Has anyone tried this yet? I can't find any actual reviews of this anywhere. I'd love to have a truly viable Linux gaming rig, but I want to play games like Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, modded Minecraft, and Fable 3 with equal or greater performance than a WIndows machine. That sounds unlikely...
http://play-linux.com/
Those of you that are old enough to know what load, peek, poke, etc... stand for, used to have a "gaming PC", in other words, a Commodore 64/128, a PC made for programming, that was however mainly used for gaming by most users. Those have a really good time these days with open source games, because they can play games with full performance, that is, with systems that don't have to carry the burden of a desktop environment or a compositor, etc..., they will have no trouble running their games from CLI on their linux machines.
Those that ask themselves how to get R9 290x fps rates with an Intel iGPU, are not amongst those.
Those that think that everything that's not prepackaged, walled gardened, premium-priced and major brand-named, sucks, are not amongst those either.
Those that think that you need a 3000 USD gaming rig to get the best performance, obviously haven't been learning anything from using computers.
The best gaming distro, doesn't exist. Oh, we can point users towards Manjaro Openbox or SparkyLinux or Sabayon, but that's just a misguided attempt to show people an easy way out type of compromise.
The fastest way to start a game on a PC, is through the command line, on a system that isn't running a compositor, isn't running a bunch of PIM functions and communications/notifications TSR's, isn't running a bunch of software to provide compatibility with commercial software consoles and their retarded filesystems or communications protocols... and that with any linux distro of choice...
I'm sure that there will come a point in time where people will appreciate DRM-free games again, because no DRM means no GUI client necessary to run the games (e.g. the steam client), which means a lot more system resources free, which means a lot more gaming performance on any hardware.
I'm sure that there will come a point in time where developers will come up with the next-gen gaming experience, that will require so much resources, that the only way to run the game smoothly, is by dedicating all of the resources of the machine to the game. All popular desktop environments have been following the bad example of MacOS and later of MS-Windows, and have become ever heavier. I remember the pre-Windows 3.1 days, where MacOS was king. Most users had PC's with 640 KB of RAM, some even with 1 MB of RAM, yet Apple Macintosh owners had to shell out a couple of thousand dollars for 8 MB (that's Megabytes, yes, less than the size of a single jpeg or mp3, and it cost a couple of grant...) of RAM to make MacOS, with it's tiny GUI, work at about the same speed as applications were running on MS-DOS machines with 640 KB of RAM. In 1991, a fully equipped Apple MacIntosh that could do the same as a 1000 USD MS-DOS PC, cost the same as a Mercedes Model 190 cost back then, the predecessor of the later C Class. How times have changed right? Wrong, consumers have gotten even more stupid, that's all. The thing that costs most about PC gaming these days, is the operating system the games are running on. It doesn't only cost the license of the operating system, it also costs a lot of money on things that aren't technically necessary, but are artificially made necessary by the operating system and consumer freedom limiting software like DRM and spyware and malware built into the operating systems.
If you look at what's REALLY necessary to have a great gaming experience, a graphical desktop environment, spyware/malware and digital rights management, are not on that list, nor are 600 USD GPU cards or 1000 USD CPU's or 400 USD motherboards.
The general stupidity of the "IT entusiast consumers" has reached unprecedented heights. Like for instance most "PC gaming enthusiasts" are convinced they need at least 8 GB of RAM. That is is wrong. There isn't a game they're playing that can technically use more than 3.6 GB of RAM, and most games run just fine with less than 2 GB of RAM. They just can't distinguish the operating system (well, software console...) overhead from the application system requirements anymore...
With the time robbing chaotic clickfest software consoles like MS-Windows have become, it's actually a lot faster to just enter "xonotic" (or even shorter "xon<tab>") in a command line, than to click your way through a bunch of eye-cancer-grade GUI crap that nobody needs. That is how far it has derailed. CLI is actually very efficient, even more without GUI bogging the system down.
A normally configured MS-Windows system with a regularly configured web browser of choice, will require more system resources than most modern games. You're not paying for the extra hardware because the game needs it, but because your software console needs it to run all of the spyware, malware, and useless background processes.
By looking for "gaming distros" in linux, you're going in the same direction. I propose that the experienced linux users would refrain from recommending "gaming distros" at all, but would rather direct people to the command line, because it's bloody more efficient in all aspects.
I guess it's coming down to: learn how to do it your self efficiently or shell out the money for hardware that drives the inefficient automation.
I guess most people chose that latter one, which was fine as long as processing power grew rapidly, now that it has slowed down to a crawl, the equation is going to change.
