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What Linux Distribution is the Best for Games?
CodeGeekGuy asks: "I've been thinking of doing the big switcheroo from Windows to Linux. I have, in the past, had various levels of success using Linux, but I generally have to give up as soon as I feel like playing a game. I've done dual booting before, but find it a pain if you're waiting for something to finish and just want a quick game of Half Life 2 or WoW.
I'm willing to give this another shot (as I hear that Cedega plays HL2 and WoW quite nicely). I've used Mandrake and Fedora Core and even Redhat, is there another distribution out there that is the best distro to use to get Cedega (and ultimately games) to work well? "
arch, as it is designed to run uber-fast and be supar-slim!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Suse is a good choice. It usually detects your video card drivers, which IMO is the hardest part of setting up linux for gaming. SAX2
Website
Your still going to be bound by Cedega's working game list only. That aside, Ive had fairly good success with Suse, Fedora, and Gentoo.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
If you have the patience to set it up intially, I think Gentoo might be your best bet, as the flexibility of Gentoo and it's packaging system is second to none. Compiling the initial system shouldn't be a serious problem on any machine beefy enough to run modern games - my last stage-one complete rebuild from scratch took less than a day, including KDE.
I game, therefore I am...
None and all... dont suport these half assed attempts at "emulation" to play your games. Everyone using cedega or wine are just giving the devs reasons NOT to make native ports of their games. Why should they when your happy with 70% preformance and major instabilities? But any (major) distro will play the native games just as well as any of the others.
Either play fully supported Linux native games, hold on to windows, or duel-boot. But whatever you do DO NOT SUPPORT the efforts of these emulators! They are not for the greater good, as far as gamming goes. Using them to run old unsupported software is another story.
I've had great luck with Ubuntu, Suse, or Mandrake. I've had bad luck with Fedora Core. Other than that I really couldn't speak for any other distros as these are the ones I've tried to game with.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
The best Linux distribution for gaming would have to be Cygwin running on Windows XP Pro.
Face it, if you want to do gaming, Linux just isn't there yet. Using Wine is half-assed at best - it may work, but there frequently will be bugs with the games and it will cause extra flakeyness. I've tried gaming with Wine, and it just isn't worth the hastle.
If you want Linux apps, compile them for use with Cygwin or find actual Windows binaries. With Qt/Windows and GTK for Windows, you can use all your favorite Linux programs under Linux, along with getting a really good gaming experience.
Trying to game on Linux is still, even now, a lousy experience. If you want to game on your PC, Windows is where it's at. Linux has a LONG way to go if it wants to change that.
... Windows =]
Gentoo is by far the best distro for gaming. I've used just about every major distro there is. Gentoo is the only one where I could reliably make games work. I've got nvidia drivers, alsa, the doom3 demo, emulators. Heck, I've got Mechwarrior 2 running in DOSbox on this thing. It didn't work when I tried it on fedora.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
As much as I hate to say it, if you want to play games that are designed for Windows, the best thing to do is boot into Windows. No matter how good Cedega gets, it will still be an attempt to imitate the environment that the game was designed for, and will always have some performane lag. Not only that, but if it is a graphically intensive video game, as most are, you will want the best possible video drivers for direct rendering and such, and in that respect, Linux is nowhere nere as adept as Windows yet. But, on the bright side, since the game is full screen, you won't have any of the annoying widgets like the 'start' menu around to remind you what OS you're in. If, however, you still want to play your game on Linux, I don't think that the distribution really matters. What does matter is that you are using the vendor supplied proprietary driver, either from nVidia or from ATI, rather than the open source equivalent, which is not nearly as good at demanding rendering tasks. Most distributions, including Fedora and Redhat, only include the open source version, so be sure to go to your video card maker's website and download their linux drivers.
Let me put it this way:
You are buying a vehicle. You want something fun, fast and sporty. You go and buy a 3/4 ton pickup. Mistake!
Select your OS based on what you want to run. If what you are running is "Windows Games", examine the first word -- Windows -- and run them on that platform. If you want to run Linux, go and buy VMWARE, and run Linux on the same box. No big sweat, and no particular problem.
