Arch-Based Distros Dominate the Linux Gaming Scene
Valve's latest Steam survey highlights Arch's popularity among Linux gamers, with EndeavourOS joining the list.
Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I'm one of the 0.06%! There's dozens of us!!
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.
It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that
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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
Well I use Arch Fedora btw
Bazzite 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.
Hello from Bazzite, just floating along somewhere in the numbers~!
I think we're probably counted under "Fedora"
Dang it's me. The % .10 Mint guy over here. Good shit.
Minty Bois unite!
We like our shit boring and working. Lol.
Look you're not really living life unless something explodes on your system at least once a year and you have to go fucking around with a tty prompt.
Green Ubuntu squad is here and ready to serve
I do most of my gaming on mint, but not for much longer as I am going to move my new configs and change to the same distro as my laptop at some point
What distro?
Debian gamer here. Glad y'all are having fun, too.
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 .nix file 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've done some gaming in my nix laptop, no problem
BtwOS is finally seeing proper representation :3
btw
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.
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 ₊˚⊹♡₊
Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora's getting in on gaming.
Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness
Once you're a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it's wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don't even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.
I feel like people discount just how useful a good wiki is. Especially on "how to" topics. It makes it better for the specifics of gaming just due to people testing and documenting it.
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.
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.
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.
I've been considering these: Crystal, Archcraft, Arco, Exodia. Are these any good?
I've looked at Archcraft (not any of the others), and the only thing that seems unique about it is that it's riced (themed) out of the box and offers several DE options. Otherwise, there's not really anything that sets it apart from, say, EndeavorOS (which has a handful of DEs and a great install process) or CachyOS (which has a nice install process, an optimized kernel and packages, and as many or more DE options as Archcraft).
The other thing that gives me pause with Archcraft is the fact that it's maintained by only one person. What happens if/when they get burned out?
Guix! Yay!
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'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) .
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/
Unexpectedly outstanding distro. New favorite, by a lot.
Based
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.
Previously was a Manjaro gamer, and had a perfectly seamless experience.
Migrated to Fedora, got some weird new issues, but running games through Steam solves everything.
Holy shit there's so many sub-distros in this thread:
Arch
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.
Isn't it because SteamOS is based on Arch?
surprised fedora isn't on this list tbh
Its honestly kinda weird, bazzite and nobara are fairly big. Must be a bug
Edit: Looks like flatpack usage prevents them from monitoring OS, a lot of fedora stuff uses the flatpack for steam. Flatpack users are 5.73% of all linux users, most are on steamos.
Second Bazzite. Been using it for 6 months or so now and it's awesome.
ahhh that makes sense. thanks for tracking that down! I guess I'm a minority in using the steam rpm, I just couldn't get the flatpak to cooperate with Nvidia for whatever reason