this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
25 points (100.0% liked)

Linux Gaming

16471 readers
220 users here now

Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

This page can be subscribed to via RSS.

Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.

Resources

WWW:

Discord:

IRC:

Matrix:

Telegram:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/4192351

New Manjaro Linux Gaming Handheld from OrangePi

This is exciting! A gaming handheld from a great open source hardware company that makes SBCs like the RP5. It looks to have all the quality features and combines the best of all the handhelds I've seen. This has me really excited.

I am wondering though what gaming on Manjaro Linux is like if anyone knows. I've heard of Bazzite and Nobara as well as Chimera and HoloISO which are all focused around gaming. Does Manjaro ship with all the gaming features preinstalled?

all 20 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They do a decent job of piggy backing on Arch's work, and loading quite a few things OOB for gaming. That being said, I don't recommend them due to their instability and issues with the overall project (failing on cert renewals, their withholding of stable packages from Arch but allowing AUR access and causing breakage, poor release schedule, and cherry picking of newer packages for "shiny things" without the diligence to maintain their library compatibility, etc etc).

That being said, their theming and UI taste is actually really good. It was a much more robust project back in 2019 and 2020, but on the technical side they're lacking severely despite having great taste from a theming standpoint. They've fallen pretty far in the court of public opinion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the info! This is really useful to know and definitely puts me off a little. I would hope installing another OS would preserve the device features. I started to look into "Manjaro Gaming Edition." It all looks to be from a few years ago and based on XFCE. However on the device's website it mentions a Plasma desktop so I wonder if they did a special version for this. One can hope it'll be a better kept version of the OS from what you said.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

hey, I see people talking a lot about the problems on Manjaro. What do you recommend as an alternative? I used EndeavourOS but an update broke my pc. I then tried debian but the games ran poorly and crashed, then I changed to Manjaro because I didn't know any better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I haven't personally used it but Bazzite is a custom image based off of Fedora 39 with preinstalled gaming software and it's atomic

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be honest, the default themes for many DE's are actually pretty tasteful. Just vanilla Arch isn't bad if you don't mind running the pacman update command. I honestly recommend Nobara for people who want stability and point/click updates.

Endeavor is more like hobbyist UI purist, and not that well optimized. Arch is insanely optimized, as well as Nobara. I would recommend Ubuntu but, Snaps. Pop would be great if their major rebase was further along, so options are pretty limited. We're in a weird transition right now as far as the major distros and overall performance metrics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Opensuse tumbleweed because at least they test software before pushing to users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like Mint; it has that Ubuntu ease of use, without Ubuntu's snap packages.

If you want something geared specifically for gaming, Pop_OS is good. I'm not a fan of how it looks, but I think I'm the minority in that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Pop_OS is known to cause issues with some games running under wine, for that reason I don’t recommend it.

Garuda linux is a good alternative, but it’s got a very “cool” design philosophy that some people might not like.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Skip the bullshit and go straight to Arch. archinstall for a good time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

won't it break after a few months?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've not had problems but nothing is fool-proof and I have proved myself a fool in the past.

In all seriousness I followed the Manjaro - Endeavour - Arch pipeline and don't see much value in the other flavors outside of a little handholding that can introduce problems of its own.

[–] kugmo 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah we all know Manjaro is ass but a 16:10 screen that's 120hz is cool. I'd get one if it had adaptive sync. When I saw OrangePi I thought I'd be an ARM device using box86/64 to run Steam games, as inefficient as that sounds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I thought the same thing but looked out of curiosity and was presently surprised. Glad it wasn't a Rokchip of some kind or it wouldn't be so powerful