Or, use the money you would spend on VMWARE, and buy another box for Linux.
I am sure that you will get a lot of "Red Hat sucks", "Gentoo rules", "SuSe rules", "Mandrake is the schiznit" answers.
Ignore them. Again, pick a REASON as to why you want to use Linux -- is it a hobby? if so, Gentoo or "Linux from Scratch" may be suitable. Do you want to do real work? Red Hat/Fedora Core or SuSe. Whatever, its your choice.
If you *do* explore VMWARE, you may want to pick a VMWARE supported system.
Anyway, the OS is a commodity (at least in the Linux world, with Microsoft, it tends to be forced on you based on applications -- it's the platform). So don't sweat it.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
...you kill a puppy. It's true.
See: 10 Points to Consider Before Buying Cedega.
Heh.
i run Gentoo and had no trouble getting Cedega working.
that said, i also use Con Kolivas' kernel patchset. initially i had problems, but we came up with a nice list of audio tips to help get things working right.
i'm waiting right now for some work Ingo Molnar has indicated he's going to do that could help Wine out dramatically. be prepared to recompile your kernel several times in the near future.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
KVM
Just get a KVM switch and hook it up to a linux box and a windows box. Problem solved.
try zen linux, then apt-get install wine.
I recommend SuSE here, simply because of its driver support. It installs the nvidia drivers at install time if you have a net connection, and provides a good GUI to control all of that.
:p
:)
One click enabling of direct rendering (3d acceleration) is something that I think would be a godsend to most new users.
Also SuSE's exellent documentation cannot be ignored.
On the cedega front I suggest you do try this! It plays Counter Strike via Steam perfectly here, though I can't comment on WOW or anything like that.
I've heard Half Life 2 support is pretty good, and there are a lot of revies on the net that show it's working pretty well. In fact its cedega that's tempting me to go and buy HL2 - an interesting fact since I don't own a windows pc
The best thing to do is to just *try* all these things. SuSE isn't free, but there is an FTP install that should cover everything you need for gaming (the commercial extensions wont help you here and the drivers for nvidia are downloaded at install time or during a later online update).
The only problem with SuSE is a lack of a good package manager, but the installation of Apt For SuSE (http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/) solves any problems here.
As for stability I'd recommend SuSE over Mandrake, in usablilty i'd recommend it over just about everything, and I'd recommend it for gamers over the other distros.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
(I recommend other distros for other things (eg slackware or debian for servers) but thats not the point. For home users its SuSE all the way)
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
Install Linux, get a console, and simplify. The Xbox has or is getting 75% of what's decent on the PC. Joypads take five minutes to learn unless you're mentally deficient.
What Linux Distribution is the Best for Games?
And which Lotus is best for off-roading?
When I get home I game and have grown tired of trying to get linux to run the games i want to play, AND don't have the budget to buy a second virtual OS.
SOOOOOO
I recommend a KVM switch. Run lin on one box and win on the other.
AND ATI suck as it is THERE fault they have crappy support (if you can find any) for linux.
I feel like a jilted lover. 5 years ago I swore by ATI but now I only allow myself to have one ATI card at a time so I can use linux on the other pcs.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
As a longtime Cedega (wineX) user I've had best luck under Mandrake in general. Suse was my preferred distro prior but as of the last year I've had nothing but trouble gaming under it... Fedora seemed to do ok, but the most solid so far (currently playing the two games you mentioned) has been Mandrake for gaming purposes.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Heh, I know it's not to everybody's liking, but I think the manual install process of Gentoo is actually one of it's strengths. I learned more about Linux in the two days it took me to get Gentoo set up the first time than I did after months of playing around with RedHat and Mandrake and the like.
I game, therefore I am...
Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!
I was just going to mention that, but I'm astounded that this guy is yet another certifiable case of Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome.
The guy who wrote that is a freakin genius.
