Drauger OS 7.5.1 | Review
The Linux Distro for Gaming
What’s Drauger OS?
Drauger OS is a Linux desktop gaming operating system. It aims to provide a platform for gamers to use where they can get great performance without sacrificing their security.
Based off Ubuntu LTS releases, Drauger OS is stable, secure, and gets updates thanks to the Ubuntu repositories for 5 years.
Summary
I performed the review entirely in the live session (see below), and I feel I got an idea of what the developer had in mind for the distribution.
Drauger OS aims to be a gaming-first Linux distribution, much like the venerable SteamOS aimed to be.
What little gaming I was able to do from the live session I was very impressed.
Install
Drauger has a heavy-weight live session complete with prompts to install Steam the moment the session starts, along with the welcome app and a “critical battery” alert or two.
The developers decided to use SystemBack instead of the far more usable and functional Calamares installer, presumably due to size concerns.
SystemBack is both unreliable and uncommon. In fact, out of all the Distro Delves reviews, only one other Linux distribution used it.
Unfortunately, the installer didn’t work at all. No matter how I tried to set up my partitions, the install would always fail.
Since Drauger OS is built with Linux Gaming in mind and all my Steam games live on an external SSD, we can continue this review in the live session.
Desktop & Apps
Drauger uses a customized Xfce 4.14 desktop with three panels: A top main bar, a left-side quick launcher panel, and the bottom panel for workspaces.
This desktop layout is awkward because it is not only more complex than the average desktop, but the panels and icons are massive, which clutters the screen badly.
Much like the Xfce desktop itself, widgets do not scale well. For example, the clock widget gets pushed to the left for each open application window.
The default theme is a dark theme with primarily red accents. The theme itself is good, but the contrast of the red text on the dark background makes it look oversaturated.
Despite DraugerOS being a gaming-first Linux distro, it ships with a surprising number of apps and is (probably) a quite capable is a regular desktop distro.
Network & Sharing
Sharing & Network support was spotty, possibly due to the live session.
I wasn’t able to connect my smartphone or get Bluetooth to work at all.
There are no built-in file/folder sharing options in the file browser, and Samba/Windows network discovery did not work.
I was able to connect to machines on my network directly using the smb and ssh protocols.
Devices + Media
I was impressed with the support for non-gaming related stuff such as archive formats and media codecs.
All of the common archive formats worked fine, and all of the popular media codecs and formats worked good too.
AppImage support was solid and Drauger ships with both Snap & Flatpak support, and both integrate into the built-in software store.
The Flathub remote is not enabled, so the user would need to set that up before Flatpak is really usable.
Gaming Performance!
Since I was gaming in the live session, I was very constrained as to what games I could test.
The live session offers only about 3gb of system memory, and some games incorrectly identified my graphics card.
I was able to play XCom 2, SpecOps: The Line, and Metro: Redux. None of these games are particularly new or exciting, but I have used them in previous episodes, so we have a “baseline” of sorts.
I say with confidence that all of the games ran better on Drauger.
A particular standout was Metro: Redux, which usually runs rather poorly, averaging closer to 40 frames a second. Drauger averaged 60fps easily.
XCom 2 did quite well, keeping well above 30fps, which on most other distros, the average is closer to about 25fps.
SpecOps: The Line is capped at 60fps and remained there until the action started. It probably averaged about 45fps.
Final Thoughts
Drauger OS is a flawed gem.
The biggest issue by far is the desktop; Xfce isn’t the right choice. Something like Kodi or even a customized Gnome desktop would be a much better choice.
But Drauger (mostly) delivers on its promise: to be a Linux desktop gaming operating system.
Lots of Linux distros have claimed games worked and performed better with them, yet they never had facts or figures to back it up.
Drauger OS is the first Linux distro that delivers on the promise. And a significant amount, to boot!
