I'm buying a new computer in the next month or two, and want to get the best speed out of my hardware as possible. Right now I'm thinking of using either Gentoo or Xubuntu. Would you guys recommend either of these? How would gaming using Wine be? The specs would something like: Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz 8600 GT 2 GB RAM 160 GB Hard drive

Yeah, I'd recommend either one of those -- or pretty much any other current distro.

If you want to game through Wine (good luck) you might be better off geeting a distro with Wine binaries available and with binary video drivers available. That would mean leaning away from Gentoo.

I would probably say for game development Ubuntu would probably be the best distro as IIRC it has the largest desktop user(which most gamers are) installed base.

For playing games, I can't say, because from what I found it's usually the distro you can easily get tweaked the way you want it, for me that was Arch, for you it could be something completely different.

Yeah I would get Ubuntu over Xubuntu. The gnome desktop is much more popular, and it won't slow down a machine with specs like those you listed. My pentium 4 laptop runs it nicely.

If you want to play Windows games, why not try to set up a dual boot system?

Right now my budget is a little tight, so I wanted to get the hardware without worrying about paying another $100 for Windows. I may eventually get it, but right now I'm going under the pretenses that I'll be having Linux for awhile.

Also, you say Ubuntu won't cause any noticeable slowdown on these specs? Not even while gaming?

Before you can answer that question you must know what's causing the slowdowns.

From what I found the only distro specific thing that caused a slowdown were the currently running applications or even the desktop environment, well the nice thing about Linux is you can set up a custom x init script so that when you're gaming you can unload everything but your essential services, x and the game. I've yet to see a distro that stops you from doing this so it shouldn't matter if you use Ubuntu, Xubuntu or LFS in this regard.

I think os wont slow your pc down(IMO). The other applications that are running are the ones that might cause the slow down.

Yeah, another vote for Ubuntu here

I use Ubuntu in my laptop, I don't play games (I program them :D), but it runs without slowdowns.

Pentium M 1.4GHz
512MB RAM
And who knows what else xDDDDDD


So, Ubuntu is fine.

Thanks for all the suggestions, looks like I'll be downloading the new version of Ubuntu when it comes out (this month right?) and pick out some software to download once I get it all set up.

On a related note, what are some good libraries to look into for gamedev on Linux? My language of choice is C#, so I'll probably downloading Mono & MonoDevelop. Has anyone heard good things about Tao or MonoXNA, or have any libraries/engines you prefer to use?

Quote: Thanks for all the suggestions, looks like I'll be downloading the new version of Ubuntu when it comes out (this month right?) and pick out some software to download once I get it all set up.

also, if you want try downloading Ubuntu Beryl...I hear its great(correct me if im wrong), they say its much like windows vista in linux