Okay, well, maybe not native. I use slackware and SuSE 9.2. I haven't been able to get ATI's drivers to work for Slack for almost a year now, but SuSE's downloads work well if you follow their instructions EXACTLY! I'd say go native for gaming though. There's flight simulators, Seach and Rescue, and a good number of others available. Also, playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Windows yields about 80fps at 1024x786 on my RV350AP, in linux, it's over 100fps, occasionally spiking to about 120 even with all of the effects maxed out. I tried playing the windows port of ET under cedega, and I was getting about 60fps with much less effects turned on. That's just over half of the usual performance I get from the ported linux version. If you can help it, get a ported linux game, or even a native linux game. First, showing support for native linux games shows developers that there's a market out there for linux gamers.. Second, they just work better than trying to emulate another OS on top of an OS that's already running.
Evil Walrus >83=
Uh, an automated install would just set up your system for you. The compiling part ("shit scroll by for hours") is all automated already.
Gentoo's "manual" install is basically paritioning and mounting the partitions you want to use and then extracting a giant tarball onto that structure. You then need to configure your fstab, network settings, compile a kernel, and install a bootloader.
Once you're done with that, then you move on to the automated part. The entire point to portage is to automate the compilation process.
You could, conceivably, manually install Debian or RedHat in the same way if you wanted to.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I run Ubuntu and play WoW all the time. While games don't run as fast as they do nativly in Windows, the convenience is undeniable. I'd recommend any debian or rpm based distrobution because Transgaming distributes Cedega packaged with both of those.
Life is offtopic.
As I see it, unless you have your *very first ever* gaming computer, there is no reason to not run Windows in addition to Linux. Eventually you will get a new one, and when you do, your old one can serve as your everyday linux box, with no dual booting, and only the additional cost of the KVM switch.
if you're wanting an OS to play games, I'd say try Gentoo, and maybe check out Ubuntu as well.
I'm a Gentoo guy, but I totally understand why people wouldn't want to go through the long install process. This is why VidaLinux exists. VidaLinux is essentially a precompiled Gentoo (with Gnome 2.8, etc), installed with Redhat's Anaconda Installer. works amazingly well Full working Gentoo distribution up and running in under an hour.
don't want to compile future packages? that's allright. just check out Project Chinstrap, which has precompiled packages for Gentoo. Easy as pie.
Ubuntu has its share of issues, but overall, it's a top-notch choice as well. both should work amazingly well for games.
i mod for the ubuntu forums as jdodson. anyways, i would recommend *shock* ubuntu for gaming. the reason why i would is that setting up your nvidia(ASSuming you use nvidia) card is a breeze. run three commands from console and you are done. also i have succesfully run Halflife2, War3, Starcraft(via cedega) and even native games like UT2004, Neverwinter Nights, Tuxkart, chromium, etc, etc. Anyways, setup for Ubuntu is a breeze if you follow the documentation on http://www.ubuntuguide.org for setup of said video drivers. we also maintain a list of native gnu/linux games at this URL: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=5153
If you're really thinking about dumping Windows, have you considered OS X? While there aren't anywhere near as many games on OS X as there are for Windows, the ones we do get are quality titles with native support, like World of WarCraft, Halo, The Sims, etc. You can find a pretty good list of games at Apple's web site. You can easily dip your toes into the water by ordering a Mac mini.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Any distro will do fine, so in that regard whatever distro is fastest, will in turn be fastest for games. Slackware (my distro) and Gentoo are the obvious choices. I game Doom 3 and UT2004 on those. Fedora on the other hand really fucks around with the kernels, games will work, but unless you for some reason NEED Fedora, don't even use it at all. For instance, all kernels shipped with it by default are set to run with 64 GIGABYTE high memory support. Thats a waste, and they use the same kernel even your lil 32 bit athlon XP. Your best bet for speed in terms of desktop-interactivity is something like Slackware or Gentoo with a fast kernel you compile yourself. Take an hour to really work up a good kernel config with either the gentoo-dev-sources 2.6 package, or for something like slackware use the kernel source package for the 2.6.x-ck3 patchset from linux-milita.net. At the bair minimum use a 2.6 pre-emptive kernel. One thing to note about