Linux distribution
Let’s hope Neil Mohr doesn’t make any gags he’ll regata. Damn it!
There are two likely reasons we’ve not heard much about Regata OS. One: it’s from Brazil. Two: it’s based on OpenSUSE. In a world that seems to revolve around Debian/Ubuntu-based distros in the English language, stepping away from either is bound to create speed bumps. So, is offering a slick games-first distro enough to move past them?
We first looked at Regata OS 22 in LXF293; 18 months on and two versions later, we have Regata OS 24 Arctic Fox, with the big update being KDE Plasma 6 desktop alongside a jump to kernel 6.7 and Mesa 24. Let’s tackle those last two, as between them they offer support for the latest gaming graphics hardware. Mesa 24 improves AMD Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing performance and new Vulkan extensions to the Intel ANV driver. This enables the Regata OS Games Access system to use VKD3D-Proton 2.12, which enables supported DirectX 12 games, primarily those built on Unreal Engine 5, to run out of the box. With this, KDE Plasma 6 provides the best Wayland support so far – we’ll have more on KDE 6 next issue.
Get down with the downloads
Regata OS is offered in two downloads, one generic and one with the Nvidia display driver, something other distros offer to help smooth dealing with the proprietary Nvidia driver. At 3.4GB, it’s clearly a balanced build. The ISO is both a live disc, so you can try it out without installing, and straight install media.
The distro uses the platform-agnostic Calamares installer, but it has customised and split it in two. From within the live environment, the installer helps partition the disk and copy the files. The user creation process only shows up after you boot into your new installation.
The whole raison d’être of Regata OS is gaming. At its heart is its own Game Access launcher; this ties together the major gaming systems such as GoG, Epic Store, Ubisoft, Origin and Battle.net alongside Steam,
