It's Time to Commit to Linux... But Which One?

[00:03] lawfully wedded operating system to have and to have >> I object! She's no operating SYSTEM, SHE'S A KERNEL!

[00:16] >> OKAY, but jokes aside, there is a common misconception that Linux is an operating system when in truth, it's just one part of a modern desktop operating system. Specifically, it is the kernel. The kernel is an important part. It's

[00:31] responsible for managing resources and communication between the operating system and your physical hardware, but you are going to need other key components. Thankfully, you don't need to worry about that though. Some fine

[00:43] gentleman or lady, probably with a severe caffeine dependency, already found everything you need, made sure it works together, and then bundled it for convenient distribution. Hence, why we call Linux operating systems

[00:56] distributions or distros for short. >> Distros, plural you say? >> I do. The beauty of open source is that anyone with an idea is welcome to create their own flavor of Linux that they feel is best, which has resulted in a lot of

[01:11] prioritize cutting-edge features and performance, while others prefer to prioritize stability. Some of them aim to be intuitive for PC or Mac refugees, while others seek to create something entirely new. Some are focused on what

[01:25] works best for developers, while others are laser focused on gamers, which is all great, but it can create a bit of choice paralysis, especially for new users. I mean, unless you're willing to test drive every distro, how can you

[01:40] know which one is the best? Well, conveniently, most Linux distributions support live booting, a way to try before you buy, running them directly off of a piece of removable media like a USB thumb drive. We strongly recommend

[01:52] doing so, but if you're just a gamer who just wants to press start on your games of hassle. So, if you don't feel like doing that, we did the work for you benchmarking many of the most popular gaming distributions to see just how

[02:06] much performance you can expect to gain from cutting-edge configurations, or in some cases, how much you might expect to lose from more conservative choices. One thing you won't lose out on, should you decide to watch on, is this segway to

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[02:33] message. Learn more at the link below. For our test, we settled on chimeraOS, Nobara Linux Bazzite, Pop!_OS, Garuda, and Pico OS. Yes, yes, I can already hear you typing, "What about what about X?" But, between

[02:47] picking these and testing them, the popular list changed, and by the time have changed yet again. LTT Store is like this, too. Yesterday, there was no True Spec cables in stock, and now they're super popular and flying off the

[03:00] shelves. Get yours today, lttstore.com. Anyway, the exact distros are not the educate newcomers about distros in general to hopefully remove some of that decision paralysis that often occurs. With that in mind, then, here's a

[03:15] convenient little table that outlines some of the key differences between our selected flavors, or should I say, subflavors. All six of these distros are derived from one or another of the big distros that each come with their own

[03:30] pros and cons. But, the main one, from a general gamer's perspective, has got to be third-party app support. Some app developers might only officially supply a .deb installation package. That's going to work really well on Ubuntu or

[03:44] Debian, which are closely related. Other developers might opt for RPM files, None of this is going to be a deal-breaker. It just might be a little applications working. As for your desktop environment, this dictates how

[03:58] the OS looks and feels. Most use some version of KDE Plasma, which personally I quite like. It feels very familiar to Windows users, while also bringing along some nice common sense improvements. The key things to watch out for then, in

[04:13] terms of performance, are the kernel version and the Mesa version. Newer kernels will bring better support for modern hardware and often better performance. While older kernels can offer the stability and security that

[04:25] only comes with long-term validation out in the field. As for Mesa, it provides the Vulcan drivers that your graphics card uses. So, if you're running Windows games, Proton, which you might have heard of before, translates DirectX

[04:38] calls into Vulcan and Mesa takes those calls and turns them into work the GPU can actually execute. Basically, the newer your Mesa, the faster and smoother you can run Windows-native games on your Linux machine. But, how much difference

[04:52] is there then? To find out, we put together a test bench with a Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT and normalized on the same major version of Mesa, then ran four different games that each use very different game engines.

[05:05] with a gold or better rating on ProtonDB. distributions aren't pacing each other and the RX 9600 XT is performing about testing that the Labs team ran in the past.

[05:20] Black Myth Wukong yields a similar result with everybody neck and neck, except Garuda, who inexplicably managed a measurable lead in the 1% lows. And you might think, "Sure, that's only a four-frame difference." But, that's 17%

[05:35] more. And this is especially surprising given that in our first round of testing for this video, we actually found that Garuda lagged behind other popular distros. More on that later. Moving on to Doom:

[05:47] the Dark Ages. Once again, everyone's performing the same, but then in Forza Horizon 5, things get weird. The averages are very consistent from one distro to the next and from one run to the next, but we observed wild variance

[06:01] in the 1% lows. This was the case across all distros. So, here's the results, but to the next, we saw these positions change more than the rule book for real

[06:13] this is going to be a long-term problem and I expect Linux gaming to continue improving at a remarkable pace. It's just a great reminder that you want to during the creation of this video, we encountered a great example of why

[06:28] round of testing in April, they normalized on the 25.0 major version of Mesa and Garuda was underperforming across the board. This was pretty confusing, so to diagnose it, we reinstalled the system using the XFCE

[06:44] only to get the same result again with both. After some more digging then, we found that the super customized and heavy desktop environment was impacting installation then to use the Casio S kernel and XFCE desktop environment and

[06:59] our other distros when using the same Mesa version. Now, we fast forward just a few weeks and many updates and Garuda is not only performing alongside the where it was even faster, which goes to show guys, the kernel, drivers, Proton,

[07:15] all of it is getting constantly and you should let those updates roll. So, with that in mind then, we're ready for our recommendations and surprise, they're going to be Casio S and Basalt.

[07:29] With that said, this isn't down to performance and the others are all worth trying for gamers to see if you like some of their creature comforts. Maybe use a live boot drive like I suggested before. Uh, with one exception actually,

[07:41] While its performance is on par, we found that it's out-of-the-box configuration of the Zen kernel and Dragonized desktop environment could impact performance before, and while this can be rectified with Garuda,

[07:54] swapping without even arcane shell commands, it's still not the most beginner-friendly solution compared to some of the more turn-key distros that something this video skims over is the installation and day-to-day experience

[08:08] aspect for these distros. And for that, I'd strongly recommend heading over to to read the companion article. I'd also recommend checking out the segway. >> WhisperFlow. Do you think it took more time to write this script or read it?

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[09:32] much about it, but uh more than one of the Linux challengers more than one of the Linux challengers ended up staying on it.