Keep noticing that when taking about Linux distro recommendations (on Reddit) users recommend Mint and Ubuntu for gaming.
Now don’t get me wrong, they’re great distros and with a bit of work are great for games, but I feel like theres better recommendations for new users looking into getting into gaming on linux.
I’m still surprised how little attention Nobara gets when it comes to this. It’s such a wonderful just works out of the box distro.
That’s sorta what I’m getting at. For PC gaming, I’d recommend Fedora and Nobara over Ubuntu,
Debian. Same base, no extra bs. Rock solid and reliable. Outdated packages are a non-issue for a casual user. Gaming needs a bit of configuration but it perfectly doable. Installation is apparently difficult but… I don’t know where that comes from. It may not be Calameres-smooth but it’s perfectly understandable even to a novice.
As always the correct answer is … “it depends “
Ubuntu and mint are fine for new users…
If you hand a new driver a car, you’d want them to have a more simple reliable car. Key in , start, drive turn brakes… etc.
But if you want to: tune the fuel air mix; lower the rear tire pressure for grip; or adjust gear ratios… then you can give them Arch or Gentoo
Similarly to windows or mac; Ubuntu and mint mostly just work, and kinda just do what it says on the tin.
What are the better recommendations in your opinion?
I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Up to date packages but with relatively good stability due to how they’re tested. Rolling release distros are always more risky, but for gaming you probably do want up to date packages to ensure graphics drivers and bleeding edge versions of Proton, Vulkan and even Wine work as expected. I think that’s most true for newer games and those where you may need to use Proton Experimental. Its also a good broad distro for other uses, rather than solely focused on one element like gaming.
Steam Deck is based on Arch; it’s not quite rolling release but they do relatively frequent updates to their version of Linux so a rolling release distro is probably going to be closer to it than most annual release and certainly LTS released linuxes.
Nobara is also a good distro to consider. It’s made by the guy who game up with Proton-GE and is gaming focused. It’s also rolling released and optimised more for gaming including the kernel. I use it on a living room PC for the past 5-6 months and like it so far.
Pop or Fedora unless there’s a reason not to.
Pop is basically Ubuntu minus snap, plus flatpak, plus their PPA, no?
Heavily customized desktop, one day to be fully custom.
Yes. With a custom gnome shell fork.
Their summer release will have the new desktop environment they have been working on (Cosmic) which will be a big point of differentiation
I like Bazzite
I keep seeing Pop!_OS brought up for gaming.
I tried Pop!_OS 3 times, and all 3 times, my computer crashed irrecoverably at some point.
I ended up replacing it.
I’ve been using Pop for a few months as my daily driver to replace Windows. It had been a few years since I’d used Linux and I wanted something stable for Nvidia drivers. I’ve had next to no issues with it.
Mint lets you install Nvidia drivers pretty easily nowadays. My surfacebook 2 has a 1050 mobile built in and it couldn’t have been easier to get the drivers installed.
Ubuntu I don’t recommend, nor Pop_OS simply due to Snaps. Where as flatpak is the standard built into Mint.
Mint is a straight swap. Knowing everything about your PC is so much work. I would rather just game and not have to be a programmer to not see ads every 5 seconds.
When it comes to gaming I’ve found them to be mid at best, but I think that’s exactly why they get recommended a lot. Stability (as in using old but not too old drivers) and a broad and easily accessible knowledge base in term of tutorials and answered newbie questions.
I’m using Tuxedo OS. Based off Ubuntu, but without snaps, and using a up-to-date KDE desktop environment. I don’t like Cinnamon.
The reason for Ubuntu is that it’s the distro corporations (like Valve and AMD) are most likely to officially support.
“support” being a vague term. Steam runs everywhere, they don’t even use Ubuntu for SteamOS. And it’s actually easier to install AMDs rocm on other distros and ofc Ubuntus drivers are outdated.
Ubuntu is the most popular and common distro
OEM vendors primarily use it as their reference distro when testing and supporting drivers, hardware, applications, games, etc.
It’s the path of least resistance.
Mint and Ubuntu are easy to setup, and will generally work well out of the box, so great recommendations for people who have to ask.
Personally I use Manjaro, which also works out of the box, and I like the rolling release scheme, my wife uses Debian and both work great for games.My wife had some initial problems with Debian and PipeWire sound system but it works fine now, and in fairness she is a musician and uses some weird audiosystem that can record 8/16 channels. So I bet “normal” systems wouldn’t have noticed any problems.
I still use pulse audio because I’m lazy, and if it works don’t fix it.
I’ve used Mint for close to 6 years on various desktops and laptops and it’s rock solid reliable. My main computer runs LMDE 6 without any issues.
I’ve been usung mint for about a month now.
I want to get rid of Windows, but I don’t want to spend my day sudo-ing my ass off.
Give me a gui for everything and doubleclick installers, and a release that is stable above all else.
I’m open to suggestions though! So shoot away which distro I should be using :)
My nephew uses arch btw.
I made the switch to Linux just some days ago, and landed on bazzite. It is fairly idiot proof with an option to roll back the entire system and is generally focused on gaming and ease of use.
So far i am having a blast, almost everything works right out of the box, and the things that didn’t were very minor and fixable with a bit of web search or asking on a relevant discord. I didn’t have to use the dreaded CLI much either - maybe 4-5 times - and when I did, I just followed a step by step guide to do something.
My personal recommendation would be choosing gnome as the DE, going with plasma seems more logical coming from windows, but I find it a lot simpler getting used to the differences by using an entirely different ui than windows. Forming new mental pathways is easier than adjusting something practiced a particular way for years.
For reference:
That’s fair, although personally I would still recommend KDE. KDE is only superficially windows like - it’s highly customisable so you can switch the GUI up. The windows GUI is also successful for a reason so it’s good to have it as one option - you don’t have to sacrifice a basically good GUI when you leave windows. (Microsoft constantly seems to want to tinker with it but then has to reintroduce the basics as that’s what people like - such as the latest nonsense with Windows 11). But with KDE you can also recreate other GUIs with relative ease (even most of Gnome).
Personally I find GNOME too rigid and inflexible - it has a clear design philosophy which is good, but if you’re not on board with that philosophy then it can be frustrating to use as they’re so focused on that design philosophy. It’s a take it or leave it DE in many ways, while KDE (and many other DEs) offers more choice and flexibility.
They’re simple to get into for anyone with an introductory interest in Linux, although I haven’t liked Ubuntu in ages. My Mint setup took a bit of effort but it does game pretty well. Fedora could be a good recommendation too, I liked that when I tried it out. There’s some gaming focused distros like Bazzite or Nobara, but I feel like I can get a “normal” distro working to a similar state for games, and I don’t have to hope that a small team doesn’t fold and my distro loses updates support.
I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed this week, wanna see if it’s a good alternative to Fedora.
I don’t dare try Arch yet, and thus I also wouldn’t recommend it to any new user.
people asking for those recommendations are newcomers to Linux and Ubuntu and Mint (especially) are both very newcomer friendly with large support communities when any questions come up
once they become more familiar with their system, they can turn to the Arch Wiki and the Gentoo Handbook as they fine-tune things
but neither Mint nor Ubuntu are going to hit you with any big surprises – unsupervised access to AUR in Arch, long compilation times in Gentoo, obscure (and semi-documented) programming language in Nix, or dealing with commands that are a little bit different in BusyBox, musl, or OpenRC systems …
