In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.

For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.

However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.

From what I've seen, there's no real performance difference with a gaming distro. What they tend to offer is an out of box experience that is more tailored towards gaming than a regular distro (think 'game mode', Steam, Proton, and maybe Lutris pre-installed, Nvidia drivers if you need them).

Someone without any Linux experience thinks it's all the same.

Someone with minimal experience will tell you they're completely different.

Someone with some experience will tell you only the package manager changes.

Someone with lots of experience will tell you it's all the same, only philosophy matters.

Any distro can be made to be the same as any other, your choice should be on the path of least resistance for you, if you need every last frame something that updates the drivers more often is preferable, otherwise you would need to update your driver's manually, bit it's never impossible, it's just more hassle.

I'm going to say this in all Caps because I'm sick of this question:

THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS. ITS ALL THE SAME PIECES ASIDE FROM HOW THE OS IS MANAGED AT THE PACKAGE LEVEL. DISTRO X WILL NEVER BE MORE PERFORMANT THAN Y IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY.

I feel like I need to start a voice channel for people to just be told "no" at this point. There is literally no difference.

Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro?

No. Gaming distro is a "regular" distro preconfigured for gaming.

I would gander that a "gaming distro" is more aggressive at chasing the latest video drivers, stability be damned.

I view the gaming distros as being about out of box. I don't see anything improving performance outside of how the kernel compiles but I doubt any do anything special.

I just installed Nobara on my gaming laptop. The benefits are preconfigured settings, and apps like Steam and Lutris come preinstalled. These distros are a convenience over trying to trudge through all of that stuff yourself. I was able to get things up and running quickly because someone was nice enough to trudge through that stuff themselves.

I'm in the same boat as you. I tried running Bazzite a while back. Most of my Linux experience has been with Pop!_OS, and gaming didn't seem easier than what I was used so, because Pop is already ridiculously easy to run. I'd love to know what I'm missing.

Last year, this piece was written on it. And, based on an extremely small sample size (N=1), the takeaway was basically that the 1% lows (and the 0.1% lows) do seem to benefit on some games.

But, there are so many factors at play, it's pretty hard to back up any claim of performance increase (or decrease). However, if you've got the time and you want to play around, then please feel free to benchmark the 1% lows (and 0.1% lows) of the games you play on different distros and come to your own conclusions.

Gaming distros sometimes can have slightly worse performance than normal ones due to bloat and aesthetics features (especially blur). They might have optimizations for some hardware but the difference is like 2-5% at most. Other than that they're just more convenient and faster to set up for gaming. If you want good performance, use a rolling release to get latest drivers and try both X11 and Wayland to see what works better in the games you play. A lightweight DE/WM can give you a couple extra FPS in some cases too

It really makes no difference other than them installing a few drivers. Some talk about customized Kernels but cmon anyone modifying the kernel is merely pretending. Not even SteamDeck does it I think.

Both. TheLinuxExperiment and MumblingHugon have made videos about that.

Bazzite is especially stable, reliable and works out of the box. Others may have better performance, but the cost is pretty big

Some kernels trade efficiency with a bit more power. Setup (like, schedulers) is probably optimized for this too. Gaming features like esync fsync ootb enabled. Integration of some launchers/services. That's the main differences.