TL;DR: Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro? Or is it more of a “this is the least work” to get setup?
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I run EndeavourOS on my desktop and haven’t had any issues with performance. I just like playing with new things and learning from the experience.
I’ve seen loads of people recommending Bazzite as a gaming distro for various reasons. It’s gotten to the point that I installed it on a second SSD to do my own testing but I’d still like to see others perspective.
From my research, there doesn’t seem to be that much performance to be gained (generally speaking). I’ll be testing this on my own hardware but is this generally true?
I think a big draw (especially for new users) would be that these distros would require very minimal work to get up and running into a game.
I think the TL;DR at the top best describes my question. I’ve just been thinking about this and haven’t been sure how to express it in a clear manner for others to understand. Also, this video got me thinking more.
EDIT:
Glad to see that I’m not alone in my thinking. Biggest benefit of a “gaming distro” is the convenience of having everything setup and there is no real performance difference.
In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.
For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.
However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.
Small nitpick; layering is technically only a thing on Fedora Atomic. Not all immutable distros subscribe to it.