What is the best OS for gaming?

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14

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Considered

229

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Sep 17, 2018

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Here’s the Deal

The 1 must play gameWhy?

Best OS for gaming	Price	Default Desktop Environment	Based On
90 Windows 10	-	–	–
77 SteamOS	-	Steam Big Picture, Gnome	Debian
-- Windows 7	-	–	–
-- Android Lollipop	-	–	–
-- Deepin	-	Deepin Desktop Environment	Debian Unstable

See Full List

11 Other Games Considered

SteamOS

Top Pro

Gamer-oriented development model

Top Con

Still in beta

Top Pro

Vulkan oriented instead of DX12

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. It's much faster compared to DX12 and is cross-platform. See More

Top Con

Steam OS boxes are extremely expensive and are not as streamlined as Windows 10 or 7

Top Pro

Completely free

Top Con

Hard to install

If you've installed Arch you're probably fine, but for those used to simple installs like (Ubuntu to name just one) you should prepare some patience, determination, and painkillers. Good news is, it's getting better (it's very young). See More

Top Pro

Native graphics processor support

The OS natively supports Nvidia, Intel, and AMD graphics processors. See More

Top Con

Not built around the desktop experience

SteamOS is, first and foremost, meant to act as a gaming console - it doesn't ship with even some of the most basic applications, such as a file manager or image viewer. As a result, using SteamOS as your primary operating system would require a fair bit of work. See More

Top Pro

Streaming service integration (under development)

Valve is in talks with streaming companies such as Spotify and Netflix to bring their features to SteamOS. See More

Top Con

Still lacking many AAA games

Top Pro

For entertainment, it just works

What media center software do for videos, it does for games (and later videos). See More

See All

Android Lollipop

Top Con

Fragmentation and security flaws due to negligence

Most Android phones seem to be released on a "Let's release a few software updates until we release the next phone, and never push out an update again." For example, In May 2014, 8.5% of phones were Kitkat, 60.8% were spread out between three versions of jellybean (with bias towards older versions), and the another 20% spread out over ICS, Honeycomb, Gingerbread, and Froyo. Google no longer maintains Android 4.3 or prior and serious security exploits remain in those versions. Device manufacturers are also taking no action, which leaves almost a billion Android users exposed. You may also encounter lingering and unfixed bugs, glitches, etc. as a result of the manufacturer's and Google's lack of interest in older versions. Some flagship phones are well supported into the future, but the fact that your phone won't be supported by its manufacturer and/or Google is a consideration you must make when purchasing an Android phone. See More

Top Pro

Allows the user to easily turn off system wide notifactions

This is great for all those free to play games that constantly send notifications to the notification bar nagging users to play the game as all notifications can be turned off on a per app basis. See More

Top Con

Difficult to use for pro audio

Android M paired with newer devices are getting audio latency down to 20 milliseconds or less, which is great compared to previous Android versions, however is still slower than Apple's 7ms on the iPhone 4S - a 4 year old phone. There are almost no professional audio tools available for Android because the latency was way too slow for professional audio creation, but perhaps now that Android isn't so far back we will start to see a few options come to Android. See More

Top Pro

Console gaming with available set top boxes

Google, Nvidia and a few other manufacturers have created TV set top boxes powered by Android Lollipop that allow one to game on their telivisions. Basically an Android console with a wide selection of games. See More

Top Con

Android does not have the best reliability.

Android products might appeal to the more technically capable, people prepared to invest in considering their product, who like a particular device form factor and / or who already use a lot of Google’s online product suite. See More

Top Con

Difficult to find quality games

Due to the surge of in-app purchased filled games that are low quality efforts it can be troublesome to find worthwhile hardcore games. See More

Top Con

You can't play most of the Windows games

Top Con

Tied to Google

Even though Android is open-source, it is near unusable without Google Apps and a Google account. For example, it's impossible to download apps from the Google play store without a Google account unless the user is sideloading the app from 3rd party source such as APK Mirror. See More

Top Con

Wide variety of phones forces variance in quality

While there are many great Android phones, there are also many Android phones that lack in both hardware and software. When purchasing Android phones, a consumer might want to do some research first - especially when buying on a budget. Not only do you have to worry about shotty hardware or poor quality testing, manufacturers tend to tinker with the software on phones. More often than not this leads to poor performance, unintuitive 'features', slower (or complete lack of) updates, and custom software that detracts from the user's experience. See More

See All

Deepin

Top Pro

Great support for graphics cards

Deepin OS includes a program called "Deepin Graphics Driver Manager" which can easily install a good driver for the graphics card. See More

Top Con

Slow default repos

Download speed for packages from the default repos, is abnormally slow. See More

Top Pro

Best for daily use

Top Pro

Easy to use

It's very easy to use. You can easily uninstall a program by going to the menu then right-clicking on the preferred app and selecting "Uninstall" option. See More

Top Pro

Has its own toolkit

It has its own toolkit called "Deepin Tool Kit". And the maintainers themselves use it. See More

