ElementaryOS doesn't work on Apple Silicon, so that's not an option.
Bazzite. Here's why:
- Optimised for gaming (gaming optimised kernel, common tweaks pre-applied, all common gaming apps pre-installed like Steam, Mangohud etc)
- All necessary drivers pre-installed (game controllers, RGB, and even proprietary nVidia)
- A Steam-Deck like gaming experience, if you want (the Deck variant boots directly to Steam)
- Immutable and atomic (image-based OS updates, so updates either work or don't - there's no chance of a broken state)
- Easy rollbacks (just select the previous image in the GRUB menu)
But since you said:
how to squeeze the best performance out of this
and if you're really serious about squeezing the best performance, then check out the Arch-based CachyOS - unlike most other Linux distros, Cachy has optimised x86-64-v3 and v4 packages in their repos, which means apps can make use of advanced CPU instructions such as SSE3, AVX512 etc. Most other Linux distros on the other hand still use x86-64-v1 for compatibility reasons, which unfortunately means that you'd be missing out on all the cool new optimised CPU instructions introduced over the past 16 years.
You can read more about microarchitecture levels (aka MARCH) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_levels
In addition to the MARCH, Cachy's packages have other optimisations such as LTO/PGO, optimised kernel with the BORE and Rusty schedulers which are better for gaming, plus several performance-oriented tweaks which you'd otherwise have to do manually on Arch (such as makepkg.conf tweaks, pacman.conf tweaks etc).
Finally, Cachy are always on the bleeding edge when it comes to gaming/driver/kernel/performance related stuff, so you'll get all the good stuff even before Bazzite or other optimised distros. For instance, Cachy was the first distro to include the new nVidia driver which has explicit sync support for better Wayland compatibility, and they're always on top of major Arch developments and provide detailed announcements which are relevant to gamers and performance freaks.
Eg, here's their recent recent nVidia announcement:
Hi @here,
as you maybe noticed, we have rolled out the new NVIDIA Driver, which includes the explicit sync protocol and tearing for Vulkan. We have been prioritized to move this forward to finally resolve the wayland situation. Additionally arch has pushed CUDA to 12.5, which is NOT compatible with the current 550 driver (it needs the 555 Driver).
The beta driver is not perfect, but so far we are applying some fixes to avoid issues and restore performance problems with disabling the GSP Firmware load. This is handled via the "cachyos-settings" package.
Anyways, since some people maybe have problems with this driver, here is a short instruction to manually downgrade and block the driver:
[...]
If you are facing issues with the new NVIDIA Driver, reproduce the issues and then run "sudo nvidia-bugreport.sh" and report it to their forum: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-graphics/linux/148
We are also shipping now an precompiled nvidia-open module. This will be also as default installed for users, which have supported cards as soon NVIDIA releases the 560 drivers.
The CachyOS Team
So as you can see, they're pretty on to it with this sorta stuff.
Now the Bazzite team are also like the Cachy guys and keep up with this stuff, but because they're based on Fedora, they can't be as bleeding edge or as optimised as Arch. So it's up to you - if you prefer stability, a primarily gaming-focused optimisations, and want something that "just works" then get Bazzite; or if you want an ultra-optimised distro to squeeze out the most performance out of your box but also don't mind ocassionally diving into the terminal and getting your hands dirty, then get CachyOS.
cc: @[email protected]
I've heard of Intel Arc users for instance not able to play certain games because it checks for AMD/nVidia, so you'd have to fake the GPU vendor to get it to work.
Eg see stuff like this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Graphics-Hogwarts-Legacy
Or https://www.phoronix.com/news/The-Finals-Intel-Arc-Graphics
You can sill use Medicare to create the USB and then add your favorite antimalware rescue CD to it, like the Kaspersky/Avira ones, but if it's an unknown malware you'd have to use other analysis tools like Sysinternals RootkirRevealer, Autoruns etc. If you want to fix Windows stuff then it's best to get a WinPE-based live CD with these tools, like Sergei Strelec, Gandalf etc.
Medicat USB has a few hardware diagnostics tools on it. It's based on Ventoy, so it's more like a collection of ISOs as opposed to a single distro.
Before y'all get excited, the press release doesn't actually mention the term "open source" anywhere.
Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.
This, to me, reads like it's going to be a "source available" model, perhaps released under some sort of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). So, best to hold off any celebrations until we see the actual license.
Ain't really a fix for games using Proton
Wdym? It works fine for Proton games as well.
This has nothing to do with Arch or Bazzite, it's actually a bug in recent kernels. Switching to Mint only fixed it for you because Mint uses an old kernel.
The fix/workaround is to enable "above 4G decoding" and "resizable BAR" in your BIOS. If your BIOS does not have these options, you can either downgrade to an earlier kernel (or OS image if you're on Bazzite), or switch to a patched kernel like the Cachy kernel.
Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?
There will be some other minor dot files in your /home which you might want to review, like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile etc. These should be mostly harmless, but if you don't recall customising them, then yeah free to nuke all the dot files. Also be aware that some programs also leave their configs outside the .config folder, like Firefox might have a .mozilla folder, GTK programs might create a .themes folder, vim has .vim. So you might want to review and delete these as well, if you want a clean config.
As for the last step - just before you boot into your new distro, you might to get rid of the Arch/Endeavour entries from your ESP/UEFI. Run efibootmgr to see your current UEFI boot entries, then nuke the entries using efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b #.
And to get rid of the GRUB configs, delete your <ESP>/EFI/grub folder. I'm guessing your /boot is on your root partition? If not then you'll also need to delete /boot/grub.
Now when you install your next distro, you should get a nice and clean GRUB install.
It's not that simple. The biggest issue is that Apple Silicon uses 16K memory page sizes instead of the 4K pages used by pretty much every other architecture out there. This means you'd need a kernel patched for 16K pages - but that would also cause an issue with drivers and other apps designed with 4K pages in mind. So there's a lot of work done in that area to get both the kernel and apps working. Even then, some apps may never work, and so you'd have to resort to using hacks like microVMs to run a 4K kernel and then run the app on top of it, but that introduces it's own set of issues of course.
Then there's the issue of hardware components - of course Apple hasn't open-sourced any of their firmware/drivers, so most of the Asahi drivers were developed by reverse engineering. The GPU was the biggest piece of work, the reverse engineering done to get it to a workable state by the Asahi team was nothing short of genius. In fact the current state of the OpenGL driver is so good that it's far, far more compliant to the spec compared to macOS itself - macOS only supports OpenGL upto 4.1 and is not certified either (and technically no longer supported by Apple), whereas Asahi supports up till 4.6 - and it's still being improved. See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/asahi-linux-projects-opengl-support-on-apple-silicon-officially-surpasses-apples/
Similarly, a lot of wizardry was done to get the sound going, and not only did they get it going - they even improved the DSP so it sounds even better than macOS! (Scroll down to the speakers section here: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/).
But in spite of all that, there's still a lot of work to be done, such as getting Thunderbolt and DisplayPort going, as well as improving compatibility with x86 apps (using krun and FEX) and more GPU improvements etc and support for the M3 and newer chips.. Even then, Asahi is already in a usable daily-driver state for many users, and it's improving at a rapid pace.
So long story short, the Asahi team had to do a ton of work to get it all going on a complex, closed piece of hardware like Apple Silicon - and it's genius levels of work, the level of which I can barely comprehend - and isn't something any random distro can pull off.