Some Awesome Gaming

Is there some reason the submitter had to shove 'Ubuntu' into the title?

I'm surprised that it ubuntu was considered good for gaming at all, considering a phoronix article in the not too distant past that showed it had 40% lower opengl performance than another distro using the same hardware and same drivers.

What article would that be, azerthoth - I read phoronix regularly and I can't recall seeing that. It certainly would have caught my attention if it's as clear cut as you state.

@herzeleid http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sabayon_5...

oops, in some cases it was 50%.

Fixed, sorry about that.

Ah, I see - I've never used kubuntu so I probably didn't pay those non-typical results much notice. It's interesting though, that these obscure and unusual results are held up as some sort of standard, when the normal ubuntu benchmarks come out rather differently.

I've heard lots of complaints about kubuntu so I'll chalk it up to bad default driver choice and/or system configuration.

herz, you have heard lots of complaints about ubuntu in general. 40-50% differences can not be chalked up to DE, as it was DE/DE as well.

azerthoth - cmon, let's get this right: I have heard lots of complaints about kubuntu - not ubuntu.

I've tried just about every distro out there since starting with SLS in 1993, and if there was something better than ubuntu, I'd be using it.

Quoting:I've tried just about every distro out there since starting with SLS in 1993, and if there was something better than ubuntu, I'd be using it.

Oh, so you're a Slackware user?

/me ducks and runs

@gus - slack was my 2nd OS after SLS. it was my only distro for over 3 years. I have fond memories of compiling my kernel (1.2.13) to support my soundblaster for sound effects and music when playing network doom.

I switched to redhat for work reasons, and during that time also spent time with caldera and mandrake, along with irix, solaris and hpux - and sco unixware (what a fossil). I switched to SuSE in 2004, managing SLES servers at work. I continued to look at various distros for my desktop use, and for SMB server use, looking at ubuntu, debian, gentoo and others.

In early 2008 I tried out the ubuntu 8.04 beta, and found it so agreeable that I switched my desktops and laptops to ubuntu, and later that year converted my servers at home from opensuse to ubuntu LTS.

IMHO benchmarks are highly dependent on the choices of filesystem, mount options, graphics card and driver, kernel and glibc build options and other factors that can bring huge performance differences even within the same distro.

I take anomalous benchmark results with a grain of salt, unless I can reproduce them myself, and understand exactly what I'm measuring.

> ...and if there was something better than ubuntu, I'd be using it.

That depends almost entirely on how you define "better". Depending on your definition, any of Slackware, Arch, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE, or Mandrake might be significantly better. And that ignores the host of derivative and specialty distributions out there. For a newbie, I'd say that Mint is significantly better than Ubuntu.

@jdixon -

I looked at mint and while it saves me the 5 minutes of installing the "ubuntu restricted extras" pattern, I really don't see any compelling reason to switch. one man operations tend to make me a little nervous from a support perspective, and I don't remember seeing any mint server distro, so it's not for me. But I can concede that it might make sense as a test distro for linux newbies, to give them a feel for what's possible.

BTW here is a fresh article from phoronix which addresses your ubuntu performance comments in an objective manner

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_ar...

so about dead even. but herz, thats the same testing regimen you already said produce "obscure and unusual results" ... which is it?

> ...and while it saves me the 5 minutes of installing the "ubuntu restricted extras"...

Your 5 minutes is probably more like 5 hours for a newbie, if he ever figures out how (or even that he needs) to do so.

> ...your ubuntu performance comments in an objective manner...

While I've occasionally been critical of Ubuntu, I don't have any Ubuntu performance comments in this thread. :)

@jdixon - ah you're right it was azerthoth making that claim, sorry.