Subj : Re: Linux gaming on low end PC's?
To   : Malvinas
From : Arelor
Date : Thu Mar 27 2025 20:36:02

  Re: Re: Linux gaming on low end PC's?
  By: Malvinas to pyrewyrm on Mon Mar 24 2025 08:59 pm

 > I've always considered Linux to be a power-hungry highly demanding OS. You
 > need quite the specs to get the thing going, especially with a window
 > manager desktop built in.
 > I mean, I know about distros specifically designed to be stripped bare to
 > the minimum so they run on smaller/older HW, but those are that:
 > specifically for that purpose.
 > Anything "mainstream" (think about that term, used regarding a handful of
 > Linux distros...), with the latest Gnome should have some decent amount of
 > RAM and CPU cycles to get the gears rolling.
 > Does any of this rambling make any sense?

Well, I don't know how far your "always" reaches, but Linux DE bloat is extremely recent (think post 2015 or so) and even then it is much less painful than what the other mainstream systems are doing.

In fact I have been using computers running a recent non-specialist Linux distribution on computers with 2 GB of RAM which have been performing much better than my mother's WIndows computer with 8GB of RAM, because Windows is so I/O hungry it is no longer funny.

Now, I am willing to buy the argument that an old computer from the early 2010s might do better for certain games running Windows 7 than a modern Linux system. I mention this because I gave it a try. The downside is that gathering a healthy Windows 7 plus drivers is a bit more work than usual these days since all the hardware that used to be suported is EOLed.

On the other hand, for actual retrogames, Linux works very well, even better than modern Windows, because Linux solutions have all the tooling you'd use to run old programs on new Windowses included.


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