my favourite Distro, Slackware (with the aformentioned kernel) is that cedega detects it doesnt use 'pthreads'. Since midway into the wineX version 3 products they started checking for it, as some games can use them/wont work without them. Slackware's glibc doesnt support pthreads, but for all intents and purposes all the games I tried were unaffected by THAT... Not for WineX/Cedega itself. It REALLY isnt worth it. Believe it or not, the games don't work. If your game doesnt work in WineX it is really worth a shot to run it in wine, if it doesnt work in there, dont reboot into windows. Just stop playing the game. Not because it will 'fuel the linux gaming revolution!!!' but because the game probably sucks. The really really good games with the excellent mod support (half-life 2 and Source blows) get Linux ports. Regardless the way WineX works is when a game comes out they Transgaming Rushes and hacks in support into cedega, and it really doesnt work well accorss everyones systems. Your best bet, if you REALLY can't live without the latest shitty starwars game, or the latest piece of directx garbage, Wine will soon have support for it. If you look into Winehq.com you can see that they are already doing very well with their start up work for DirectX9 implemations. And unlike transgaming they are taking their time to do it right. They are making a platform to run the games, Transgaming forked Wine, and now are trying desperatily in vain to use the executable and hack in all the needed stuff to make the game work as best as humanly possible. Plus Wine is FREE. In conclusion, Forget about Fedora, and use 2.6 kernels, the distribution from that point on in irrevlant. And hasnt this question been posed numerous times in the past? It always ends in that same kind of conclusion. PS Gentoo is the fastest of them all, but if you dont mind losing a frame or to in your games use slackware.(thats all you really get it you do your own kernels in something like slackware) You also dont have to compile everything and (insert gentoo complaints here), if thats your beef. I LIKE gentoo's emerge, but my school's connection sucks balls so it would be really difficult to get my stuff downloaded and compiled.
Am I missing something? I dual boot and have a GeforceFX. The linux and windows drivers both give solid openGL acceleration at about the same speed, but on windows I get about a dozen pages of fancy options with my nvidia drivers such as screen rotation, colour profiles, overclocking, image quality, forced FSAA and anisotropic filtering... :)
I know some of this is already included in linux by default, but how do I access all the other features in linux?
Plus, windows has direct3d - although maybe that's a liability rather than a feature
Well this is not reasonable for most people but the way I did it is just by having two systems with one running Windows and the other Linux. Then I just use Windwos for games. I'm hoping someday that game studios will stop this kind of situation but until then I have a monitor switch and two systems.
It seems there is a double standard with games -- many who preach the superiority, or at least usability of apps like Gimp, Firefox and Open Office, apparently go home and play Windows-only games.
I, for one, would be quite interested in supporting games developed specifically for Linux.
I have 2 swappable HDs and a HD bay on my computer here. When I want to work under Linux, in goes drive A and I can do some serious computing. When I want to fuck around playing Windows games, I put in drive B and I can play City of Heroes.
:P
Its superior to dual booting to my mind, each OS is completely separate and cannot possibly affect the other one, and its relatively painless to switch them around. At the same time while I am in Linux, I am not tempted to fire up a game as a distraction
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Um, no, no it doesn't. :)
/etc/fstab, creating user accounts, and the other similar stuff that is needed to set up Gentoo -is- a good way to learn your way around some of the basic stuff that you might not know about otherwise. Plus, it also gives some insight into all the things that are running in the background on the system, because each of them was set up manually by hand, rather than being done invisibly by some automated setup program.
But partitioning and formatting your HDs manually, building your own
I'm not saying that an automated install is a bad thing, just that by doing it manually, one learns a lot more about what goes into the process than they would otherwise.
I game, therefore I am...
I've cut off my ties with Windows permanently now that it'll run every game I could ever want to play (with the exception of Gunbound >.). Every Blizzard game works perfectly (including WoW, for me). Most FPS games work (Valve's games, and Id's games for sure). I don't know what the status of Sims 2 is, but otherwise I think that "I don't like linux because it doesn't run my games" is a very poor excuse at this point.