I guess the gaming devs caught on to this, hence the push fur low level hardware access.
If we want to be resolute, why stop at getting rid of the GUI and abstraction layers when we could trim our entire operating system to the point of it being just a laucher for 1 specific game. For example start XonoticOS from the bootloader.
I don't run my games from the CLI terminal, but then again my OS+gui only needs 120 megs of ram.
I guess that gaming distros like play linux are a good thing, because if people are using a crutch it might as well be one that is based on linux, that way linux gets the good driver optimization effort.
Like most Linux users, you miss the point entirely. And this is why I feel (very sadly) that Linux will not ever conquer the desktop platform. At least, for gaming. Linux developers do not get it. They can program just about anything under the sun and moon. There is obscene amounts of overhead in Windows and Mac, yes, but we can put a disk into our tower and make games happen. We want every frame per second possible without getting a computer science degree. I can't program or delve into the frustrating minutia of Linux syntax. I have a degree in physics and can do some neat things with computational programming, but I shouldn't have to spend hours of research trying to install a stupid game on a machine. I was hoping someone on this enlightened forum would have seen this distro and offered some insights, but I understand it is typical to mock someone with a different skill set than your own.
I hate Ubuntu, but for the average Linux user who just wants to game, and have no fuss this could be something good, I have had many issues with X and AMD drivers in the past with Ubuntu, if they where sorted this could work well, I would never ever recommend Ubuntu again, but maybe this :)
Ill test it later on in VM :)
That's a remarkably ignorant comment if you don't mind me saying...
1° It's much easier to install applications, including games, in linux (it's like Android, everything is found in the GUI frontend of the package manager, that downloads from official repositories, and even in the command line, it's much easier still, e.g. to install the shooter Xonotic in for instance Arch linux, all you have to enter would be "pacman -S xonotic", and then it would install in less than a minute on a medium fast internet connection), and for DRM-protected games, like Steam games, there is absolutely no difference at all with how the Steam client works on software consoles.
2° Is this what access to technology has brought you? Expecting a brand name? Because when you're installing software in a software console like MS-Windows, you're installing software from media or from websites, whereby you put all your trust in the brand name, because you can't see the actual code, and you don't even know that what you're asking for, is actually whats' downloading and installing on your computer. In the linux world, we put our trust in encryption, to make sure that the code that we're seeing, the code that is vetted by developers, is exactly the same code that is downloaded and installed. And even though that is pretty foolproof, even then, application software is installed in "user space", meaning without any access to the system and secured data, and without control over the machine. It's just a matter of seeing what's important. One moght have expected human beings with access to education, access to all the data in the world through the internet, and access to powerful computing hardware, to grow smarter than to just put all of their money and trust in brandnames on obfuscated code that is waaaaaaaaaaaaay too large to just do what it says on the tin...
@Sigiler
Most of the linux developers I know and work with are for the most part, down-to-earth people. I wouldn't paint us all with the same brush, or you might begin to marginalise a small group for the sake of hap-hazard generalization, and your personal pet-peeves.
Anyway, thank you for the head-up on "Play Linux." I shall try it out when I have some spare time.
As an aside, you may be interested in checking out "MIA 2.0 Game On" It's a plug-and-play Ubuntu based distro focusing on controller based gaming like emu ROMS, MAME etc.
There is obscene amounts of overhead in Windows and Mac, yes, but we can put a disk into our tower and make games happen. We want every frame per second possible without getting a computer science degree
Sorry to break it to you but the obscene amounts of overhead are part of the not needing a computer science degree. (ok some of it is due to short sighted design choices)
Linux is efficient & versatile , if you want noob-proof you have to give up on either efficiency or versatility.
You are getting "mocked" well lets call it corrected, because you are asking for a thing with contradictory properties.
I highly agree, Look at arch, while been easy its not noob proof, and I like this, I want it to break to teach me, and I want a community backing me that can teach me and guide me, Windows and Mac cant provide this.
This I feel personally is down to education in I.T, in both school and college I was raised on Windows, and I personally used Windows at home so I could game and had to use office (because the education system here doesn't believe in FOSS).
We where briefly introduced to Linux in college for about 5 mins via Ubuntu 8, not the best start but a start non the less, but no one could use it.
The kids that played with it continued to use Windows, because it wasn't as refined and polished as Windows on the surface, and they couldn't be arsed to learn to fix things (Hell your doing a BTEC I.T qualification, you need to learn this stuff!)
