Just a question to throw out in the open:

What is the best gaming distro? Despite the limited number of retail games out there (for now), what distro is the best performer/ease of use for relative newbie to intermediate user. This would mean some of the following:

1. Few unneccessary programs running in the background.
2. Ease of use for system manipulation.
3. Support for newest hardware.
4. Optimizations for speed.

I'm sure there's more...

What's the verdict?

I wouldn't think any distro would be better or worse than another since you'll probably be using wineX to play a lot of modern games. So.. I'd say use whatever distro you're most comfortable with.

Given, WineX has gotten better, it's detrimental to native ports and actually making games for linux users in mind (my opinion, anyhow). What I wanted to know is this: is there a distro that anyone has used that they prefer for game playing. Red Hat 9, for example, I've heard has compatibility issues with older Loki games, along with unneccessary background tasks. Mandrake has included a lot of SDL stuff, so that makes dependencies easier. Gentoo can compile from source, so it could technically be a much faster distro. Any thoughts?

i think slack compiles everything from source, so if you feel that makes it faster, then slack's your distro...
slack doesn't have 'unecessary' stuff in the background as well. you've got to manually man-handle/woman-handle every little thing to get it going...

Gentoo actually has a gaming distro...you can get either from their website or from linuxiso.org. Anyways, I would go with gentoo. They seem to be a great setup for unreal tournament at least. I would say gentoo.

I've heard great things about Gentoo as well. I was wondering, however, if it is required to download any additional, somewhat necessary components (kde, etc) on the gaming distro addition? I have a 56k connection that's slower than Iraq's.

I've been checking out Slackware, as well. It seems fast, but a little difficult to manage. I was wondering if Gentoo is at the same difficutly, or is it RH/Mandrake-ish in newbie-friendliness?

LOL. Slackware is 10x easier than Gentoo. Because Slackware does NOT compile everything from source. It uses TGZ packages.

If you dont want to spend the many hours settings up Gentoo, Slackware is very light on resources. It runs minimal background tasks.

I play Unreal Tournament 2003 on it, and it runs great.

Just looked at the Gentoo installation docs... holy crap! Since I don't have a Phd in computer science, I think I'll stick to messing with Slack. Question though: any good (or bad) gaming experiences on other distros? Also, any good Linux games anyone playing?

Chromium is addictive, most of the 100+ games with Mandrake are
PowerPack editions have the nVidia drivers pre-installed.

ok, i use rh 9, and, while its slower (until you stop all those processes before they boot), the hardware detection and driver setup HAS advanced light years...in fact, it was more plug-n-play than windows was. I just installed it, and my scroll mouse worked, the audigy 2 was blasting, it found the vid card, EVERYTHING! it just worked...the ONLY problem is with friggin' XF86 4.3 and radeon cards...UGH! so in that case, until drivers are released, steer clear

Is there a good way to speed up redhat? How do you kill all those processes?

Also, any good newbie tutorials for slack or gentoo users?

Finally, what's the deal with radeion and xfree 4.x? I thought there were drivers (I've got a 9500 pro in the mail... don't tell me I'll have problems!)

hey optimal,
at first glance the gentoo stuff looks crazy as all get out. However, if you follow it step by step, it is very detailed and easy to understand. The only time something didn't go right was when I skipped a step. And just because gentoo compiles from source does not mean that it is difficult. The way my mind works, gentoo is much easier to understand, even though slack helped me get to that point.

Also, it says in the gentoo docs that if you have a full iso cd, that you can get everything off that cd instead of having to download it. That might be worth a shot.

Oh yeah, the gentoo forums are great for finding things out and getting help. THis place is great for slackware. Pretty much, take your pick.

oh holy bejeesus, dont expect any opengl apps (tux racer, chromium, q3, ut2003) to run more than 2 FPS...HOWEVER, there are two other threads on these boards, both started by me concerning the issue. Actually, one guy did a mega hackjob and got it to work on the PX400 chipset, more info is in the email for me

Gentoo has full iso??? I didn't know that. Is that the one that comes with the UT2003 demo? I've heard about it, but haven't looked into it. Another question I've heard pop up before: I look on the xfree86.org website every once in a while to check on driver status. I have a voodoo3 in an older machine with rh9, and I can't get 3d-acceleration to work! Yet on the xf86 website, under driver status, 3dfx, they say that under 4.3, hardware acceleration should work... ???

For 3D acceleration, you have to be using the EXACT driver for your card. Generic drivers wont give it to you.

Yeah, Ive heard of lots of problems w/ the new Radeon cards (9500 +). It might not run as well as it does on windows, but you should get decent performance.


Gentoo has 3 levels of install, based on how much you want to compile yourself. If you choose level 3, the system is MUCH easier to install. I suggest level 2 though. Its a good mix between custom and automatic.


Unreal Tournament 2003 is THE game to play. Its one of the best games around, and it runs NATIVELY in linux, so no WINE for me. Besides that, all you got is Tux Racer.