Yes this has been asked and answered a million times I’m sure. There is a plethora of ‘top ten distros for Linux gaming’ lists out there and the majority of posts I can find on That Other Site seem to devolve into “every distro can do games”.
I’m interested in what you are using and your experience doing so. Any gotchas you wished you knew? Anything you tried that didn’t work, or anything that worked unexpectedly well? What would you say if your friend asked this over a few pints down the pub?
I’m using Pop OS and it worls flawlessly!
Me too!
I’ve been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT
same here and lutris was giving me shit with ea app, I could not get controller to work. I ended buying BF on steam and it works flawlessly.
not even going to bother anymore. steam 100% for gaming, idiot proof implementation is about ready for the normie stream.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, YaST is the deity I pray to
i’m just using manjaro right now, works pretty well
Same. Never had a problem with Manjaro. But also never play AAA online games
Using Manjaro KDE here, as well. Granted, I mostly play Counter-Strike, Risk of Rain 2, Stellaris, and various indie games, but pretty much everything has been very smooth. Very glad to be free of Windows on my main machine, and it hasn’t really affected how I use my PC day-to-day.
update: i have now had an issue with manjaro (audio issue, low quality, fixed pretty easy, but still)
Arch linux, minimal install. Feels really nice to have control over my whole distro and to not be clogged by third-party annoyances.
I mean…Steam OS on Steam Deck…and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.
Mint for my desktop, SteamOS on Deck. Both do what I need, and the only issues I’ve run into since switching have been random things like GOG not having an updated Planescape Torment build that works out of the box. I don’t play many online competitive games with like invasive anti-cheat stuff, so I haven’t run into a ton of compatibility issues.
I forgot about the anti cheat stuff. That may well be an issue - some VM toe-dipping appears to be in order for me
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I’ve been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it’s been nice. However, I’m not as big of the DE and don’t have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.
I was using Debian, but I now daily drive openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Currently using Debian 12.
I haven’t gotten Lutron’s to install anything on debian 12. Was run into some wine error while installing games.
Do you have any guides you used?
Been using arch, don’t have issues. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with dwm, but if I switch to xfce then games run without issue. My current computer has an nvidia gpu, next one will be entirely amd based.
Do you have issues? I run a 12th gen I7 and a 2070 Super and everything just works
Not really. If I do it’s usually because of my weak components. Dwm causes issues sometimes but it’s just cause whatever I’m playing doesn’t know what to do with a tiling window.
Fedora, apart from the latest nvidia driver rendering Plasma a slide show I’ve had no real issues.
I run Arch BTW. Even with a Nvidia GPU and never have issues.
Debian Bookworm
I run AMD kit (not the latest) and install the KDE desktop, Steam and Crossover.
I choose Debian because its packaged extremely well and I want an OS/Applications to be things that just work.
The only bugs I suffer are Proton issues playing Windows games and the recent steam ui update doesn’t seem to work with steam link from a wayland desktop (has to be x11).
I’m using Nobara. It’s a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.
Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).I’ve also been using Nobara and it’s been near flawless for me since I started using it months ago