While I also continued to use Linux I followed it with a secret passion, and learned about its efficiency over its noob proof, I wanted to learn, not be guided via a dam point and click installer, which Ubuntu has...
Now today I am studying for Linux thanks to this great little corner we have here on Tek Syndicate, and because of the way we talk and think, and the fact we help noobs, pushes us personally to efficiency.
So I whole heartedly agree with your post, while not with the way you put mocked, but the meaning behind it.
To put it this way, we need kids to learn how to use Linux, and how to actually work things instead of having a GUI in a container with chains binding you to crapware that is unstable and slow as hell, which is also miles behind even Debian stable.
Just wanted to share that :)
I want it to break to teach me, and I want a community backing me that can teach me and guide me,
I agree fully with this. Its something that has been lost with modern computing. When hardware used to break, we learned what killed it, how to fix and then repair it. Going on to tell others that you should be careful about X and if it breaks to do Y.
Modern computing has lost this mentality as people want things to just work and by which time if does break, its usually become obsolete (in the eye of that particular user) and they replace it with something newer, regardless if it was a simple fix.
Anyway, as to the main point of this thread. Looks pretty interesting and I will certainly have a look at it.
The guy just asked an opinion on that distro, not an essay. I respect Zoltan's, FluffyMace's and XDroide626's opinions but sadly you are missing the point. There are some interesting topics here for debate (Linux as a learning tool, Usability and Accesibility vs customization), but I feel they belong to their own threads.
Now, save yourselves the nitpickings and get to the point: Is that distro good for gaming? Are there any tools or settings in this one that would save an average person a ton of time of researching to get his game going?
Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering and learning with linux, but sometimes, I just want to play a game without having to dpkg-reconfigure xorg.conf or compiling a hotfixed kernel because a fucking bluetooth dongle doesnt work and QTSixA can't recognise my Dualshock controller, fixing some obscure config file that prevents wine from installing .NET 3.5 SP1, etc...
To keep it short: the distro in hand is advertising a better linux gaming experience, that is, less tinkering, more playtime.
@Sigiler, I'm downloading it right now and I'll install it on my main rig. I'll come back with some kind of report/review when I have it running for a day or 2
I don't think GUI is unnecessary, but I agree that it's not optimized enough. Also, high performance graphics cards are necessary for high resolution gaming.
Yes, background processes take away from the performance when you play games, but not that much. But I would rather keep the GUI and have it more optimized (The first thing I do in windows is to disable animations because that's just stupid).
No, I don't want to go back to text based OS. It's not the 90's anymore and our hardware is fast enough to support it. Again, I would like to see things get more optimized because that's free performance..
Also, about RAM. While I agree with you that most of the games themselves can be played perfectly with 4GB of RAM and I been recommending 4GB for people on tight budget. But 4GB is from some stupid reason not enough for chrome.. I'm a little angry when I have only 40 tabs open and chrome takes so much more RAM than it has too. even IE does it more efficiently (baahh). The main reason I have 16GB of RAM is because I do heavy multitasking.
These $1000 CPUs are not targeted for gamers. It's targeted for productivity and professional work that require a lot of horsepower. When talking about medrange gaming, an FX 6300 is pretty good $100 CPU that can play games really well (mostly because games don't require that much CPU power). On tighter budgets an athlon 760K will do a great job, pair it with 4GB of RAM and an R9 270 and you got a sweet $400 gaming system (or $480 with windows D:)
Also, I agree with you about DRM free games. It seems like I'm the only one among my friends that seems to be unhappy from the fact that I don't actually own the game (if there's DRM, you don't actually own the game). This is why whenever I can, I will buy games DRM free like in GOG, although they have a limited selection of games. The problem is that publishers believe that DRM is the only way to stop piracy, but in fact it has been proven time and time again that DRM is useless against piracy. Most of the DRM free games are indie games (something that I appreciate a lot more than most AAA games anyway).
My point is that a dedicated distro for gaming, like a dedicated distro for this or that, is not really interesting as such.
Any distro is basically just a selection of packages with a choice of package manager and repos. That's it. I think it's much more interesting to start out with a good base distro, then make your own selections and custom distro.
For gaming, it's ideal to start from a minimal install without heavy DE. Even XFCE is too heavy to get the most performance out of games. It still does compositing and stuff, and thus uses unnecessary resources. A full DE in linux can be had, including launcher docks, with less than 64 MB of RAM, but that's still not necessary to game.
