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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? "
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...
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.
Thats why i experience a 2 FPS drop? You just pulled that number out of your ass.
It doesn't emulate. It's a wrapper - it translates the calls to the appropriate API, rather than drawing it in software with occasional help from your hardware(as would be emulation).
But, you do have a point in that using them doesn't push devs to develope cross-platform. But, neither does the small market share making noise.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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
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.
...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...
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 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.
That's pretty untrue. Linux is as good a platform, if not better to write games for. The difference is market share, and that is all.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
There more then a few people that support Transgaming's work, but the anti-wine groups tend to be louder.
I've been a subscriber for over 21 months and support their work, as it does NOT make companies not want to port to Linux. That is a decision usually made long before the product hits the shelves, ideally in the planning stage before any code is written.
Those that say company A won't port game B to Linux because it runs fine with Cedega are delusional and use that as an excuse. Transgaming is looked down on because they have "stolen the code" and "don't return their changes".
The GPL at the time of the WineX fork was completely within the rights and they do give back. They are also legally bound to not redistribute the copy protection code, other then that all the code of freely available in their CVS.
If you don't like it, don't use it as we don't need to hear the same hallow excuses over and over again.
All the 'proof' I've seen has been bogus and nothing but more ranting (someone with your same argument doesn't count as proof).
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
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...
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.
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