- shazow
You might as well be asking which sexual position is best. There are so many different opposing and agreeing views you have to really decide for yourself. Honestly, a debian based system would be what I recommend, but SuSe has a nice interface and just seems really professional - except not a very friendly package manager. Fedora doesn't cut it in my estimation.
I use Xandros myself, but I don't play games much -- I don't have a good graphics card -- and the libs get old real quick -- hard to update. =\
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
........ why bother? it's going to be hardcore noncompetitive with the obvious gaming solution.
just learn to dual boot people, jesus =P
The best Unix for games is still Mac OS X, which can run a lot more games natively than Linux/X86 can, and Virtual PC, while far from perfect, can as I recall run 2D DOS and Windows games reasonably well. And then there's the fact that most of the vintage Mac OS {n|6>=n=9} games.
Don't forget the UNIX games either.
Windows 98 is fairly good for older games too, but for new games that aren't OS X or Linux friendly you often just have to bite the bullet and boot into XP -- firewall it heavily and run Windows Update every time you turn it on and you should be okay. And don't use MSIE, that reduces the risks vastly.
personaly, I like all the debian based distros.. because of apt.. I tried the others but apt seems to be so great solving dependency problems.
The situation now with the Debian distros is they seem to be xfree right now for the most part.
I have run some older games, like unreal goty & quake, and it was not too terrible to figure out, but I havent tried cedega or anything cutting edge.
If it was me, I would just pick a distro I liked, set it up for dual boot, and what works.. works, and what doesn't you reboot for... VectorLinux has a nice lilo menu ... (had to tie this in somehow...)
regards
dbcad7
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
one of it's strengths
"its".
I think it's more that the manual install forces you to read the gentoo install docs than just the manual install by itself...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
This is probably the most informative post on this discussion.
HA! Yeah how about I like running my games at full speed not just emulated speed. And I like it when I can play a game the day I bought it rather than "hacking" it into playability. I'm not looking for an excuse to leave Windows, I'm looking for a better experience than Windows. Now I understand that some of you pro hacks out there can get game "X" to work on Cedega or what ever it is with "just a few tweaks" what I believe you guys don't understand is I have a life, a girl, friends, a 9-5, and a family. If I do get the time to play a game, I want to pop in the CD install it and run it without spending a few hours learning how to hack wine to get a game to work on the OS my PC didn't ship with. Mod me troll I could care less, but please let this sink into your heads. I want my games to work the way they were intended. 60 FPS is not high enough for me, and spending an exorbitant amount of money on a PC to then install Linux on it to play a Windows game at 25-75% of it's typical performance is not a sound investment. I would buy a PC that was 3 years old if I wanted to play games at that level, and the money I saved on the premium for high performance hardware would pay for itself at the very least 3 fold on my $60 student copy of XP Pro. When Linux is an easy to use OS I'll sing its praises, the OS itself works fantastic if you have nothing but free time. I'd rather stick with Windows it works the way I want it to 99.9999% of the time regardless of what you guys like to think. It's like 100 times easier to use than Linux, and even with the Mac mini it's still 1/2 the price for a comparably performing system from apple... though that thing looks damn sexy. Don't get me wrong I love open source software, I use OO.o exclusively, Thunderbird, Firefox, TighVNC, and openVPN all for win32. But Linux itself is just not ready for prime time. Cut the effort it takes for me to install programs, make it so I don't need to worry about dependencies, and all that garbage to install a program. Realize that because your OS doesn't require ".---" at the end of a file isn't a big deal. Make a distro that can be released without a shell prompt. I understand that you like the shell, I'm glad to hear it cause it ships with every distro, but I don't want to have to use it, ever, that includes when it comes time to install a new program on my PC. Sigh... I understand for you needs Linux works great, but please appreciate the fact that for mine it just doesn't come close, so please don't tell me that one of my major, and well founded caviates with the Linux/Windows situation isn't a "good excuse". Trolling done, -manno out
all you need is a lift-kit and you're set.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
RTFM - that's all I hear.... except for the blank silence of unanswered messages.
