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.
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.
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 😂