this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Linux Gaming
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If you are going to game daily, I would recommend Nobara. Which is based on Fedora, but has all the gaming stuff precompiled/installed and ready to go from the start, Which makes getting started with gaming much easier. Its very user friendly to boot.
but if you just want an binary answer between Mint or Fedora, I'd say Fedora.. since you will still be able to find, install, and benefit from a lot of the Nobara stuff, even if its not included in the box from the start.
Nobara is actually one I highly considered. But I keep reading that base Fedora is more stable.
Of that’s not true I love the features Nobara comes with.
It's more stable. But as I understand, it doesn't come with any proprietary drivers or blobs, so you've got to do an amount of tinkering and configuring to get it running for gaming. Especially if you've got Nvidia GPU.
Whereas with nobara or bazzite, those features are baked in already, by professionals.
You need them either way, so my question is, who do you trust more? Yourself? Or the developers behind the gaming oriented flavors of Fedora?
I went with Bluefin, based on silverblue, based on Fedora. It has all the gaming stuff I need, plus like bazzite, it's immutable (ish), so while it's harder to do some stuff the normal Linux way, it's also significantly more stable, because nothing I do or install ever touches the core operating system files. I can't break anything, and this makes me happy 😁
nobara has a seperate iso for nvidia cards.
Nice! All the more reason to go with a distro that's already suited to your needs. Just my opinion, obviously 🤷♂️
I mean, base Fedora probably is more stable.
Playing games requires an lot of extra stuff, and the kernal is more bleeding edge in nobara to keep those GPU updates (if AMD) and performance tweaks fresh and useful.
but generally speaking from my experience, Nobara is no more or less stable than anything else, windows or linux. And any issue I did rarely had was typically resolved with a reboot, and generally from a game.
You guys might have talked me into Nobora actually.
I’ve not been someone who’s favored stability over new tech and performance on Windows, so why should I on Linux?
Also, like others have said, changing the Distro if I hate it isn’t exactly the end of the world anyways.
The main issue with nobara is that it's handled by a single person. Almost everything you get on nobara you can get with a few commands on the terminal in fedora; and whatever patches they have under the hood will at best get a marginal performance boost and at worst cause major crashes and issues.
Nobara is a solid choice for people that don't like to tweak their system too much because it comes with everything you need to play games from the get-go. If you're more of a power user there's very little reason to pick it over fedora or arch.
That’s the reason I was considering Fedora instead. But I just installed Nobara, so I’ll see how it goes.
I’m VERY curious about Arch, but I’ll stay on this distro for a little bit(I think)
Well Arch is great at what it does: getting you the latest packages of everything without needing to upgrade every 6 months or whatever; that does come at the cost of a bit less stability. There's EndeavourOS if you're uncomfortable installing from the console.
Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it's worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that's been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it's "stable" you're in for a world of pain.
If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you'll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any "unstable" equivalent, because you won't be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you'll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you'll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.
Stable distros absolutely have their place, there's nothing wrong with them and they're typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they're designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they're designed to do.
I disagree that stable distros aren't good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.
And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.
As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn't fall back to it.
I'm not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.
Tl;dr there's more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.
That’s an excellent point.
I run a brand new GPU, I like to play both very old and brand new games. I sometimes overclock my hardware, I’ve been really into modding games in the past.
Stable isn’t really how my gaming ecosystem is on Windows either. Not to mention Windows, Nvidia, AMD etc have always had a element of instability to it. I’ve ran beta updates on my PC for years and also do that on my phone. The amount of times I’v messed around in regedit, cmd, bios, eventviewer etc. is beyond what I can remember. I’ve been adopting windows versions early since Vista came out too.
I’ve never really been happy with stable. Maybe I this question should be «Arch vs Fedora» instead, but I’m not cocky enough(yet) I guess 😂
Any reason to go with Nobara over Bazzite?
Nobara is not immutable, which is a plus for some people. I'd use it over Bazzite because I like the ability to fix things that break rather than just rolling back to an older image and hoping that the next update unfucks whatever the maintainers broke in the last update, but some people are fine with that process, so for them there is Bazzite.
Bazzite has never broke for me. One of the advantages of atomic immutable distros is that there's no rush to push a new image. Either the whole image is updated when it already works, or it doesn't get shipped. None of the issues of pushing a single package update without testing that later turns out to be incompatible with a different package update.
Yeah exactly. Worst case, I reboot my system and it's fine again lol.
I see people sometimes try to act like immutable is only for newbies or people who don't like tinkering, and it's just not true.
It's beginner-friendly, sure. But you're really not that limited in what you can do, you just need to learn the different ways that they're done on immutable (rpm-ostree for example).
There is a slight learning curve, but after a few months, I really grew to like the entire concept of immutable and atomic. I'm not sure I would ever go back to Arch (if I want anything from AUR I just start up my Arch distrobox).
I have had broken updates pushed on my system with Bazzite, and the fact that I couldn't do anything about it just rubbed me the wrong way. That's just me though, some people are fine with rolling back to an older image, no hate lol
I have never used bazzite to give you an honest answer to that.
all I can say is that I was distro hopping for a good while after running into roadblocks on ubuntu, and Nobara is just where everything clicked into place with usability, and ease of gaming.
seconding Nobara, I've been using it daily for close to two years now and have been super happy with it.