Arch Linux for gaming?

yeah it's fine

Every distro is going to be good for gaming. Arch is going to be about equal to Fedora when it comes to gaming (both are good).

SteamOS is based on Arch, for instance.

You're not really going to see a difference when it comes to compatibility or performance, and even if you did, that's usually just a configuration issue (like setting a large enough VM heap size, which distros are starting to do by default anyway).

SteamOS is based on Arch, for instance.

Heavily tweaked and customized by Valve... you're not going to get the same experience on vanilla Arch.

well … SteamOS is based on Arch …

Its the best distro for gaming. Valve is using it, rolling distro.

I don't think Valve is rolling it though, I'm pretty sure they do feature freezes for stability.

I use arch for gaming btw.

Distro doesn't really matter when it comes to gaming.

Alpine has enters the chat
You're going to struggle a bit on Debian. I know you can install backports and flatpaks but it's not 100% the same as native recent packages.

Bazzite, specifically crafted for gaming and isos tailored to types of hardward. https://bazzite.gg/

Omg this is something i have to try!!! I switched to Fedora Silverblue for Laptop and this ostree Thing is insane! Thanks!
This looks really awesome. Probably going to have to install this a few places soon.

It's good. The steam deck's version of steamOS is arch based, so that should tell you a lot about its capabilities.

I'd recommend choosing an Arch-based distro like Endeavour or Garuda so you don't have to go through the rigmarole of installing vanilla Arch.

While SteamOS is Arch based, i don't think they really use it the Arch way. It's run as an image based immutable OS, so they control the packages and not run at the bleeding edge.

You might run into problems more likely than SteamOS will.

Although i didnt't have problems gaming on Arch, it's not the same
- I think they confirmed in an interview at one point that they don't roll with it. They take the binaries they need from it, test it and freeze it. Initially they were using Debian but ended up needing more recent package versions and apparently Arch binaries in core and extra were more suitable to their purposes than Debian testing.
Arch installs aren't too bad, it's the post-install setup that'll get you though since a fresh install is guaranteed to detonate if you don't disarm it.

It doesn't even have to be complex anymore thanks to archinstall.
- Disarm? I don't remember having to do anything like that...
Arch documentation is great, if you're only doing it once it shouldn't really be a concern.
- How about doing it never.
  
  I'll never understand why some people think that the arch install is such a transcendental event that you absolutely must subject yourself to.
  
  And even if it were, sometimes you just want to install Linux not have a life-changing experience.

I've been using Nobara for some time and it's amazing. Nice installer and gets all drivers and fixed applied from the get go. Also it is maintained by GloriousEggroll himself.

Echo nobara.

Been the most stable nvidia experience for my odd setup.

Able to handle an ultrawide and normal monitor 1440 at different hz and one is display port other is hdmi.

Would run into the occasional hickup with manjaro. Been all good on nobara
- Fedora > arch confirmed

Arch gamer here. I can confirm that it works well.

hello, hi, do you play cs2? If yes, does fullscreen work for you?
- I have not played CS2, sorry.

any distro can do anything another can, itll be fine for gaming and has a massive community

As others have said I doubt you will see a difference but I can attest to arch working just fine for gaming. Between steam and Lutris I haven't run into any real issues.

So if you're wanting to try arch go for it with confidence that your gaming experience likely won't be impacted.

Nix is just as configurable and you will have far less problems

*Screams in CUDA*
- Configurable
After learning about nix, I'm surprised steamos isn't built on it
- Steam is its own package manager and native games usually assume that an FHS-conformant is present. Neither of those mesh well with Nix notoriously has nothing comparable to an FHS and usually requires everything to be defined in its terms.
- There's a limit to how much you want to tinker with the OS when customizing it.
  
  Also, Arch has about 10k binary packages in core, extra and multilib.

Arch works well for gaming. However, depending on what you're doing, you should keep this in mind:

on any distro, updates may break things or change the behavior of apps. The difference in arch is that youll update no less than weekly on average, maybe biweekly at worst. This would matter more if you have a complex setup. If you're just using steam, I wouldn't worry
arch only uses the latest versions of software. If you ever install something from outside the arch repos, you have to make sure it is compatible with recent versions. Sometimes it may not be.

For the love of Tux, whatever you do install Arch on the btrfs file system so you can time shift back whenever arch decides to try and ruin your day on an update.

I use EndeavourOS (which is almost the same as Arch) for gaming and it works great.

nah you not gonna gain more fps or something

except if you compare it with windows 11.

My Win11 was so bad (compared to Win10) than I’ve switched to ArchLinux. I’ve won around 10~20fps without doing anything particular (and also gain some better loading time as the nvme sequential access performance was much much better under linux).
- I switched fron Arch to Windows 11 and even with insane Hardware the File Explorer feels extrem laggy. I gonna Test bazzite now.

I can't chime in on that specific angle but on exactly the opposite. I'd call myself an Arch guy, or Manjaro and Endeavour more specifically. But recently I started hearing more and more about Nobara, I own a Steam Deck and use GE Proton on there which is from the same guy so I said I wana try Nobara and I immediately felt at home. I'm not a big KDE fan but really the out of the box Nobara experience when it comes to gaming needs felt and feels so complete to me I really couldn't complain about a single thing.

It obviously wont replace Arch in my homelab but I don't think I'll ever consider anything else besides Nobara for my desktop again. Point being I had next to zero practical Fedora experience up to that point. I tried Garuda before which is also Arch based and supposed to cater to gaming needs but with that direct comparison I now feel like Nobara is the only distro that truly gets gaming. It's SteamOS for the KBM based Desktop.

They can all be good for gaming. The distro doesn't matter. Use what you find efficient, pretty, customized to your liking. They can all game. Don't install Popos because it's gaming oriented you can game on vanilla arch if you wanted to or debian. Arch won't matter much unless you have the newest hardware.

LTS distros and extremely delayed packages can give you problems for sure, the components used for gaming are very fast moving pieces fixing latest issues constantly.

Im on EndeavourOS like a lot of other folks here, which is basically Arch with an awesome installer, a handful of convenient extra tools, a sensible default confuguration and a fancy theme. It's been awesome so far, hell I've just been able to install and run an EA game from steam with minimal fuss yesterday, just the help of lutris to install EA Origin to authenticate. Shit just works.

That being said, Arch can occasionally blow up at your face for no fault of your own and it's a very different environment from fedora (love fedora btw), so there's a bit of a learning curve that you're gonna have to accept to climb if you want to maintain your system.

3 years (or is it 4? What is time?) on arch exclusively and I do quite a lot of gaming. It's been great. There were a few occasions over the years where something didn't work, while others on ProtonDB had seemingly flawless experiences, but it was always just a few minor tweaks. Much better experience than what I had on Manjaro prior to switching. Also, this is all on Wayland (sway) and even with that, it's been great. BTW.

It's fine. Only issues I've had is occasionally some modifications to glibc will break anticheat but that's only happened to me twice in the past 8 years.

As a few others have said, most distributions are good for gaming. Arch, being a distribution that requires lots of manual configuration, requires some setup for the best performance.

Read these two articles throughly and use the tweaks that apply to your system/needs.

Straight from the Arch Wiki:

Improving Performance

Gaming (section 7 and section 9 are especially useful).