The same goes for trash like the Steam Client or other linux native software consoles, which require an lxc to be used safely, or even worse, a windows VM to run games on, which is a huge overhead and waste of resources, yet, it's still the lesser evil in comparison to "optimized" wine configurations, which are not only a huge permanent loss of ressources (a simple windows file used in a wine config for a single game can be half a GB large easily, it's hugely inefficient, because for every game, a different set of windows file will have to be loaded, all wasting extra space, gigabytes and gigabytes of it, together more than the waste of space of a Windows VM, which can easily be stored as an appliance, whereby all the typical waste of storage space from Windows though files full of zeroes, is automatically reduced, and the same Windows VM plays all the games without needing a different wine config and different huge windows files for every game.
That's my gripe with "gaming distros". They are just Windows emulations basically, not very logical, certainly not efficient. In my opinion, a huge loss of time and resources.
Why do you hate ubuntu? Just AMD drivers? They suck over the entire linux eco-system for the most part.
I'm going to be extremely disappointed if you say anything along the lines of 'muh botnet'. Especially considering you post from the point of view of someone apparently in the know...
I personally use ubuntu minimal on both my notebook and my pc, the driving factor being nvidia prime support for my notebook (which, at least at the time of install was the only distro to easily support it, sure I could mess around with it, but I made the decision after a long day of getting annoyed at computers at work). Extending on to using it on my desktop, I do that solely for continuity when switching between devices and being able to pull and place the same configs/scripts/css for both systems.
However one thing I do miss from Arch that kind of makes me wish to go back to it on the desktop was the AUR. But it's still not a good enough of a feature for me to be arsed to make the switch, perhaps when I inevitably break something... I figure Aur is only good for about 30minutes when I setup my pc anyway, so the minor inconvenience of dpkg'ing something isn't a problem. Thus far I've not had to compile any programs that I needed.
Back on topic, I find the point of a gaming linux distro kind of silly. I appreciate valves intent in their specific case with steamOS, but they've the manpower and cashflow to hopefully get the ball rolling, unless you have that leverage I feel you could've spent your time contributing towards or making something else.
Reading over the website it doesn't seem to be anything special, I can appreciate the aim with making it nooby friendly, which is the correct ideal(for certain distros, we have hundreds of them.. I think these linux purists/elitists [not implying you're one] can get the hell over it [you've no idea how much I want to make a graphical installer for gentoo that comes with unity just to piss off these kind of people]), the assertion that something easy also has to be bloated is completely and utterly moronic.
Having automatically installing drivers and pre-installed programs makes it easy for normal people, most of which would've already installed all this shit anyway (pro-tip, they have absolutely 0 intent to learn about how their computer works in any way, shape or form). There doesn't need to be any other safeguards utilized than the one we currently use, admin pw.
If you give children your admin pw, you deserve to get shot in the foot, if you fuck with things you don't understand, the same thing. (of course this is how I chose to learn, but that was my intention all along, I don't go rip apart my car just because I have the tools to do it)
tldr more babies first linux distros are good, specifically targeting them at things I guess is also perfectly reasonable, I mean we have distros dedicated entirely to network pen. As far as I'm concerned you can rip apart any of them if you find anything they do so abhorrent anyway.
People need to stop waving their dick about because they use linux and believe it's some kind of super power requiring the brainpower of all the great minds to of existed combined. It doesn't it follows logical rules just like anything else, and if you have a few hours you can fix any fuckup you make.
Not quick =/= hard.
And also, as far as im concerned, attracting flocks of morons who don't even know the prt screen key exists adds opportunities for paid support in the consumer market.
Nan & Pop don't mess with things, they call 'the guy'.
Probably cursed a few times, which I can't remember the rules on, also mentioned things not relevant to your comment, but that were relevant to the thread at large, not really used to the whole traditional forum thing after such a long absence, wasn't sure how to format it to quote or direct it at certain people.
*Looking forward to a Linux Distro heavily favouring Gaming*
Install went fine, as soon as I installed Proprietary drivers and rebooted, cursor, cursor, cursor, cursor, cursor
Constant crashes, I mean constant, the Live CD is fine, I can run it easily, but as soon as the bare metal install is finished, X cant launch and can only be fixed with AMD Catalyst, I want a free system, not one with blobs, hence why I moved to Linux, and I dont see why I should sacrifice my views to run a system like that.
I dont have a problem with their server/minimal distros, I have used them many times without many problems I cant solve, and feel that I have more freedom with Ubuntu Minimal than actual Ubuntu/Unity, but then again I still feel slightly restricted on whats going into my system, as say compared to something like Arch/Gentoo and maybe even to a point Fedora.
