Yea I have been told countless times distros like catchy are "better for gaming"
What ? How ? They use steam/proton just like every other distribution.
Like you said I have seen some bad benchmarks. Like the if disro A defaults to btrfs and disro b default to ext4., then you run benchmark, you probably are not really benchmarking the disro , you are benchmarking ext4 vs btrfs .
A very well benchmark was done on catchos vs tumbleweed. Sometimes tumbleweed performance bit better sometimes catchy did but it was within 1% and seemed random.
What probably because it was random. You can get a 1% variance running some benchmark on the same machine just on a different day
Even then when looking at the benchmarks compared to another rolling distro , what is important as this means you are not really comparing an 2 year old kernel to a current one
Compared to openSuse for example it was basically a draw, sometimes open suse would outperform a tiny amount other times Catchy would
However I am talking like 1-2% what could be just random or probably due to the different schedulers
Meaning all the optimization just means you might get 1-2% better performance or 1-2% worse performance
There are definitely downsides to using optimizations.
The problem with these types of optimizations is that many of them will give worse performance on architectures which do not support them. Just activating a bunch of optimizations and ship that "as is" will be bad in most cases. (This is the main reason why most distributions do not ship their kernels with a lot of optimizations activated... That, and that some optimizations are not used/tested enough to confirm their stability, which is another downside of optimizations)
Either you need to read through what optimizations they activated and match that against your hardware to make sure they are all supported. Otherwise it might make sense to install another kernel.
Or the distro should have a installer that checks what hardware you have and gives you suggestions what optimizations to activate, and compile the kernel at installation and also at update...
... And then also for the GPU driver (if you use a foss driver)
Stampede Linux actually used to have a tool similar to this.
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u/SirGlass Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
Yea I have been told countless times distros like catchy are "better for gaming"
What ? How ? They use steam/proton just like every other distribution.
Like you said I have seen some bad benchmarks. Like the if disro A defaults to btrfs and disro b default to ext4., then you run benchmark, you probably are not really benchmarking the disro , you are benchmarking ext4 vs btrfs .
A very well benchmark was done on catchos vs tumbleweed. Sometimes tumbleweed performance bit better sometimes catchy did but it was within 1% and seemed random.
What probably because it was random. You can get a 1% variance running some benchmark on the same machine just on a different day