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A few months ago I did some extensive testing of VaM on different Linux distros. I guess I will post my findings here.
I was testing specifically for distros that are tailored towards gaming on an Nvidia GPU, so I skipped out on many options that people might normally pick.
Although I did actually record FPS benchmarks on each of these distros, the differences between them were very small. Anything that stood out, I put in the notes. It is worth noting that there was at least a 10% drop in performance when moving from Windows 10 to any Linux distro, and my guess would be that DXVK (DirectX to Vulkan) is the culprit. (Crossing my fingers that VaM2 might get native Vulkan support.) However, the drop in performance seemed almost negligible in desktop mode. I will need to do more testing in VR to see if there is a significant difference there. I did do several tests with different Wine runners, but ultimately went with the latest Proton build in all of these because it was the most consistent.
-Bazzite (Fedora): I tested desktop and VR. Bazzite with Lutris gave me the best performance in Desktop Mode of any distro. (This may have been because Lutris comes pre-installed and pre-configured with ProtonPlus). I also tested desktop mode in Steam and Bottles, which had basically identical performance. SteamVR would not detect my Valve Index, which was very confusing to me! I spent a bit of time trying to troubleshoot this with no success. However, wifi streaming to the Quest 3 with ALVR worked fine. VaM must be run inside Steam's proton layer in order for SteamVR to detect it, so Lutris and Bottles were not options for VR. I have really enjoyed my time in Bazzite. Fedora KDE Plasma has an excellent interface, and most of the games I have tested have worked great.
-Nobara (Fedora): The guy who designed Nobara was involved in the creation of Steam's Proton, so I thought I'd give it a try. There are very few differences between Nobara and Bazzite, the biggest being the fact that Bazzite is immutable, and Nobara is not. VaM performance was pretty much identical between the two, except the aformentioned boost to Bazzite's natively installed Lutris. Running in Bottles and Steam were pretty much the same experience as before. If you don't like the idea of having an immutable OS, maybe this beats Bazzite in that way. I did not do any VR testing.
-CachyOS (Arch): Since Arch Linux is what SteamOS is also built on, I figured I would give Cachy a try to see if there was any noticeable difference. Surprisingly, there was a bit of a boost to CPU performance specifically (about 10%). GPU performance was about the same as the others. Lutris, Bottles, and Steam all had the same FPS. One thing that did drive me crazy about Cachy was how difficult it was to get NTFS drives working on it, so dual-booting was definitely more of a challenge. KDE Plasma was available as a desktop environment, and it was easy to install, so that was nice. I did not do any VR testing.
-POP!_OS (Ubuntu): This gave me slightly lower performance than the other distros, running through Lutris, Bottles, and Steam (probably 2-5% slower), but everything ran fine. Even though you can technically install other desktop environments for PopOS, it's not very easy to make it the default. I personally did not care for their custom Gnome desktop, but that's just a personal choice. Overall it was fine. I did not do any VR testing.
-Mint: Cinnamon (Ubutnu): Mint gave me terrible game performance with an Nvidia GPU. I may be mistunderstanding why, but I think it's because it is still using older X11 protocols instead of Wayland? I think you can change this manually, if you know what you are doing. Whatever the case, VaM was a slideshow in all of my tests. I have not tried an AMD GPU to see if it was any different.
These are just my findings so far; nothing very complex, but I did find it encouraging to see that VaM ran fairly well in all of them. I have decided to move forward with Bazzite for the time being and see if it does well long-term for editing VaM scenes. Hopefully I will have more to share when I do more VR testing.
I was testing specifically for distros that are tailored towards gaming on an Nvidia GPU, so I skipped out on many options that people might normally pick.
Although I did actually record FPS benchmarks on each of these distros, the differences between them were very small. Anything that stood out, I put in the notes. It is worth noting that there was at least a 10% drop in performance when moving from Windows 10 to any Linux distro, and my guess would be that DXVK (DirectX to Vulkan) is the culprit. (Crossing my fingers that VaM2 might get native Vulkan support.) However, the drop in performance seemed almost negligible in desktop mode. I will need to do more testing in VR to see if there is a significant difference there. I did do several tests with different Wine runners, but ultimately went with the latest Proton build in all of these because it was the most consistent.
-Bazzite (Fedora): I tested desktop and VR. Bazzite with Lutris gave me the best performance in Desktop Mode of any distro. (This may have been because Lutris comes pre-installed and pre-configured with ProtonPlus). I also tested desktop mode in Steam and Bottles, which had basically identical performance. SteamVR would not detect my Valve Index, which was very confusing to me! I spent a bit of time trying to troubleshoot this with no success. However, wifi streaming to the Quest 3 with ALVR worked fine. VaM must be run inside Steam's proton layer in order for SteamVR to detect it, so Lutris and Bottles were not options for VR. I have really enjoyed my time in Bazzite. Fedora KDE Plasma has an excellent interface, and most of the games I have tested have worked great.
-Nobara (Fedora): The guy who designed Nobara was involved in the creation of Steam's Proton, so I thought I'd give it a try. There are very few differences between Nobara and Bazzite, the biggest being the fact that Bazzite is immutable, and Nobara is not. VaM performance was pretty much identical between the two, except the aformentioned boost to Bazzite's natively installed Lutris. Running in Bottles and Steam were pretty much the same experience as before. If you don't like the idea of having an immutable OS, maybe this beats Bazzite in that way. I did not do any VR testing.
-CachyOS (Arch): Since Arch Linux is what SteamOS is also built on, I figured I would give Cachy a try to see if there was any noticeable difference. Surprisingly, there was a bit of a boost to CPU performance specifically (about 10%). GPU performance was about the same as the others. Lutris, Bottles, and Steam all had the same FPS. One thing that did drive me crazy about Cachy was how difficult it was to get NTFS drives working on it, so dual-booting was definitely more of a challenge. KDE Plasma was available as a desktop environment, and it was easy to install, so that was nice. I did not do any VR testing.
-POP!_OS (Ubuntu): This gave me slightly lower performance than the other distros, running through Lutris, Bottles, and Steam (probably 2-5% slower), but everything ran fine. Even though you can technically install other desktop environments for PopOS, it's not very easy to make it the default. I personally did not care for their custom Gnome desktop, but that's just a personal choice. Overall it was fine. I did not do any VR testing.
-Mint: Cinnamon (Ubutnu): Mint gave me terrible game performance with an Nvidia GPU. I may be mistunderstanding why, but I think it's because it is still using older X11 protocols instead of Wayland? I think you can change this manually, if you know what you are doing. Whatever the case, VaM was a slideshow in all of my tests. I have not tried an AMD GPU to see if it was any different.
These are just my findings so far; nothing very complex, but I did find it encouraging to see that VaM ran fairly well in all of them. I have decided to move forward with Bazzite for the time being and see if it does well long-term for editing VaM scenes. Hopefully I will have more to share when I do more VR testing.