As a whole I prefer Arch over Ubuntu and apt anyways, although as said, I would have no issue having to run Ubuntu Server/Minimal in an actual environment, compared to home where tinkering and gaming happen.
Also to your comment about baby distros, I have to agree they are good, but again if you want something efficient you need to learn it, and fine if you can get Ubuntu working, use it, more power to you, but I feel personally you wont get the true power of Linux, and stripping Ubuntu is more work for a new person than actually installing something like say Gentoo to get its efficency out.
If Ubuntu works for you, and runs fine and all you do is web browse, go Ubuntu or Mint, if you want to tinker go further up the chain and get a distro that accepts you tinkering instead of breaking and halting progress, unless you like that sort of thing :)
I dont care about bloat. Hardware easily beats the games being made. It crazy games are still 32 bit and use small memory footprints. Thats a whole other topic itself.
I want out of windows and to be able to game reliably. I didn't mind Windows 7 but 8 makes me cringe and 9 looks crap as well. The cloud can go blow itself. I dont want half my system tied to the internet and OS X and Windows are both running straight for that so they can lock down users to platforms.
Im looking at KVM now as a possible stepping stone. Id like to be gorn from windows before 7 is EOL'ed.
I am not sure what the answer is to get the momentum for gaming developers to code for native linux is.
Sabayon is already dead simple. It has a steam machine mode and drivers are installed by default. If you want wine and wine tricks, it is just a few clicks away in the package manager (rigo).
I have a few thoughts to add to this very interesting discussion.
First off, I'm all for learning and figuring things out on my own. Sure, windows is "easy" to use, but what does it actually teach you? Very little. I see the benefits in the efficiency and potential in Linux and thus I enjoy spending time just tinkering and trying to fix issues within various distros.
Several months ago I built and HTPC and had intended to run Linux on it. As a HTPC, all I need it to do is run stream netflix, youtube, play media off the home network and run Steam in-home game streaming. To this day, I still don't have it working properly and there are several reasons why.
One issue is poor performance due to drivers. I've tried both proprietary and open source graphics drivers and they seem to work "ok". The hardware is powerful enough to stream games like Metro Last Light through Steam at 50+ fps, yet it struggles to stream 1080p or even 720p video from youtube and netflix is only smooth some of the time. The other issue is audio drivers (pules-audio) which I've spent countless hours trying to fix/solve with no progress or improvements at all.
Do I blame Linux for simply not working? No, because it's the MS/windows plugins in FF and Chrome that do not support/work on the opensource platform. Plugins like flash and silver light. There are workarounds, but they aren't perfect. Unfortunately I don't know enough at this point to create my own work around, so I'm stuck with the current solutions. As for the audio drivers, I have no idea what the issue is - still scratching my head over that one.
This brings me to my next point which is more relevant to the topic. It's great to understand and know how somethings should work and to explain the most efficient way to, for example, install and play a game. The problem is we are stuck with software consoles like Steam where by the majority of games must be installed with and run from. We can't just snap our fingers and change everything, we have to work with what is currently compatible, whether we like it or not.
Those of us who are gamers, whether we enjoy tinkering with Linux or not, also do like to spend a good portion of our time actually playing games. It doesn't matter if Linux is better or more efficient than windows, what's the point of running Linux on your gaming PC if you rarely or never actually get to play any games on it? (playing devil's advocate). That has been my main frustration with my HTPC - while I do enjoy learning and using Linux, it would also be nice to actually use the PC for what it was intended for. When my wife and I sit down to watch a movie and it starts stuttering or the audio breaks up or it just plain doesn't work, what other option do I have but to swap the HDMI cable over to our older windows 7 laptop with lesser hardware that just simply works?
I hate MS for forcing us to use their software console(s), but I also understand why they do it. Business is business and it's all about making money. Even if you build a gaming PC with Linux as the main OS, you still have to purchase windows (if you don't have a copy) and install it in a VM (as described in Zoltan's thread "What if I want it all.") to be able to run certain games. I agree largely with many of you here in advocating for better education about Linux and not simply taking "the easy path" because it's more convenient. I want Linux to become more popular and gain more traction, but more people need to get educated and get on board in order for that to happen.
Is that distro good for gaming?
yes
Are there any tools or settings in this one that would save an average person a ton of time of researching to get his game going?
They want to provide plug and play functionality of wine without the need for user intervention, as well as some preconfigured hardware drivers: so yes.
Keep in mind that the popularity of your hardware & game choices will influence your experience.
