What distribution would you recommend for running games without too much of supplemental shared library downloads?

After some 5 or more years of my avoidance and negligence of learning new technologies such as Dual Core Processing, EIDE, IDE, SATA, SAS, UHID and USB I have finally got lid of my fear and am able to accept my first Dell Dimension. From my day one with PC back in 1986, I had always chosen to build my own system and was very hard to accept the system build by someone else. But building own system based on my goal and ideal got so expensive.

One other reason I had avoided main stream system was my SCSI only attitude. One time, I have had as many as 4 or 5 SCSI channels to support SCSI devices of different speed, I used printer, scanner, disk, tape, CD, DVD and like all on SCSI and it was necessary. I have always been afraid to give up SCSI but support of SCSI got so scarce and many manufacturers have stopped producing anything based on conventional SCSI technology (68 or 80 or 50 pin). SCSI command set survives on serialised SCSI, serialised IDE, fibre channel, fire wire1394 and on some UHID device but physical form of SCSI is practically dead out there except here at my home.

Over the holidays, I have had some time to explore what open Suse can offer in games and multimedia field.

I have not had time to explore multimedia but trying out games on open Suse were totally disaster. Once upon a time, Suse was one of greatest platform for experimenting games, different window managers and multimedia but now at least half of games I have recently tried caused segmentation fault even after having met all the library requirements.

First of all Suse 11 failed library dependency on any attempt to install sizable games (anything over 5MB in package size) such as Thunder and Lightning, Flight Gear and the like. After lengthy downloads of required libraries and drivers in RPM format, more than half of them refused to run. Problem includes the Thunder and Lightning package compiled on Suse 10.3 by Toni Graffy from the one of well accepted RPM repositories. What a disappointment! Only programmes that installed clean on open Suse 11 were celestia, stellarium and xephem after I made some modification to add simultaneous motif compatibility of libXm.so.1, Xm.so.1.2, Xm.so.2 and Xm.so.3. I tested all motif dynamic dependency using ldd with binaries in question and subsequent application test. They are correctly linked but both OpenGL and mesa support were much slower than debian and fedora. Compatibility is more important than security. I do not use any security feature in any OS. If you maintain weekly updated images of all your partitions, you can safely run everything as root. That restores everything perfectly than any virus recovery procedure. At this time, for linux and unix OS, you have to give exactly same numbers of cylinder counts per partition cloning for extreme safety unlike that of Norton Ghost32 on PCFS which can compress image by 30 - 40 percent on the fly. In unix, imaging may not be a right word, perhaps block by block and inode by inode cloning may be more appropriate for backup safer than dd. I also use TkZip for day to day differentials. If you do not like permission and owner system imposed by unix and disable them all, careful double backup is necessary.

Have open Suse and Suse abandoned running games? I want to know because it wastes my time going after something no longer exist in open Suse and Novel Suse distribution policies. There are practically no games that Suse can install and run out of box that was possible up to Suse 9.x even to 10.3 with a few shared library addition. Downloading and supplementing with a few shared libraries are quite acceptable and of a common sense but over a dozen of libraries for setting up every viable 3D game that exist out there is too much for me.
Is there an established Suse library repository like packages.debian.org or fedora.org where you can reference the compatibilities with games?

Also open Suse lacks simple thing as mouse double click timing control. All previous KDE did have such control (in look and feel control) to accommodate someone with arthritis like myself who badly need such feature. Such feature is much more important than app armour or cryptic directories which I would never use.

Open SUSE is visually very appealing but many things are missing what we used to have on Suse distributions. Is it the distribution and development community wide goal to shift the platform audiences to business users only?

Open Suse seem to have its srength in:

Visualy appealing and carefully layed out applets
Advanced and marked reliabiliry in udev support (USB support)
Marked hardware compatibility – video card, sound card, scsi card, printer, mouse, keyboard, SATA, CD, DVD and all
High disk to disk and CD/DVD to disk data transfer rate
No legendary KDE problem such as dcop socket ghosting
Over all efficient for business use

pinecloud,

I recommend using a distro based on Debian like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. You won't run into many dependency issues if the software is installed with apt-get/synaptic.

I have no clue what "mainstream Linux" is. In our company, it would mean RHEL, and there would be no games (officially). (Our IT folk do a really good job with Linux, but RHEL is the only officially-supported distro.)

In the Linux community (Borg?), there is no central government---we get games the same way we get anything else: demand from users + the aggregated efforts of individuals who enjoy writing SW with only the slimmest hopes of getting paid. (I'm not being negative here--it is simply a reality that making money is probably not the prime motivation for many people who contribute to OpenSource.)

After giving the above advice a try, if it fails you, try Slackware. For sure there will be no dependency issues at all, because there is no dependency management, which I think is a very good thing.

I run all sorts of games on Slackware, and usually, because I install everything from source myself, everything actually f'n works. It's crazy...