I know, lame post, but I wanted to say that Linux gaming has gotten soooo much better, to the point that I honestly think my games are running better than on Windows. I’ve played so many games, but notable ones are Halo: MCC, MS Flight Sim 2020, Satisfactory, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and right now I’m starting a full playthrough of Dragon Age.
Dragon Age is notorious even on Windows for being a pain because it’s such an old game. You have to install the 4gb patch, and even then it’s a bit rocky. Not on Linux though! I did have to install PhysX but I googled it and saw it was 2 buttons to install on Linux! Now it’s been rock solid and stable, with no crashes.
Linux gaming may have a high bar to learn, but that bar is constantly getting lower! Exciting times!
Only with Arch do I see people talk about the lack of features as if that’s a selling point. Manually install drivers! Wow! What fun!
Its basically the difference between buying a consumer car with automatic transmission and self-driving vs putting together a kit car that has manual stick shift.
Ubuntu and fedora and the like, like the modern consumer car, just does everything for you with little hastle. But you might not know anything about how it works and have to call a mechanic to fix it.
Arch and Gentoo and the like, like kit cars, give you granular control over your system, can sometimes be a lot more powerful, is tuned to your specific needs, and most importantly: you learn. You will rarely if ever have to call the mechanic because you know how to just go in and rip and replace or tweak the faulty part.
You can obviously learn to work on your consumer car and start tuning and tweaking it, but you’re not fully in charge.
There are different usecases for different people. For the people who like Arch, installing everything yourself is a value-add, to us it means the system gets out of our way. You set it up one time and it just works.
I put together my install over 6 years ago and have had to do next to no maintenance since then with regular updates.
It feels very odd to describe it as “getting out of the way” when it’s actually getting in the way with its lack of features.
I’m not trying to say people shouldn’t be using or enjoying distros like Arch or Gentoo, I just find the way people talk about them peculiar.
People who talk about it like this are people who probably value a few things:
learning (in general)
self-improvement
deep understanding over their system
control over their belongings
trust/safety in their system
DIY distros naturally provide these things by forcing you to go through their manual install process.
Think about it like how Goku always finds ways to get stronger and better at what he does by sheer effort.