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Open Source Operating Systems Linux Games

PikaOS Is a Next-Gen Linux Distribution Aimed Specifically Towards Gamers (zdnet.com) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the let-the-games-begin dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Jack Wallen: PikaOS is very similar to that of Nobara Linux, which opts for a Fedora base. But what are these two Linux distributions? Simply put, they are Linux for gamers. [...] So, what does PikaOS do that so many other distributions do not? The most obvious thing is that it makes it considerably easier to install the tools needed to play games. Upon first logging in, you're greeted with a Welcome app. In the First Steps tab, you have quick access to tools for updating the system, installing patented codecs and libraries, installing propriety Nvidia drivers, installing apps from the Software Manager, and installing WebApps.

Next comes the Recommended Additions, where you can install the likes of: PikaOS Game Utilities is a meta package that installs Steam, Lutris, GOverlay, MangoHud, Wine, Winetricks, vkBasalt, and other gaming-centric tools; Microsoft TrueType fonts for better Windows font emulation; Blender for creating 3D images; OBS Studio for streaming; Kdenlive for non-linear video editing; Krita for painting; and LibreOffice for productivity. In the Optional Steps tab, you can add AMD proprietary drivers, ROCm drivers, Xone drivers, and Proton GE (for Steam and Wine compatibility). Finally, the Look And Feel tab allows you to customize themes, layouts, and extensions. The layouts section is pretty nifty, as it allows you to configure the GNOME desktop to look and feel like a more traditional desktop, a MacOS-like desktop, a Windows 11 layout, a throwback GNOME 2 desktop, and even a Ubuntu Unity-like desktop.

As far as pre-installed software goes, it's pretty bare bones (until you start adding titles from the Recommended Additions tab in the Welcome App). You'll find Firefox (web browser), Geary (email), Pidgin (messaging), Weather, Calculator, Cheese (web camera software), Rhythmbox, Contacts, a few utilities, and basic games. However, installing new apps is quite simple via the Software Manager app. Of course, the focus of PikaOS is games. When you install the PikaOS Game Utilities, you'll get Steam installed, which makes it easy to play an endless array of games on the Linux desktop. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you launch the PikaOS Game Utilities installation, it opens a terminal window to run the installation. Give this plenty of time to complete and, in the end, you can launch Steam, log in to your Steam account, and start playing. Just remember, the first time you launch the Steam app, it will take a moment to update and configure. But once it's up and running... let the games begin.
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PikaOS Is a Next-Gen Linux Distribution Aimed Specifically Towards Gamers More

PikaOS Is a Next-Gen Linux Distribution Aimed Specifically Towards Gamers

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  • ...people who know what (who?) Pikachu was (is?)

    • ...people who know what (who?) Pikachu was (is?)

      1. A what. It is a Pokemon [bulbagarden.net]
      2. Is. It is both the name of the species and the the individuals. I do believe I recall seeing screen shot of a recent season and the character Pikachu is still around.

  • Immutable OS would be nice for gaming... (Score:3)

    by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:21PM (#63252075)

    What would be nice for an OS designed for gaming is to have it ship as an immutable OS by default. This way, whatever apps or games are used are free to install what they want, but the OS is going to have some decent protection, especially if the game has stuff that runs as root. This way, if something breaks, it isn't hard to get the machine into some type of usable state again, especially if a filesystem that supports snapshots like ZFS or btrfs is used for the apps, games, and data.

    Of course, the immutable-ness should be able to be turned off for development, but in general if someone is using it for gaming, having the OS protected from wayward installs is overall a good thing.

    • The OS should be the only thing that can update itself, including drivers.
      Games should only be able to access their own directory and sub-directories.

      • I'd say that for a gaming OS, something like FireJail would be a must, to allow a game complete access to its own directory, but not do anything outside of that. FireJail also allows for redirection of all writes, so a game can be located 100% in its own directory, and if a game is problematic, the directory can be removed. Of course, it would be nice to add a bit of configuration so games can have data and save directories separate from the game executable files, just so one can archive off their saves.

