My teenage son wants to try a new distro for gaming. Our family has been using pop os for years, but he wants to try something new. The main three I see are

  • nobara (fedora based)
  • garuda (arch based)
  • drauger (ubuntu based)

The machine he’s using is a 2018 Intel nuc. It has a strong processor (core i7) but no discrete graphics. I can’t tell which (if any) of the distros above would be better or worse for his case.

Reading around, it seems like Garuda might be slightly more fiddly. And, Drauger I only saw mentioned in a couple of articles, but not on this forum. Are these impressions correct? Do you have any other advice for us?!

  • Starbuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    The biggest danger you’re going to run into is that those distros all lie downstream of the real changes, so non-gaming (and potentially security related) fixes might be slow or incompatible.

    If you go with something like Fedora or Ubuntu, there is going to be full support on all the core things, and you can build the gaming experience you want on top. Any changes that Nobara or Drauger are making to their distros you could probably make yourself.

    (I’ve never used any of those distros, but I’ve found winehq and other tools on Fedora more than sufficient)

    • zipsglacier@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      I know that any distro can be a gaming distro in principle, but we don’t really know what changes we should be making to improve his experience, so that’s what we’re hoping one of the gaming distros can help with. I’m fairly comfortable with what I need to do for my daily use, but not so much for games.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      The biggest danger you’re going to run into is that those distros all lie downstream of the real changes, so non-gaming (and potentially security related) fixes might be slow or incompatible.

      From what I’ve read about Brazzite, their release process seems fairly automated and given that it’s an Universal Blue project, I have faith that this won’t suffer from such problems for the foreseeable future.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        They rebuild their images once a day iirc, which should be fast enough even for security related issues. And because of automated updates, systems will probably receive updates more timely than on regular distros (by default, it’s always configurable).

        • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          And Brazzite as being a flavor of Universal Blue is already part of a bigger project. As much as I respect the Glorious Eggroll fella, Nobara is basically a one man project.