Pop_OS is a good distro and has good Nvidia support
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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I’ll second Pop!_OS! Been using it as a daily driver since 2022 and have had a painless gaming experience the past year or so using lutris (league) and steam.
I use an Amd cpu and a nvidia gpu, if that helps at all.
I'd strongly recommend to stick to a mainstream distribution like Fedora, Debian, Mint,...
With bigger distributions you have more people working on them (-> more packages well maintained), you get a bigger community, and therefore it's easier to get help if anything breaks.
I'm not sure which distribution to recommend though, as they all have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gaming. Ten years ago I have switched to Gentoo (which is definitely not a distribution for new Linux users) when I got fed up with Ubuntu's Enshittification, and have stayed there ever since, so I lost a bit track which distributions are good for gaming now and which aren't.
This might be my misunderstanding but when you say mainstream distribution what do you mean. My understanding is mint is built on Ubuntu similar to how nobara is built on fedora. So for example if something broke or I wanted to something on mint I can follow Ubuntu instructions (kind of) and follow fedora for nobara? Sorry if this is dumb question
It's not a dumb question at all, and there is no "agreed upon" definition.
For me the most important characteristics of a "Mainstream Distribution" would be the size of their maintainer team - though that is also inaccurate if we are talking about distributions that are built on top of other distributions - as in your example.
Another indication is to check who is sponsoring a distribution's development. If there are plenty of commercial sponsors, then chances are that the distribution is well maintained. Similarly, if the distribution is created by a commercial company (Intel, Canonical, RedHat,...), as those companies also have an interest in keeping their product in a good state.
Age of the distribution might be another indicator. If a distribution has been around for a long time, chances are it isn't bad either.
However, I am lazy and would not actually check any of this by hand. Instead, the thing I would actually do is to just go to https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and read through their list. 😉
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If you mainly play Steam games, Mint will do the job just fine. Just install Steam and you're good to go. No tinkering required.
Won't I have to install Nvidia drivers? This is my big concern if I'm being frank (I have a Nvidia card)
Mint makes this very easy, it had a driver installer in settings last I used it.
I actually just found that on there page thanks :)
Yes, nvidia can be a bit of pain. Normally you a install proprietary drivers and it works, not always. AMD just works.
AMD "just works" unless you dare expect hardware encoding that you explicitly picked your card based on to work properly
Yeah, if you're planning on doing anything fancy (e.g. RTX, FSR/DLSS, streaming w/ a specific encoding, etc), do some digging to check compatibility on Linux, you may need a newer kernel or something. If you just want a general experience (e.g. mostly playing/using apps on default settings), it's less of a concern.
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Mint has a program that simplifies the process of installing Nvidia drivers. I think it's just called "Driver Manager".
You'll have to do it for any modern game with medium to high requirements.
You need to change steam configuration to unable to enable compatibility for all games, or only Linux/proton approved will work. I agree mostly works out of the box, but eventually is good to check protondb website if for tinkering.
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Fedora has fairly recent kernel versions while being quite reliable. You'll want somewhat recent kernels for hardware support (especially if you use an AMD or Intel GPU, as drivers are in the kernel itself).
Use KDE (not GNOME) if you want (better) support for VRR.
I distrohopped for a little while when i built my new gaming rig two years ago and can confirm:
Fedora KDE spin is the way.
In general, pick big well supported distros.
Smaller more specific distros like Nebara may sound good, but if there are issues, you will have to wait a long time for a small team to fix them, or work it out yourself.
All standard distros can be used for gaming, you may need to find a way to pull in the latest kernel/drivers/packages if you want thr most optimises experience though.
I'm using Linux Mint with an Nvdia card and it works great. But I don't have a completely new PC so I don't need the latest of the latest stuff. Taking your hardware into account is always a good idea.
My advice: don't switch too fast, maybe keep dual boot at first and give yourself time to learn. Try distros with a live USB stick on your system to see if it works. For the look and feel consult https://distrosea.com/ and play around. Linux can be fun and it's serving gamers very well now (for the most part - there are games that won't run mostly due to invasive rootkit 'anti-cheats').
omg that link is so cool thanks
Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and (to a lesser extent) Fedora are basically THE best "desktop" distros. They support a range of desktop evnironments but are mostly built around "just working". If you are coming from windows, you can't really do wrong with KDE Plasma or (Linux Mint) Cinnamon as both of those are "more Windows than Windows" as they heavily crib from the vista/7 era. But even whatever the current default Ubuntu desktop environment is called at this point is fine.
So it mostly boils down to what GPU you have.
- AMD? Any of the above
- nVidia? Mint and Ubuntu make this trivial as they have a nice GUI method to turn on the proprietary (so "good") nvidia drivers. Fedora involves a few terminal commands and seems a lot more prone to getting borked and needing to reinstall the drivers. But I run Fedora with nvidia and have zero concerns.
- Intel? May Erastil protect you.
Personally? I use Fedora with KDE Plasma for my desktop OS. While I am not huge on either, I vastly prefer flatpaks to snaps for app delivery. And I have a lot of concerns with how Canonical/Ubuntu is handling update cadences as a way to promote their enterprise OS.
But also? The beauty of Linux is that it is trivial to reformat. And the best thing you can do is just distro hop a bit for the first month or so. Install Mint. If you find something bothering you, look at what distro does that better and install that. New distro a piece of shit? Embrace Fedora. And so forth.
