Joined
·
3,446 Posts
Recently I watched a YouTube video about the "best gaming distros" and the top 2 were Manjaro and PopOS!. So, naturally, being an avid gamer and a 20 year veteran of Slackware (and quite proud of my customizations) who keeps partitions around just to test out other distros for a few weeks, I had to see for myself. Long story shorter, I ran Phononix Test Suite, Heaven, and SOTR Benchmark on Ultra... all installed on a dedicated NVME partition shared between them all.
I hated PopOS! immediately because it does not setup a root account for the installer and disables things like kdesu, but it did OK gaming. Manjaro was much more to my liking 'cuz I'm a nuts 'n bolts kinda guy but I had some problems trying to build a custom, low-latency, realtime kernel for speed, response and smooth consistency. That's mostly my fault because I prefer a truly vanilla kernel direct from source tarball off kernel.org. I don't like waiting around for repositories to catch up or offer solid alternatives and I simply must be able to enact a multi-user cli runlkevel to install the latest nvidia drivers from nvidia's excellent .run installer. That was a PITA on Manjaro and basically far too many hoops to jump through in Pop.
So my Slackware Current system had an advantage because of the kernel and a few other features but the average scores for all 3 benchmarks was oiver 9% better in Slackware and was as much as 12% on average better in SOTR benchmark. So I won't be dual booting to eoityher Manjaro or Pop... BUT I am seriously wanting to install SteamOS v4 once it's available. I'm quite excited by SteamDeck for numerous reasons.
For someone new to Linux I'd recommend trying Manjaro or anARCHy and also try the live Slackware iso since it is all human readable/editable confgigs, is a full OpSys with Persistence not a skeleton trial, and you can see for yourself that Slackware is not as hard as many make it out to be... and most of all, it's worth the effort. If you're really just non-technical then PopOS is getting a lot of play lately, even on LinusTechTips, so it might be for a more general linux newbie who especisally wants gamer features out of th box..
I hated PopOS! immediately because it does not setup a root account for the installer and disables things like kdesu, but it did OK gaming. Manjaro was much more to my liking 'cuz I'm a nuts 'n bolts kinda guy but I had some problems trying to build a custom, low-latency, realtime kernel for speed, response and smooth consistency. That's mostly my fault because I prefer a truly vanilla kernel direct from source tarball off kernel.org. I don't like waiting around for repositories to catch up or offer solid alternatives and I simply must be able to enact a multi-user cli runlkevel to install the latest nvidia drivers from nvidia's excellent .run installer. That was a PITA on Manjaro and basically far too many hoops to jump through in Pop.
So my Slackware Current system had an advantage because of the kernel and a few other features but the average scores for all 3 benchmarks was oiver 9% better in Slackware and was as much as 12% on average better in SOTR benchmark. So I won't be dual booting to eoityher Manjaro or Pop... BUT I am seriously wanting to install SteamOS v4 once it's available. I'm quite excited by SteamDeck for numerous reasons.
For someone new to Linux I'd recommend trying Manjaro or anARCHy and also try the live Slackware iso since it is all human readable/editable confgigs, is a full OpSys with Persistence not a skeleton trial, and you can see for yourself that Slackware is not as hard as many make it out to be... and most of all, it's worth the effort. If you're really just non-technical then PopOS is getting a lot of play lately, even on LinusTechTips, so it might be for a more general linux newbie who especisally wants gamer features out of th box..
