I looking to build a couple of Linux gaming PCs and I would like some advice as to which distribution of Linux works best in your opinion. Please take in consideration video, sound and dev configurations.
Thanks,
Scott Nash

I know Gentoo has a large amount of (linux) gamers in it's user base. There is even a gaming specific subforum on the Gentoo boards. There is also plenty of (popular) linux games in Portage (the package management system).

Well i dont think theres much difference between distros when it comes to installing and running games. i personally have only tried Fedora Core 4 and havnt had any issues with anything up to date. What games do you have in mind ?

there some patches you can gte for the kernel that are siupposed to improve gaming

sorry this question dont was for this forum

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, but if you're saying that this question isn't suitable for LQ, I'd beg to differ. I think it's a valid question to ask, and I'm sure others would be interested in reading the replies.

I'm not sure there is much difference between distros when it comes to gaming. I think that there are other things to consider first that are more important, such as using an nvidia card as opposed to an ATI card (cause I always find ATI cards more difficult for installing drivers and configuring for 3D), using Cedega, etc... I would have thought (and this is only my opinion) that the distro chosen is going to be almost irrelevant - just go for whichever one you feel most comfortable with using.

No, he meant that he asked in the wrong place and so deleted the message. Slackware is a decent distro for playing.

Ahh, thanks for clearing that up

i like gentoo as a distro as a whole the only problem is that you have to built everything from source. thats ok i dont mind that it just really time consuming though and takes alot of resources in the process. thats why i like slackware it installs really easy but alot of time you have to build packages from source so you get the same effect.

i guess that the end result of this thread is that most distros are good for gaming so if ur selscting a distro, gaming isnt something to worry abt.

Actually they do... Take for instance the Con Kolivas kernel patch, it improves peformance a lot by tweaking the scheduler (the part of the kernel which tells it how much resources and how much processing time any given app gets). This helps in terms of overall performance, plus low latency (and really makes a difference with "emulated" apps running through Wine/Cedega).

The bottom line is that to have a really good system for gaming, you have to tweak a lot of the system yourself, I don't think there is a distro specifically aimed at gaming (except maybe for the Knoppix-Games liveCD/DVD). The main problem at making a gaming specific distro is that it most likely will have some heavy system requirements (fairly powerfull CPU, plus fair enough amount of RAM), specially tweaked kernel, this in itself rules out a lot of machines (in the range of P2s and earlier). Also this kind of distro would have to drop some packages in favor of others (for example authoring tools would not be at a higher priority, nor server packages), on the plus side, it would at least come with hardware accelerated drivers for nVidia and ATi cards, at least!

BUT EVEN SCARIER : If you play it foreward, it installs WIN-XP !.....now that's a funny one

Yes, you generally wouldn't have a problem with it but linux is built however the distro wants it built and depends on the one you have. You might not notice much difference between some which is what ^ is saying but there should be a distro that is built with gaming in mind.

The reason is that there are processes that run in the background in linux depending on what you have setup or what the distro has setup and those could interfere with the game because it could be that gaming isn't in the mind of the developers that write these daemon services (maybe i'm not sure but I would take that into account).

There are a lot of ways you could customize Linux just for a gaming platform it just needs to be optimized for it which I would suggest Gentoo if you wanna learn how to do something like that. Gentoo is a good tool to have around that is for sure. I hope they stay around for a long time.

In fact I have seen somewhere that there was a bootable CD with a Gentoo build with a game on it which played just like sticking a playstation 3 dvd in and playing.

I really wish more people would try to get the game developers to do that with production quality games and put a Xorg and KDE and Gnome on it. You could build a linux OS for gaming off of a liveCD or make a partition for the OS and it just have the basic apps that you want to have and all of the libraries that is needed to run the game.

I really wish somebody out there was working on this and giving the developers out there a second choice. Not only would it steal market share from M$ but it would be good for linux and the SDL and OpenGL organizations for which I have a lot of respect in for their innovations.

Examples of Game Distribution:

1. Build a LiveCD with the Linux kernel and GNU/Linux with just Xorg and auto load the game at startup of X.

2. Build a LiveCD with the Linux kernel and GNU/Linux with Xorg and KDE/Gnome and setup an installation of a customized Gaming OS to setup on a partition on the hard drive and install the games and all games in the future for the OS to that partition with the Gaming OS.

I know people are going to say that it won't work and the devs won't use it so it is a waste of time but if it was given plenty of time for the word to get out and setup to be user friendly with less ways to mess up the OS and maybe even given a really nice GUI then I don't see any reason not to develop games for it. It would be good for support reasons which companies worry about; which is ridiculous in my opinion because they should well know that the Linux organizations out there support themselves and don't need support from them.

btw, if anybody has anything to add or corrections then i'm open to anybody that has any input.

-Josh Young

I think that if you ever want to play windows games using WINE=wine is not an emulator! then you should check wine hq becuase different linux distros work great using wine and cedega while others run like garbage so if you have any windows games that you want to play then check how well they run under different distrobutions on wines sites, go to a specific game and check its playability rating!

i read on this site about this live DVD, maybe it can add to the discussion:
live.linux-gamers.net .