Is Endeavour OS for me?

Lounge
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Gaming rig not with me at the moment; it’s in my local computer store (support small business!) where I ordered it from.

But it’s an:

  • Aorus gaming motherboard
  • AMD Ryzen 7-3800X (Zen 3 is getting SCALPED)
  • AMD RX 580 (hoping to upgrade to 5700XT)
  • 16 GB DDR4 3200 RAM (doesn’t Arch have an increased RAM caching thingy?)
  • M.2 SSD for /boot and /
  • 2TB FireCuda SSHD for /home

Dar said:
All those “gaming performance distro” is all just to let gamer fanboy fantasize about the “myth” of whatever kernel or softwares that people claim to be using.

I think I am of the same mindset as Elloquin that I am very optimistic about gaming on Linux.

I think the “gaming distros” are distasteful as they are merely gaming bundles in my eyes. I can bundle the games myself! My quest is to find a “gaming distro” that focuses on system performance and can prove their tweaks/changes improve my games’ performance over other Linux distros. But I think Dar brings up an interesting point: Fact or Fiction? Am I really chasing some wild unicorn when I’m hunting online forums and web articles for “gaming performance tweaks”? Is there real-world evidence that Package A makes gaming better than Package B? For all my new packages that I could install or changes to config files I could make, is it real? Are there real performance benefits to be had? What are your experiences?

I disagree with Dar and believe Linux has ascended. By no means to the top, mind you, but far greater and better than it was back in 2013! You had TF2 and Dota 2. That was it.

Dar said:
If you really have a good high end system, windows will be the best for your gaming needs no doubt about that.

I agree and disagree. I agree that Windows will give you the biggest gaming library. I have 150-200+ titles on my Steam account. However, I don’t have quite as much time for games these days, but the games that I do want to play are available or playable on Linux.

I just wanted to say: because of your timely responses and your friendly comments, I will remember this interaction with the Endeavour Community. I will definitely recommend Endeavour OS to the Arch-curious just because of how fantastic you guys were to me. Thank you!

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*cough* Garuda *cough*

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My advice would be : Keep on using Windows. Games are primarily designed for use with Windows.

and the (inevitable) problems you don’t want.

Not useful according to the title of the thread but my honest opinion. I often experienced users who wanted to play games designed for Windows using Linux and in the end complaining why those do not run without any hassle like they do using Windows.

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Hello, I just registered to post here.

I have been using Windows all my life, I like it, have nothing against it. I am a Windows sysadmin and enjoy the system and ease of use. It "just work"s for me my entire life. I don’t know how people complain about slowdowns, viruses, crashes etc, none of my Windows system ever had ANY serious issues or crashes. They’ve been rock stable, even my early Windows 98 gaming days with 3dfx Voodoo.

But I am not a fan of telemetry and the bundled services Windows 10 pushes on users (Skype, OneDrive, integrated online Windows logins, etc).

I want to stop using Windows on my personal gaming/internet desktop purely to move away from the corporate nature and “forcefulness” of Microsoft, the only aspects I am unhappy with.

I’ve tried various Linux distros now and then since the mid 2000s and never stuck around long. Always problems cropped up and internet searches lead to outdated articles, etc, you know the drill.

Funny thing is, I have recently gotten into gaming again and now have a Ryzen 5600x and an nVidia 3080, both brand new equipment. Games run gloriously in Windows.

But I still wanted to move away from Windows 10 despite this. Call me crazy.

So I am now on the hunt to find the “perfect” distro for me.

I installed Fedora 33 and installed Steam/Proton and ran a few tests on some games, all worked perfectly, even non-native games, at the same high refresh rate as on my Windows machine (same FPS). Granted, I just loaded my save, ran around in a few games, and noted the FPS for some minutes in different spots and actions, and quit the game(s) to go on to the next one. All handful modern titles I tested ran perfect except some higher frame times/stutters but those seemed to go away a few minutes into the games.

A few distros I tried just would not load due to having kernels < 5.8/5.9 that don’t boot with my hardware, but Fedora, Garuda and EndeavourOS were flawless installs. And now I cannot decide which ones I want!

I guess this turned more into a blog than anything. I am just excited there are so many native Linux games now from sources such as GOG and Steam and others, it is very cool, and thanks to Proton, even Windows-only seem to run just as well as Windows (I’m sure I’ll encounter frame issues/crashes/bugs later on with more testing, but I was surprised that even superficial testing was so easy).

Anyway, I’m not sure why I made this post, I guess I didn’t contribute anything usefu. I just wanted to chime in as a fellow gamer looking to move from Windows to Linux, and so far it seems totally possible! Just cannot for the life of me decide on which to stay…

Garuda: cool concepts, but some things I wasn’t a fan of: some of the content/tutorials on the site are lacking in professionalism/proof reading… not a good sign for me at all. Also, the default Firefox install ships with a number of addons enabled by default… such as Bitwarden, uBlock origin, dark mode forcer, gnome-extension extension, localcdn… I just think it’s not the right place for them to ‘force’ these on users as default addons… it should be up to the user to decide on browser extensions, not devs. Yes I can disable them, but that’s not the point. I also went through their forums and saw several posts of users bringing up issues, and the devs finding out it was tweaks they made, and they just willy nilly in the same thread basically say “yeah, we can see it being a problem for users. We’ll revert it”, i.e setting flags in Firefox that break site functionality on major websites. It seems they just implement/change things too quickly without much of any thought or testing. Basically if it sounds good on paper to them, they’ll implement it. And worst case if users complain, they will revert it. On one hand it’s good they are so responsive, on the other, I’m not a fan of this type of activity.
It makes me wonder what else is “off” that I have yet to discover and stumble on that will leave me scratching my head as to why something is broken or not working.