The reason so many of us get rather tribal about our distro or desktop environment is because we chose them. In the Windows space, you get cranky and hope Microsoft undo something you hate in the next five years (or you install sketchy third party plugins that never work). In the Linux space? You find out that a bunch of people also hate that clippy went away and built an entire distro around support for clippy like behavior. Or whatever.
If you put a bit of effort in you can even re-use your home directory and lose zero data. Although, personally, I have never had the patience for that. Games go on dedicated drives that migrate between installs. And personal documents get backed up to my NAS. So a reformat is just wiping the OS drive, installing the new distro, and then spending a minute or two to figure out what weird ass name an app I like is in the package manager.
I would take that one step further and recommend an atomic release: like fedora silverblue or kinoite for someone new to Linux. The read only base filesystem makes the risk of breaking things basically zero.
It does make some tutorials invalid though, which can be a source of frustration.
I generally don't like atomic/immutable distros outside of an enterprise environment. Odds are you will never run into anything that will bother you... until you do.
Conceptually? I think they are The Future. But I still tend to encourage people to use a more "normal" distro to start with and then migrate if they find problems.
distro hop a bit for the first month or so
I guess that depends on what your goal is. If you want to learn Linux, distro hopping won't help much and can even be counter-productive since you're just looking at different sets of configurations instead of making them yourself. Try a few, but at a certain point, you'll get better outcomes by digging in and figuring out how to get what you want. Most things can be done with any distro because Linux is Linux.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed (been about 4 years now), and that's only because I needed to reinstall anyway because I wanted BTRFS on / for snapshotting. Before that I used Arch (about 5 years), before that was Fedora (1-2 years; switched because release upgrades took forever), and before that was Ubuntu (2-ish years; switched because a release upgrade broke stuff). I tried multiple desktop environments and Window Managers on each, which was really easy to do by just installing and configuring.
If you don't want to learn Linux and just want to accomplish some task (say, playing games), get a distro focused on that task and be happy. But if you want to learn Linux, pick a popular one and get your hands dirty until there's something you want to do that your current distro just doesn't handle well.
I guess it depends on how you define "learn Linux". I "distro hop" repeatedly every day since we use a mix of ubuntu and rhel "at work" and I use a mix of debian and fedora "at home". Except for that one vendor's server that runs (REDACTED).
And the vast majority is the same regardless of distro. Sure I might never be able to remember the package manager flags for each distro and need to figure out where config files are stored but all of that is a quick google away. Because I "learn(ed) Linux" in terms of how to read an error message and search for the appropriate terms. Similarly, some number of months back I ran into an issue with a game but was knowledgeable enough to realize it was a Wayland compatibility issue and did a mess of generating config files in x11 so that I could play the game "normally" after that.
But I guess I take issue with your depiction of this. Mostly? You found shortcomings in distros and picked what you like. Good. But you are more describing "learn openSUSE" or "learn Fedora" as opposed to "learn Linux".
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Nobara. Easiest install for gaming.
Can confirm, after distro hoppong through Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora and Nobara, Nobara has been the most straight forward and least problems. And KDE has and will have better support for stuff like VRR and HDR coming soon and even a joystick calibration builtin
garuda is one I’ve been playing with recently, and have been very pleased with
It’s built on arch, so not the most beginner friendly base, but they add all my favorite tweaks into the base install. Including fish as the default shell which is more beginner friendly imo
And it’s built and optimized for gaming and comes with all the needed software and drivers pre installed, so even less tinkering required to get it working.
I've been running Garuda for maybe 4 months primarily for gaming on a desktop and it has been fantastic. Basically everything runs beautifully, even stuff only advertised as being for Windows.
Steam
I tried mint and had some issues with nvidia drivers, which seemed out of the ordinary since other people were fine with it. I tried PopOS next and it was fine (Bottles had some issues but games through Steam or Heroic worked out of the box basically).
Bazzite! Especially if you don't want to tinker with the system too much.
Edit: regarding security/stability; Bazzite is an unofficial member of the Fedora Immutable (erstwhile Silverblue) family. It stays in lockstep with their release cycle and the RPM OStree, so the actual "system" part is pretty much the same.
You can use my post as reference: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
You can use any distro you want for gaming. Maybe try to choose a more popular one, niche distros like Nobara often aren't as secure as major ones.
Thanks looking into it first on your list is mint I have heard alot of good things about this one might give it a go.
Pop!
Something up to date with a newer kernel. Wine devs say that's best to get updates and benefits quicker given how things are changing quickly.
Given that, I'd say Open Suse, Arch or Fedora. I use Open Suse and am very happy with it. Meets my indie gaming needs.
Been eyeing Bazzite up for a bit. How is it using it daily?
I'm been dragging my feet but I think I can dual boot and still mostly avoid Windows outside a few games. I know some Linux basics from playing around but I'm not sure if it's enough to make this not painful.
Are rpm-ostree backups robust enough for the guy who fucks around and tends to blow up the OS often?
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Depends.
...from what games you want to play, which hardware are you using, and so on.
I built up a new pc last november, mostly for gaming. So nobara was a great choice and all my games are running fine on it. Including Baldurs Gate3, Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory and Everspace2.
If you are not into buying the top-notch games on day one, you may look into other distros too. Nobara is grear, but I had some issues with my display setup (2 monitors with different rosolution) that may not have happened with mint or another more stable distro
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