        T

        • and no steam like mod / update / store system?
          So each game will have it's own installers? and likely not be in the os update repo? and what if an game needs the os to have X library to run?

          • We can do it with flatpak. I used to dual boot off an ISO image and play pirated games flatpak.

            or at least I set it up and tested it. Turns out I never really feel like pirating games when I have a huge pile I’ve paid for and never play.

          • The store would control games which would be installed in its own subdirectories.
            /OS/
            /Steam/
            /Steam/Game1/
            /Steam/Game2/

            etc

            • Well... we still need the modmanager to access those directories. Being able to turn it off easily to do this would make the whole "immutable OS" useless as we already have permission management in most OS.

  • Binary drivers (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:38PM (#63252115)

    The Linux kernel infamously doesn't make any guarantees about driver APIs, rendering the idea of binary drivers a pretty shaky proposition - what works on one kernel might not work on the next. That said, I wonder why NVidia / AMD / Intel come together and produce a stable driver API that acts as a shim and *they* support for some duration of time and their binaries work against.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Petersko ( 564140 )

      Because it's not in their best interests? You'd need a lot of cooperation amongst them, and that's not free, even before development started. How big is the market they're trying to capture, really? Nvidia, for instance, would need to see some change in their unit sales to justify it. Is there a large enough body of people sitting on the fence that would subsequently make the leap and buy a card?

      No, the model that makes sense is the DirectX model. Nvidia and ATI don't have to talk to each other at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        Seems like it would be in their best interests because at the moment, trying to get binary drivers working involves a lot of bullshit and they're having to write shims anyway. Installing something from NVidia for example usually means running a script that compiles a shim as a kernel module and then the binary hits that.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )

      The Linux kernel infamously doesn't make any guarantees about driver APIs, rendering the idea of binary drivers a pretty shaky proposition [ ... ]

      Mneh, mneh, mneh, mneh....

      Uh-huh, sure. BTW, how may versions of the MSVC++ runtime are currently squatting in your system folder? I think my Win7 machine managed to get up to something like 14. But no, it's Linux that's a moving target...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        Since VS2017, there is exactly one MSVC runtime and it is ABI forwards compatible. Secondly you've missed the point - the GPU companies could maintain a shim - there is no moving target as far as the binary driver is concerned - driver gets loaded up and it has a well defined interface.

        • Since VS2017, there is exactly one MSVC runtime and it is ABI forwards compatible.

          Someone needs to tell my Win10 (upgraded from Win7) system to retroactively patch all the installed programs to look for this new universal MSVC runtime instead. I have 17 copies of MSVC (2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015-2019) installed.

          I'm guessing on a newly installed Win11 system, only the newest MSVC is installed but most software will probably install the version that was tied to the version of .NET that was used to compile against when they were written. As I don't have a machine with a clean copy

        • Since VS2017, there is exactly one MSVC runtime and it is ABI forwards compatible.

          Too bad it's not backwards compatible, so you still need all the older versions for your older software.

    • It's a non-issue for Intel and AMD, as their drivers are open source and shipped with the kernel itself. In Intel's case, the drivers are sometimes merged into the kernel source tree months before the hardware is even released. NVIDIA is the only one still requiring binary drivers if you want to get full performance out of their hardware.

    • How often is this a problem anymore? I can't remember the last time fighting with drivers in linux.

  • WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:39PM (#63252123)

    This sounds overly complex and annoying. What's wrong with installing SteamOS instead of messing around with all that stuff?

    • This sounds overly complex and annoying

      I believe that to be the number one reason most people hesitate to use Linux on the desktop.

    • It's a totally pointless endeavor in comparison to just putting any effort spent into instead improving things on a another already popular distro. But hey, if they're doing it for fun, all the best to them.

  • Just in time! (Score:4, Funny)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:41PM (#63252129)
    OMG! I thought for moment that there weren't gonna be enough Linux distros. Thank you PikaOS for saving the day. You're my hero!

