this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Linux Gaming
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I'm so happy to see some big channels doing these Linux tests. I know it's probably way more difficult since there are thousands of distros to try!
You don't need to test every distro.
Honestly you could capture 90 percent of the market with just arch and Debian/Ubuntu.
You could add 2 or 3 of the gaming focused distros for comparison however since they tend to be built on top of the two above things are more likely going to vary based on configuration more than which distro or de you are using.
Lets be real, Ubuntu/Arch is the way to go. Debian is just not present on gaming set ups, Arch is close to what Valve is doing and Ubuntu has like 69 downstream distros.
Before I say anything, I think Gamer's Nexus only testing with Bazzite makes a ton of sense. It would be silly to expect them to test with Windows S, N, Pro, LTSC, etc as well.
The distinction between Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian are pretty minor as far as gaming goes. They are all considered the same family for a reason.
Linux Mint (a Debian-based distro) and Ubuntu (also Debian-based) are extremely popular in gaming setups. In fact, the steam hardware survey has Mint 22.2, Ubuntu Core 22, Ubuntu 24, and Mint 22.1 as the second, third, fourth, and fifth most common Linux OSes.
While true, the issue is that Debian release cadence is such that they will always be "behind" kernel and wine wise.
Also they are more purist and less likely to facilitate proprietary bits. Last time I tried wine a lot of apps didn't work because they had no work to enable non-free fints So they may have the same general packaging strategy, but the vintage of content and scope are distinctly different from more aggressive distributions.
You are mistaken.
It's not popular in that arena, but it's definitely present.
I am a Debian user, and I think you are 100% right :)
Ubuntu is in the same boat, 90% of its users are using the LTS version.
Arch isn't that good of a choice either simply because it's a DIY distro. It's not meant to be complete out of the box and may require tweaks and making choices that Gamers Nexus is explicitly trying to avoid.
The vast majority of the use of arch at this point is complete out of the box... Arch hasn't been a diy distro any more or less then fedora or Ubuntu for a few years at this point.
Between endeavour cachy and steam os. Diy arch is basically not really a thing for gamers. It's a meaningless concern.
With archinstall, I largely agree. However, you still need to make a lot of choices. Which kernel branch? Which filesystem? Enable swap? Which desktop environment? And other choices that I forget, it's been a few uses since I used Arch.
Gamers Nexus is very clear they want to avoid making decisions. They want to stick as close as possible to as possible, but that's tricker since Arch doesn't have defaults for those, unlike Bazzite. Bazzite uses the Fedora kernel (which follows the latest stable); btrfs; zswap; desktop environment they do provide a choice between KDE and Gnome, in which case is easier to choose KDE since it's what Valve is pushing.
Garuda is Arch. You just need to get the right download for your graphics card and choose your desktop environment. It's basically painless at this point.
It already includes all the gamer stuff and comes preconfigured for performance.
This is fucking benchmarking... You don't benchmark a 5090 with crysis 1. That would be objectively stupid.
So you are actually correct your use case literally is not real gaming for the purpose of the context.
I would be amused by some DOOM benchmarks. Let's see how many zeroes we can get before the FPS counter breaks!