Arch base v Sabayon for gaming? (No flame)

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Okay so which would be suggested? I love pacman over Equo, but I love sabayon.

The system will be for games, I was as bleeding edge as poss, 3.13 kernel, RadeonSI for R600 (If possible) KVM/QEMU easy setup via virt-manager and native gaming.

Adding to this I was to use PS1 emus to play the classics I have :) to play via disks hopefully :)

I like Minimal systems, lightweight DEs and fast boots (I am on SSD) looks don't bother me, I spend a lot of time looking at text so yeah DE looks are nothing (Thinking Fluxbox)

Generally everything a windows gamer wants, but can have mwhahaha.

Also I want to know in KVM how to set it to 8 core faking, and direct passthrough, I have an i5 2500 with a G1 Sniper M3 so i am sure IOMMU is possible, I cant find the options recommended in zoltans guide :(

Don't start arguing please, I want to keep this clean, anyones contribution is welcome regardless of experience.

Thanks in advance!

2

Both would perform the same, really.

3

Okay so what DE works well for been light then? Razr Flux etc 

4

Fluxbox is good. Do you want a tiling, floating, or dynamic WM?

5

I like the look of tiling, With 2bwm, but its still in alpha no? I would prefer to move to text based WM, get out of this GUI habbit :)

6

Text based WM? That's just use framebuffer and tmux.

I recommend Bspwm as a tiling WM for X. I've moved to a pure Wayland system, and love it, but the Nouveau drivers aren't quite there yet, so you may want proprietary driver if you're gaming, and they are limited to X.

7

I have AMD so drivers should not be an issue, and how do you move to wayland and to 3.13 in arch?

8

I know that there is the 3.13.1 kernel in the Testing repository. My guess is that you just need to uncomment the line in the pacman.conf file.

9

Okay, Can do that before first update then :) 

10

kernel 3.14rc1 is even available.

there are a lot of aspects about using linux to do stuff that was intended to be kept away from open source platforms, like playing games or using gaming graphics cards, that require some degree of experience to get right.

it's much easier to set up a virtual container with PCI passthrough when you've already learned how to set up virtual machines for a production environment.

you need to give yourself time with linux, do some real stuff with it first, so that you understand how it works.

those that went along with linux back in the days before the kernel 2.4-2.6, know a lot about how linux works because of the problem solving of the past, and can't really imagine the problems beginning users might encounter, because it all seems so self-explanatory and evident. and because of the huge amount of factors in every install, it's almost impossible to help someone out without having the system logs.

of course people want the best possible performance, but you don't learn to drive in an Ariel Atom, you learn to drive in a family car.

Why don't you start with Manjaro, OpenSuSE or Mageia first, install all your things there, and then move up to Arch with a minimal window manager?

performance depends on a lot more than the RAM footprint of the DE or WM. every part of the system can be improved, always, and it's never a static situation, because linux is always a work in progress.

i would recommend sticking to the more user-friendly but bleeding edge fast distros like Manjaro XFCE until you have enough experience to diagnose instinctively what part of your system needs what tweak to finetune performance. Just follow you gut feeling about the choice of distro that you work best with. That's what most linux users do. Different people have different logic, just like different distros have different logic.

11

What I do is have a live bookmark with the rss feed from the arch linux home page. I check it from time to time and I try to click on as many packages as possible and read the description (I don't know what 99% of them are, to be honest), I've found a few nifty packages this way (my current favorite being yakuake).

12

Okay but I expect breakage on 3.14 so I may go for it.

And like what? System tweaks for performance etc? And I want a VM for them windows games :) that's all :) any labs are via virtual box

13

I'm happy with arch, but I'm using catalyst because my hybrid graphics don't behave well with the open source driver. For the PCI passthrough I couldn't find much information, but it's mainly possible though virt-manager as I saw.

I also read a lot of recommendations and documentations for XEN, but I'm not an expert there..

As for DE did you think of enlightenment maybe?