Fedora: It’s alright. It’s generic. I guess that’s a plus to me? But it’s owned by RedHat/IBM and the stereotype of it being used as a test-bed for RedHat and being felt like a second-rate citizen guinea pig just doesn’t sit well with me, even though Arch is the same bleeding-edge type of mentality with potential to break…

EndeavourOS: nothing bad to say. But also nothing wow’d me so to say from what I played with it, but I think that’s a good thing. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken, just make sure it works” :slight_smile:
Not sure how to feel. It is the Arch-alternative I’m attracted to most, though.

I guess it will come down to EndeavourOS and Fedora for me, and I will manually implement some of the things I really appreciated Garuda goes balls-to-the-wall with. Garuda by far is the most “extreme” and cutting-edge distro I’ve found. They are not afraid to run with non-standard stuff you’d expect the Linux community to shun away from, but it seems to work for them, and you cannot deny some of the things Garuda implements are super interesting and brave and exciting!

Apparently Fedora 34 will move to Wayland by default, as well as PipeWire instead of PulseAudio, which is exciting. I’m not sure how Wayland default will play with nVidia hardware, though… guess will wait and see.

Fun changes are coming to Linux scene in the future, that’s for sure.

edit: one thing I’d really like to do is to compare game performance in Garuda and Fedora/EndeavourOS (whichever I decide to go with). I wonder how much difference if any there will be. But I honestly don’t have the desire to do this type of testing and downloading of games overnight on multiple distros to test for some hours… I am quite sleep deprived the past few days installing so many distros (many of which wouldn’t even install due to older kernels - which I was very disappointed about :frowning: ) and doing so much comparing of distros in my mind and research.

Phew! Time for bed!

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Sure, you must start with something that’s already set up with lots of bloat. Later on, you can decide what to keep and pare it down with a more minimal install putting in what you need.

Garuda is an option (though the theming and included options would upset most Arch users - I don’t like the theme myself) because you have your steam and lutris in the box.

Really you need to live with something for a while before you can really know how well it suits you not only in terms of software, but philosophy and attitudes also and sometimes friendly forum support is vital.

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Okay, You are crazy!!!

Garuda is really a kind of ‘pet project’ which is also very new and in many ways not interested to be too professional. I think they’re just having a lot of fun - but yes, for those that can I’d say pick a more vanilla install and set up what you need for yourself.

I’ve watched youtubers load up their desktop (and I really hate the look of dragonised Garuda) and gloat over how utterly gorgeous they think it is… I’m left puking and feeling that they’re pushing too hard in that regard. I like a simple and professional desktop - I have 3 options, from a minimal light theme with buff/green colours and a professional dark theme with shades of grey and subtle highlighting (this is where Endeavour/Manjaro come ahead on first impressions after installing).

However, Manjaro seems to be trying to murder itself - they banned ‘friendliness’ from the forums, and now many queries just get ignored and 90% of their help has left, and ones that remain are less helpful/active than they used to be.

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Hi Ben, you are totally right about Garuda :slight_smile: There is absoloutely nothing wrong with just having a fun project people come together to work on and improve on and turn it into something that even more people get use out of and appreciate and enjoy, and it picks up steam and gets better and better with time, then that is awesome, and is what the spirit of Linux is all about in the first place.

They are being bold, and being bold is needed in Linux (well, Debian users might shake their fists, but let grandpas be grandpas :joy: )

Now that you brought this point up I feel lousy having made that knock against Garuda. This is another benefit to the variety of distros in Linux: different strokes for different folks :+1: someone who dislikes corporate rigidness and slow-to-change culture and not satisfied being another anon contributor would probably be psyched to contribute to something unique and evolving and open to change like Garuda.

About Manjaro - what is it you mean that they banned “friendliness”?

I had heard some talk that Manjaro leadership changed for the worse, but haven’t read further into it. Hearing that their forums being left a help-less ghost town doesn’t sound like it would bode well, since they bill themselves as the newbie friendly Arch-variant.

I always seemed to remember that the friendly and always helpful Ubuntu community in its early days was exactly what propelled Ubuntu to be so popular for so long and brought so many people into the Linux world in the first place.

Shame to hear Manjaro going the opposite direction despite that relative success they’ve had.

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Even more cool about Garuda and gaming is that they include special tweaks for WINE, Proton, Steam, and other gaming-related additions such as Piper (gaming mice config utility to change DPI, bindings, RGB), that are incredibly easy to get working out of the box just by enabling a few tick boxes in Garudas custom control panels.
It’s one thing to call yourself a “gaming distro” when all you include is some emulators and a 16bit gaming wallpaper and call it a day. It’s another when you go the extra mile like Garuda and actually make impactful changes like this baked right in! Garuda may be the only true gaming-tweaked/geared distro out there.

They even include some lesser known but to me critical pieces, such as Legendary (Epic Games Launcher CLI-based alternative, which I actually use on my Windows PC) Legendary is (for a reason I can’t understand) not well known and I’ve done my share of spreading the good word on it.

So it was actually cool to see the Garuda devs are real gamers, hardcore gamers, and knowledgable gamers.

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FORUM MODERATOR: TOPIC SUCCESSFUL. PLEASE MARK COMPLETED OR WHATEVER.

Fantastic suggestions, folks! I’ve decided that I don’t like Garuda, but I don’t have time for Endeavour OS. I’ve decided to stick with Manjaro for now. Thank you so much for your help!

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Lolz okay.
Just remember, Manjaro can be snapshotted… so if you run a KDE there, and install Endeavour KDE, you can restore stuff pretty quickly - like under an hour.

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I don’t understand the logic, but whatever works for you. :+1:

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Closed per OP request