| Oh, that looks very nice. Thanks for the hint. The article does got not really go into the real issues with Linux gaming and instead just mainly presents some gaming targeting distros. There are only two things that are important: 1. Can you get Steam running? 2. Do you get modern versions of your gpu driver? Ubuntu is good for both, though you need a PPA to get the current Mesa driver, which is the only choice for AMD gpus (and that driver works great!). Otherwise a rolling release distro like gentoo is actually great for gaming, since you get the current driver, but it takes some effort to get Steam to work (also because of 64-bit vs 32-bit). I needed to delete old steam libs[0], set the LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH for Steam[1] and then, depending on the game, need to re-set the game-specific LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH[2] again. If Solus integrates Steam automatically and also has current drivers(?), that would make it a good alternative. [0]: http://www.funtoo.org/Steam#OpenGL_GLX_context_is_not_using_... [1]: LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH="/usr/lib32/dri" LIBGL_DEBUG="verbose" /usr/bin/steam [2]: Set `LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/dri %command%` in the Launch options of the games Steam Properties. |
When I installed Solus around 4 months ago, steam was noticably faster on the same hardware than it was when installed on Ubuntu.
There are probably ways to get the same experience on Ubuntu, but if I were a non-technical user I think I'd only really care about which gave me the best experience out of the box.