  • Great, but ... (Score:3)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:42PM (#63252133) Journal

    People keep asking when the "year of the Linux desktop" will be. And honestly, it's not happening as long as things are this fragmented.

    What I mean is, you have to select a "distro" from many, many possibilities out there to easily have the apps/utilities and configuration that's ideal for various tasks.

    There shouldn't be a need for a new distro because you want to game on a Linux system. This should become a default setup selection on all of the popular existing distros.

    • Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @07:09PM (#63252395) Homepage
      That all depends. Most people think that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" would come when Linux became more popular as a desktop OS than Windows, and doubt that it's ever going to come. Some of us Old Phartz know that it originally referred to the year when Linux worked well enough that the average user could use it as a desktop OS without needing to have a guru handy, and from my POV that happened at least twenty years ago. I remember watching a 16 year old girl doing her homework on a laptop running Linux Mint about eight years ago, with no more need for a computer geek than if she were running Windows, and if she could do it then, there's no reason that most computer users couldn't today. And, there are distros out there designed for people like her, with the various flavors of Ubuntu being the best known.

      • > the year when Linux worked well enough that the average user could use it as a desktop OS without needing to have a guru handy

        It will be the year that the average user can fix problems with their linux without the need for a guru or reading buttloads of pages on different parts of linux and typing line after line of gobbledygook in a cli.

    • Well, we are kinda there. Most of the new distros are based on either Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu or Arch. That's 3, which is way less fragmented than, say, 10 or 15 years ago. Sure, there's Gentoo, Slackware, LFS and others, but we mainly have 3 major distro bases. I've been using Linux as my daily desktop driver for 20 years. It's just a matter of doing it. So do it. Gaming on Linux though, that's a pickle. Just like Microsoft thought it a good idea hogging Linux with WSL without facilitating th

    • it's not happening as long as things are this fragmented.

      I think the causality link is not there. If everybody gave up their linux distro for, says, Ubuntu, we would not be closer to that year by any means. The reason for not being the year of linux on the desktop is no desktop manufacturer decided to ship linux in their mainstream setup or (another way to see it) no setup with a an installed linux became mainstream. ChromeOS is a modded Gentoo Linux. When Google has a compelling argument for everybody to buy ChromeOS computers, then it's the year of linux on the

  • Sorry by the Portuguese :P

  • All this could be done with a script? (Score:3)

    by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Monday January 30, 2023 @06:41PM (#63252309)
    Am I missing something? Like, the need for this being at distro level?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      The one thing which occurs to me is that the big obstacle when I considered trying to install Steam back in lockdown in Spring 2020 was that it required a 32-bit graphics driver. Unless they've made it work with 64-bit ones since then, that is IMO a fairly specialised requirement.

  • Isn't Pika the disease where the person eats shit?

    • Isn't there like google or something you could ask instead? "Pica is the eating or craving of things that are not food. It can be a disorder in itself or a sign of other cultural or medical phenomena." So if eating shit means in the coliqual sense just eating a bunch of random shit, then yes. And also maybe feces as well. But mostly dirt is the contexts I've heard it in. Some natives have cultural rituals around eating clay and junk. Also could be used to describe linux distro hoppers, who just eat the r

  • Just install Steam ... (Score:3)

    by JasterBobaMereel ( 1102861 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @08:51AM (#63253479)

    ...and it can do 99% of this already - and you still have a non-gaming OS as well ...

    • I started messing with gaming again and I am amazed at how well steam works with linux.The bulk of the work is selecting a version of Photon for each game but it saves your choice and no problems afterwards. And that is for non-supported games. It also done through the gui.

      Hardest problem I have is getting nexus modmanager's to work well in linux. Vortex looks cool but doesn't work unless you pin it to an old, unsupported version.

  • Gotta catch 'em all! Y'know...all the different Linux distros? -ducks for cover-

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