Top Pro

Excellent apps

Having Deepin installed also means you have thousands of quality apps to choose from. The apps which come with installation will suit your needs to browse the Internet, listen to music, watch videos, talk with friends, editing documents or simply any task you want to do at home or in your office. See More

Top Pro

Great design to the app store

The app store is gorgeous. See More

Top Pro

Enjoy the simplicity of Deepin's desktop

The desktop interface and apps feature an intuitive and elegant design. Moving around, sharing and searching, etc. has become simply a joyful experience. See More

Top Pro

Exciting applications

It has some exciting applications, such as Deepin Graphics Driver Manager which can easily change between free and proprietary drivers without any issue. See More

Top Pro

Based on Debian

It is based on Debian which is the best Linux distribution for desktops. See More

Top Pro

Blur and transparent design

Deepin has a blur and transparent design throughout the OS, which makes it one of the most beautiful Linux distros. See More

Top Pro

Steam pre-installed

Top Pro

Company behind it

The Wuhan Deepin Technology is behind this Linux distribution. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install

Installing Deepin OS is very easy. Even easier than installing Ubuntu! See More

Top Pro

Lighter than Windows 10 and Ubuntu

Deepin 15.7 is lighter than Windows 10 and Ubuntu. See More

Top Pro

Comes with CrossOver pre-installed

Deepin is a huge supporter of Codeweavers CrossOver. So, it includes CrossOver pre-installed. Nevertheless, it's NOT a trial version. And with CrossOver, you can easily install and use Windows programs See More

Top Pro

Supports Flatpak

Deepin OS supports Flatpak. It also has some Flatpak programs installed by default. See More

Top Pro

Launches programs faster

Programs load and launch faster in Deepin than other Linux distributions. It takes only about 3 seconds to launch Chrome. See More

Top Pro

Automatically cleans package cache

Deepin automatically cleans package cache. Cleaning package cache is a good thing as it will make the OS much faster and lighter. See More

Top Pro

VLC media player works without any issue

In some cases, VLC media player has some problems with Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based Linux distros. That isn't the case with Deepin. See More

Top Pro

Not based on Ubuntu

Some people don't like Ubuntu nor its derivatives. See More

Top Pro

Well-designed in every detail, developers have a professional aproach to the system

Deepin has a sane default set of apps including custom apps of their own design that gives the distro a very consistent look and feel. By working with the community on these tools as well as custom translations there is a great sense of polish when using it that is not often seen when using such a new desktop environment. See More

Top Pro

Can be made to look like Windows easily

By default, Deepin looks kinda like macOS but it can be made to look like Windows by right-clicking on the dock and changing the mode from "Fashion Mode" to "Efficient Mode". See More

Top Pro

Rolling release

It is a rolling release Linux distribution which is quite popular these days. See More

Top Pro

Very stable

Even though it is based on Debian unstable, it is still pretty stable and you will hardly ever get a dependency issue. See More

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Ubuntu LTS

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Manjaro Linux

Top Pro

Steam installed by default

Top Con

Security issues

Since packages are not updated as fast as in Arch, critical security updates may not come as fast as needed for packages that may have issues. See More

Top Pro

Installation is a breeze

Calamares installer and MHWD is the reason why this distribution is good for desktop user- friendliness! Audio codecs, latest packages,latest kernel and easy upgrade to the latest build makes it the best choice for new users. See More

Top Con

Bad way of handling dependencies

Manjaro is based on Arch Linux. Arch Linux and its derivatives have a bad way of handling dependencies. To handle dependencies, it installs a whole another program which contains the required dependencies. See More

Top Pro

Excellent graphical package manager (Pamac)

Features include: providing notifications of available updates; mirror management; AUR support (with the option to suppress unnecessary confirmations during the install process); update settings (frequency, whether to check for updates from the AUR, packages to ignore updates for); and a history of packages installed, updated, or removed (from the official repositories - AUR packages are not currently tracked). See More

Top Con

You can't change the default theme in certain applications

Although it is possible to change the default dark theme, this has no effect on Firefox, which appears to have the dark theme "hard coded". Hardened Linux pros may find a way to change this, but for the rest, it renders an otherwise nice distro a no-go. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

If you ask questions of users in their forums or on other platforms, they are willing to help you. Also according to the developers, they are open to new ideas in order to make the distro better. See More

Top Con

Nothing new

There is nothing new in Manjaro compared to any other Arch based distribution. See More

Top Pro

Stable and consistently up to date

Manjaro receives regular updates, but more importantly these updates are stable. The updates are rolled out, which means you can easily update the software without needing to re-install. See More

Top Con

The Manjaro unstable repository is slow to sync with the Arch stable repository

The Manjaro unstable repository syncs with the Arch stable repository and if any package has moved, it gets moved to stable. Manjaro gets package updates a bit than Arch. See More

Top Con

Can still be unstable

Here are the details of it. See More

See All

Steam

Ubuntu 15.04

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