Geee I just want to make a short cut for a prog on my desktop.... NO ANSWER!
for people who use their computers, as tools to make money, and don't feel like programing, LINUX suxs.
for people who want to feel smug and superior linux is GREAT! (most people - there are plently of cool people out there who want to help, but it seems after many polite questions and research I mostly read jerks.)
I don't feel sorry for you folks who want to play games on your "Superior O/S" and can't, rather I laugh and repeat the mantra you so often chant RTFM!
Don't bother flaming me cause I won't read this post anymore...
Asking which Linux is best for games is like asking which non-alcoholic beer is best to serve at your Super Bowl party.
- Binary Packaged Games
- Source Packaged Games
For the first type, any pretty reasonably recent distro will work. The two main package formats are RPM and DEB. RPM used to be it for the most part, but these days you can usually find a DEB if there is an RPM to be had.RPM's do somewhat of a "dirty" install in that they often put files in non-standard locations and they have dependency issues. DEB packages don't really have any major flaws except perhaps that they are considerably more difficult to create properly than RPM's. Debian based distros also have the "alien" tool which can install an RPM, but their native package is the DEB. So my thought is that Debian based distros give you the best of both worlds here.
Source based packages are another matter. You need a system with a very strong compiler toolchain if you want to build beta versions of games with reasonable ease. Obviously source based distros like Gentoo and Slackware hold the high cards here, but Debian runs a close second because its toolchain is also very high quality. Gentoo is pretty nice for a lot of source based games, because chances are there is a Gentoo ebuild prepared and all you have to do is emerge the package. For Debian systems, its a bit more complicated because you have to install whatever development packages are required, but often the ones provided by Debian are not recent enough to compile the software. This is where things get ugly for Debian based systems. For Gentoo, often you can "unmask" a package and install a beta version of a developer library without much hassle.
Overall, I still would probably say that Debian unstable and its derivatives are the best choice for most gamers. You can quickly and easily install a humongous number of precompiled games, and getting the odd source based game to build isn't really a big deal unless its bleeding edge new. Debian's new installer is much improved over older variants making it not too hard for a novice to get a Debian system up and running.
Gentoo, however, is probably preferable for game developers and advanced users. It too has a considerable number of game ebuilds making installation of the more common Linux games quite painless. If you are the type who likes to play around a lot with Sourceforge CVS versions of games, then Gentoo (and similar) is probably more what you want.
In summary,
Personally, I run Gentoo on my own system, but for the wife's or kid's computers, Debian is a faster install with more games and more bells and whistles. I'd recommend starting with Debian (and derivatives) if you are pretty new to Linux. Gentoo is pretty cool but you should probably cut your Linux teeth on something with a flatter learning curve. The idea is to have fun and play some games.
Clickety Click
I use a Debian Dist in combination with Cedega.
Simply Mepis for installer & setup. Plus any change in hardware is detected on bootup.
Most of my Fav Games run near perfect.
Under Cedega:
Star Wars Jedi Academy
Star Wars Jedi Knight II
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Unreal Tournament
Clive Barkers Undying
World of Warcraft
Anarchy Online
Quake 1,2,3
RUNE
Native:
UT2004 : Edetors Choice DVD - Brilliant - HaloUT for Halo in Linux -SWEET
Cube
Enemy Territory
FlightGear
Debian Games List too long to List.
Trigger
Torcs
ArkHart
Slune
Tux Racer
America Army
RUNE
Doesn't Run
TRON
HULK
POD RACER
HALO
The only thing Cedega does is to dissuade publishers from making real Linux games and actually porting to something other than Windows.
Transgaming is almost as bad for open source as Microsoft is by itself.
Nathan's blog
You mean my "ultra-super-duper-optimized" Gentoo install isn't that good after all?
Funny, because with Slackware I ended up doing most all of that by hand anyways when setting up. Oh well,