this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Linux Gaming
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I know there are gaming-centric distros but I wonder, if someone built a Linux that was essentially a console equivalent, useless for anything else, how it would fare.
That's just default Bazzite. There's not much included out the gate other than gaming dependencies.
There is no fundamental performance difference between these "gaming" distros and any other ones. Some minor kernel tweak maybe net a few percentage points here and there, but the gaming stack is still the same across the board, and very little can be done to squeeze more performance there without each just getting performance improvements.
Even still, you'd just install those same versions on any other distro and get those performance benefits.
It would be just fine. You can look at SteamOS on the Deck for exactly that (and I would assume the upcoming Desktop version will be similar). Bazzite in handheld mode is similar.
Much of the extra overhead comes from the desktop shell and window manager, so anything that swaps out stuff like Plasma or Gnome for something lighter is already on better footing.
Like the Steam Deck?
Nintendo and PS are allegedly some variant of BSD, as is MacOs