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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? "
I've "sat through" the install on a less than uber system and it can take upwards of 3 days to build and install all the needed and wanted packages for a complete system. But, it's worth it.
I've had Cedega running with Steam for CS quite well. It only took 2 tries and 32 wtf's. Also, for games that run in linux when a patch is properly applied, you can emerge them. but you need the cd's or images as the emerge only comes with the patch. but it does the install for ya. Gentoo is teh slick... I just wish their install process was a little more automated. HINT HINT!!
while(1) { fork(); };
Cygwin has its uses, but it's just not a substitute for Linux. You don't switch to Linux because you want to run a particular Linux-only program -- those are actually pretty rare. You switch to Linux because you're tired of the flakiness, lack of security, and nonconfigurability of Windows.
The fact is that different distributions can make this emulation process smoother & faster, which in turn make the gaming better. I run CS (1.6) through Point2Play (Cedega frontend) on Ubuntu, works flawlessly, I run nVidia drivers which are pretty damn good, though my FPS is down about 30% from 100 on Windows, it isn't noticeable (in a game like CS 1.6, anyway).
Some people experience better FPS through Linux/Cedega than they do on Windows XP. I'm not sure why, to be honest, but it can happen.
You can certainly have better gaming distros, ones with good pthreads configuration, for example. Also, the kernel you choose will be very important for obvious reasons, as well as Xorg.
Personally, I would strongly suggest Mandrake because it's defaults are very nicely set up for gaming, it should be the simplest and easiest to get everything set up, with lots of support (you'll find a lot of Mandrake users running games through Cedega) from the regular Mandrake channels and ofcourse on the Transgaming website itself.
Also, This thread entitled "Which distro is simplest for Cedega and P2P" sounds like a needed read for the submitter.
great speech, from someone who has never used cedega. linux HAS the best video drivers, with as many or more features as the windows counterparts (for my nvidia cards at least). for performance lag, thats on a game by game basis. linux native games (savage, ut2004, every single ID game) run faster in linux almost 100% of the time. SOME windows games run faster (WoW being a prime example). most windows games run slightly slower on the graphical end, but almost every single windows game runs faster on the computational end, because the cedega emulation of various windows system calls such as disk access and paging are faster.
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"
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...
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=
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.
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.