up to 2K, still be at or over 60fps, basically for games released prior to ~2006/7/8?

If your confidence level is decent (you said elsewhere you're new to Linux), I'd suggest EndeavourOS. Nearly all the benefits of Arch without most of the hassle. It's great for gaming and great as just a daily OS (whereas Bazzite seems very focused on gaming).

@korendian i7 4790 here with an Nvidia GTX 1060. Bazzite Nvidia booting to the normal Plasma desktop performs fantastically! You don't say if it's SSD vs HDD, but if it's the latter, put in an SSD and it'll be great!

Depending on how open you are to be tinkering with the system I would suggest Arch since it can be very lightweight as a base and then use reteroarch for the emulation (but I'm not sure about the wii emulation...)
- I am fairly new to Linux overall, so I'm not sure how confident I would be installing arch, but I guess it's worth a go.
  
  If it's just installing you are conserned about ther is the option of the arch install script. Used that too for my first install and it's basicaly just typing "archinstall" ind the tty and choosing some values for things like partitioning user settings and desktop environment.

For that, you might want to install something like Mint with XFCE, Kubuntu apparently, Ubuntu MATE, Feren OS, Xubuntu, and Fedora (I'd recommend XFCE for that). These are not specifically atomic distros (like Bazzite is), and I would recommend not using an atomic distro unless you're not very good with Linux. I tried to find things that are very easy to install for you, hopefully, so if it helps... that's all that matters to me.
Edit: Apparently CachyOS is also another option a lot of people are saying, so I'd recommend that too.

Install Lubuntu. A lightweight Ubuntu derivative.
- I can't recommend Ubuntu now, with snap running all the time it actually caused my server to oomkill some of the key processes. It's not good for low memory
  
  Aw dang. I forgot about that.

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