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? "

Comments

Re:Gentoo

[Tr0mBoNe-]

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!!

Re:There is no best Linux for games

[Sparr0]

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.

Gentoo's manual install is arguably a -good- thing

[ClassicG]

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.