Operating Systems

It kind of doesn’t matter which distro you use. They should all work similarly with gaming, there’s no distro with some magic formula that makes it more compatible or with better performance than the alternatives. So pick one that strikes your fancy.

If you’re new, it’s probably better to stick with well known distros. I recommend Mint and Pop OS. Both are based on Ubuntu, so every time you run into an issue or have a questions, you can google solutions for Ubuntu which will also work on Mint/Pop OS. But both also have big communities, so you’ll always have help.

Word of advice that Nvidia and Linux don’t really work that well together. Some games will have issues. AMD GPUs work just fine though.

I use Linux Mint and running ProtonGE with Steam means everything works. Personally I would recommend Mint over Ubuntu at this point. I have seen others have good experiences with Nobara and Garuda as well.

If you're new to gaming you might do well with ubuntu since it tends to be a good distro to start with with lots of support.

One of the big things is to do research and make sure how your hardware might perform on linux because some hardware can surprise you.

Personally I use Arch and it's never given me any issues. I've never used it but my understanding is Endeavor OS is basically just Arch but easy to install. Proton with steam makes running most windows games relatively easy, the main pain points are multiplayer games and their anti cheat.

Using openSUSE Tumbleweed and it works very well with gaming. Like others said, the distro doesn’t matter but check on the hardware compatibility. It really depends on what you have in there.

Dropping in here to ask a side question

My biggest concerns with finally making the switch to gaming in a linux distro are

• Will the biggest releases generally be guaranteed to (eventually) work in wine?
• ~~For game with multiplayer that use invasive anti-cheat third party systems, what's the hit/miss rate of people getting unfairly banned because they're running it on linux? I'm generally playing multiplayer in FFXIV and WoW these days so I'm sure that's fine, but I don't want to worry about being VAC banned down the line for playing some non-AAA game with a trigger happy cheat detection software.~~
• ~~Follow up for this last question - if that's just a reality of gaming on linux, what anti-cheat softwares do I have to be weary of?~~

I found such a list

Bless this community.

There's two recent posts about this topic that might give you some answers: https://lemmy.ml/post/1130762 https://lemmy.ml/post/1171529 I'm also gaming on Linux with an Nvidia card and I know there used to be issues, but I didn't have a single problem so far.

ATM I use PopOS on my rtx3050m laptop. Once you understand how to setup all the command for using the discrete graphics it runs flawless.

I use endeavourOS and it's fantastic

I mean feel like most Linux distros are the same performance wise. Always like POP OS had a nvidia driver already set up which made things easier.

I used arch, cause the archinstaller makes the install easy, while getting a lightweight customizable system at the end. But when it comes down to it, Ubuntu also worked for me. The major advantage of arch is it's aur, bleeding edge packages and the docs.

I've heard good things about Nobara Linux for gaming. It's basically Fedora but with some patches to make it work better out of the box for gaming. Stuff like proprietary Nvidia drivers can be preinstalled. I have Fedora on my machine personally, but installing Nvidia drivers can be a pain if the open source drivers don't give you a working system with your card.

I’ve installed steam and wine on Gentoo and it works great… so any other distro will work too. Main concern might be 32-but library support out of the box, but generally any “established” distro will have it

Another recommendation for Linux Mint here. I've bounced between Manjaro, Ubuntu, Fedora, and I've found Linux Mint to just be fantastic for beginners, in that everything just works, and it does a great job of guiding the user through installation, updating drivers, updating packages (including choosing an appropriate package mirror), and setting up backups.

It's just really nice all around; the only thing I could complain about is lack of touchpad gesture support, but that's probably not an issue for desktop PC usage.

I recommend Fedora (I use the KDE Spin). I have an Nvidia Laptop, which is supposed to be the worst nightmare for Linux gaming, and Fedora handles it brilliantly. The packages are newer than you get on the Ubuntu-based distros like Mint and Pop, and it really makes a difference in performance, when it comes to graphics card drivers (plus you get Wayland and Pipewire which are great).

I personally use mint since it's pretty beginner-friendly. Since you already have some experience with ubuntu, it wouldn't be a bad choice.