All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!
Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.
I’ve been using Fedora for the past few years and have been pretty happy with it. It updates at just the right cadence for me where I get new stuff pretty quickly but I’m not on a rolling release.
Not at all an expert, but I’m doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.
I’ve been on pop os for at least 2 years now, been loving it. Most of my gaming is through steam so compatibility issues are the exception, not the rule. It’s a bit of a dream come true to play God of War on Linux, it feels like all the stars aligned.
Even when I bork the install by fucking around in the kernel I wind up getting back on pop rather than finally taking the dive into arch.
I've been running Pop for a bit over a year now and am (mostly) satisfied with it. The only issues I had were due to kernel updates, it would cause flickering on my screen and (like someone else mentioned) had to revert to an older kernel until the situation was resolved.
Pop here also. I tried several different distro's, pop worked out of the box. Only issue was my cheap little Bluetooth USB wart, but five minutes of searching showed me how to get it working. That's it. I like it. Familiar enough for a windows refugee, plays enough steam games without issues to keep me happy. No crashes, no freezes, unlike windows 10/11.
Yeah I use Cinnamon too. It's fairly polished and can delve into Ubuntu or Debian when missing something you really want. I find the Nvidia drivers are easy to set up and maintain, and Steam works reasonably well (I have had a few quirks but nothing that I couldn't resolve).
The standalone Nvidia driver install panel makes installing the right gpu drivers a breeze.
The only problem I ran into is that it won't boot with my main monitor (1440p 165hz) plugged in. I have to use my secondary monitor (4k 60hz) to install the OS and Nvidia drivers first, then shutdown and plug in the main monitor and everything works on the next boot.
What is it lately with companies and shooting themselves in the foot? Have all the CEOs gotten together and mutually decided that this was the year they were going to piss off their communities?
Red Hat are burning through a lot of the good will they’ve made over the years with this.
Here’s the statement the Rocky Linux folks put out:
I dont know that its how they brand themselves, but Pop!_OS is a fantastic linux gaming distro.
Its based on Ubuntu, but they do several very important things: they update/patch the kernel with the latest drivers and goodness and provide the latest nvidia proprietary drivers. So you get the stability and durability of ubuntu + newer kernel support which means things like much more current mesa drivers (for radeon cards).
I’ve been using it full-time for 3 (or 4?) years now. I technically have my PC dual booting with Windows for gaming reasons, but since the steamdeck took off all of the big games I want to play are available on linux. I’ve logged into windows exactly 2 times and that was to run updates.
Pop has been rock solid and turned out to be a great gaming OS.
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.
You can try different distros online using distrosea.com , if you’re not planning to use a distro with no GUI ( like Arch , where everything need terminal ) then I would recommend focusing on trying to learn dealing with DE ( like Gnome , KDE , XFCE , SWAY , etc )… while testing make sure to do things like trying terminal , playing with settings , discovering things etc , and any obstacles/questions you find you can search for its answers and solutions…
For resources, I mostly find answers and learn new things about linux from any websites I find in a web searching about Linux ( right now I only remember Linux TLDR , Arch wiki , Ubuntu forums , its foss - not only Linux focused -) , reddit , and linux@lemmy.ml community on Lemmy ( both news and questions ) For news , usually Linux community on lemmy and The Linux experiment channel on peertube ( iirc they have a YouTube channel too but I know nothing about it )
Linux has more freedom and diversity than Windows, I also wanted to try something unusual compared to the routinized experience of Windows , I wanted also to get rid of Windows restrictions ( like the need to activate Windows to fully use it while I live in a country where there’s no way to activate it , ads and such things )
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