Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://pika-os.com/
Price: Free!
Blurb: “PikaOS is a gaming focused Linux distribution, focussing on ease of use and high compatibility. Using the know-how from Nobara, combined with a Ubuntu base (sic), PikaOS is almost unrivaled in software compatibility. Our repository is also extremely fast, globally, thanks to Cloudflare's CDN. They also power our global ISO mirrors and status page.“
Kubuntu and gaming? I had to test this out.
Firstly, it’s pretty. Secondly, it seems to be made by people saying “birb”, and while this is cute on 4chan with other 13-year-olds, it should not be used in the real world.
To be fair, it is not what I expected. It is also a “gaming distro” without any games installed. It did, however, have unnecessary services running by default. I could turn them off, sure, but that means it is not fully optimized for gaming, I have to optimize it. The secret sauce in the distribution comes from the PikaOS Hub. Think of it as a welcome screen for gamers. I would have liked to see Oibaf make the list, but it did not. A tuned Kernel (Xanmod) is responsible for some of the niceties, making it as sleek as possible, but there is *some waste – maybe only ship it with five fonts, for instance, and lose wacom and print manager daemons? This does not mean there isn’t any potential here, because there is!
I feel audio is overlooked here, These are places that Windows still leads the way. Other than my gaming drivers, I need audio control and fan control in Linux.
Now I did not dig into the PikaOS team, as sometimes it does not matter, as the work speaks loudest.
From what I have told you so far, I hope you picked up on the sway, almost like a cyclist weaving through traffic. Positive, negative, positive, negative, and to be fair, some problems are Linux in general. I tried the distro on a Dell XPS 9720 and 9520, and while they are not “gaming” machines, the 3050ti graphics card puts up a good show (until it gets hot and the fans take too long to ramp up). As you can see by my latest screenshot, I have been running it for a while, and it certainly has gotten better in leaps and bounds. The 17-inch laptop seems to take everything harder, and I am not sure why. On the 15-inch, sound plays in live mode, but not on the 17-inch. The 15-inch has smooth mouse movements, while the 17-inch has jerks and so forth. Both laptops were new and unused before this, so I’m not sure if it is a hardware issue. I installed vanilla Ubuntu and updated the firmware, but there was no change.
You have the option of using either X11 or Wayland, but I suspect Wayland is the better one for modern gaming, while X11 is fine for retro gaming. The default is X11.
If I compare apples with apples, I can clearly see there has been work done. Running the same game on Linux Lite 6.2 and PikaOS, things already run smoother even on the simpler games. The first few games I ran, ran so nice, I wondered if it was better than on Windows 10 / 11. A game I previously could run on Vulkan on Windows did not want to any more, so I could not tell, but I suspect it ran better.
Though I missed things like Lutris out of the box, nothing was difficult to install, as it is all provided via the PikaOS Hub.
For shits ‘n giggles, I fired it up in Virtualbox and here it surprised me. This time I compared it to KDE Neon, to keep the Desktop Environment the same. I did not expect any games to run. In fact, on KDE neon, games paged, instead of scrolling. In PikaOS, I could actually still play. Now I don’t want to create any false expectations, There were sections where the display jerked, but I played without it feeling like I was in a VM, rather than older hardware. Chained Echoes is not the most demanding game, but I chose it because it has lots of horizontal and vertical scrolling. I honestly expected more paging and screen artifacts. This was so unexpected that I tried a few games with edge scrolling, and lo and behold! It worked. (Virtualbox version 7).
There is definitely some voodoo happening in the background here, and my first impression of the OS was so wrong, that I rewrote the whole article. What is weird here is that, according to the Github page, there has been no movement in months, so is it Ubuntu’s gaming initiative bringing about these changes? We will have to wait and see.
It is important to note that PikaOS is not an Ubuntu Flavor, nor is it a finished project; it is very much a work-in-progress. I would keep my eye on this one if I were you. I am certainly expecting big things.
PikaOS is to Ubuntu what Nobara is to Fedora, or something in that ballpark.
I do not like waste, and it feels like a waste to me when I update here. My test laptops have Nvidia graphics cards, but I see AMD drivers & firmware being downloaded using the provided update software. While I suppose it is not an issue for most people, I would like to see something that allows you to remove the stuff you do not need. Remember, this is supposed to be a gamer-centric distribution, you want the bare minimum.
Unlike Vanilla Ubuntu, PikaOS prefers Flatpaks over Snaps, which is preinstalled and ready to roll. I’m still running the version with the mintupdate (broken as all heck), which has been fixed in the meantime, but requires a reinstall on my part.
The only part that has not changed, and I’m keeping from my original article, is that it includes APX. This puzzles me. From the latest updates, you may note: “Added more containers to apx“, and I can only ask why? Is it because of the VanillaOS fork? These guys are on a good path, they should avoid boaty mcboatface (if you know, you know).
As always, misc@fullcirclemagazine.org if you have a different experience.