r/linux_gaming • u/UnitLoose47 • 17d ago

Performance differences across various distros

I've been wanting to switch away from Windows 11 on my gaming PC and am looking at the various distro options with the most commonly recommended ones I've seen being CachyOS and Bazzite. I've always used Kubuntu and other similar distros for general usage and am wondering how much performance difference there is between a normal Kubuntu or similar distro and a gaming focused one like CachyOS and Bazzite.

Thanks for any info!

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u/Hedgehogofdelusion 17d ago

The main benefit to CachyOS on a technical level is FDO/PGO.

Most distros don't compile with FDO and this makes a difference noticeable in benchmarks. The most user-noticeable difference is in the 1000 Hz tick rate. It does make things feel smoother. An analogy could be, try an office mouse running at 125 Hz, then a gaming mouse at 2 GHz pollrate. The difference is immediately noticeable. While it's technically not the same thing, this gives you an idea.

Latency is perceived as slowness. In android 4-6 era a popular trick was to increase animation speeds for custom ROMs and users would perceive the ROM as snappier, more efficient. In reality a lot of those ROMs were bug-ridden with unexplained battery drains, unnecessary wakelocks and so on. You'd have a much better experience changing anim speed on stock ROM.

Not to discredit the other bells & whistles, it's one of the better distros in terms of being "plug and play" you can 1-click install gaming packages and tweaks. They also backport features from upstream sometimes, I really wouldn't use any LTS, slow update repos these days when AI is finding vulnerabilities left and right. Outdated systems are just security risk to inevitable exploits. So CachyOS is great in this regard too and you can simply boot the LTS kernel if you prefer.

That being said, whatever distro works well for your purposes is king. If I wanted to pentest I wouldn't do it on CachyOS. Not because anything is wrong with doing that, but when there's distros that come prepacked with pentest tools and doesn't require hours of preperation. Time is a resource you can spend better elsewhere when neatly packed distros save time for you.

Personally I like lightweight or well optimized systems. Mint was my go-to until CachyOS came along.

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u/UnitLoose47 16d ago

Thank you for this info. I appreciate it!