Operating Systems

I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.

Debian

I'm on Arch right now, migrated to it after almost 2 years on Fedora. I'll probably still go back and forth between the two.

Not at all an expert, but I'm doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.

Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.

Without actually installing anything.

This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)

Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.

Here's my config (no hardware):

• OS: Arch
• Kernel: linux-zen
• Window Manager: i3-gaps
• Compositor: picom

I've been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it's been working really well for me right up until recently.

After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I've exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it's just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who's been running it to play games for several years in a row.

The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to "in-game", changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC... and back on the same config after that as well.

I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there's been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam's most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game's demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you're hovering your mouse pointer over the game's thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you're actually trying to click: for example, if you're hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide "Install Demo" button, which is floating over another game's thumbnail, you'll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.

As I haven't been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June's Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can't deny that it's been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I'm doing at my PCs: it's great for my work, it's even great for my gaming, it's great for my leasure, and I don't want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.

Now, I know there's sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can't run it as easily: I'll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it's just time for me to tinker again.

Im running good old Ubuntu with gnome. I mostly play terraria, minecraft I and Bethesda rpgs these days so it does everything I need.

On my gaming desktop, I am using Fedora currently with the Awesome WM. That might change though with all the RH stuff going on. On my gaming laptop I switch between Arch and Void with Qtile on both.

I'm currently on Pop! OS 22.04 LTS. For me it worked out of the box. That installer with the NVidia drivers already included was a dream, so I didn't have to set up anything special. I did end up preferring the KDE desktop over Gnome, so I just went screw it and installed KDE plasma on top of it. It's been my daily driver like this for years.

Though, honesty requires me to mention that over the 4-ish years I've been using it they pushed a kernel update twice which killed the nvidia drivers, causing you to be unable to boot to the desktop. Solution was as simple as just rebooting into the previous kernel for a while and waiting for an update which fixes it, but still...

Other than that, pretty happy with it and I'm unlikely to change anytime soon.

As a former Arch user, Fedora has been so amazing for me. It's so rock solid and simple to use. It also has great software compatibility because lots of software is distributed as rpm due to businesses using CentOS and RHEL.

My main distro for years has been Mint, but I play around with a several others frequently. For me, it comes down to the package managers I feel most comfortable in (I know apt the best, but I know zypper and pacman ok enough to get by) and the window manager integration. Personally, I prefer Cinnamon and I think Mint has the best integration for it. My only complaint with Mint lately is the difficulty of getting nvidia drivers to work properly. It should be as simple as selecting the driver you want in the driver manager, but secureboot complicates things a bit.

Now I am on fedora. Before I used debian stable and before that I tried some other distros, like some flavors of ubuntu, endeavor, mint, manjaro and so on.

Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.

garuda, it's just a fancy arch install with the ugliest, bloatiest, default theming you can imagine, but once you get rid of it it's pretty solid.

I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you'll get 12 different answers

Like several others here I am using pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop though so they kind of go hand in hand.

PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.

It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.

I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.

NixOS. If you played around with Arch you'll be fine. My only gripe (although it's kind of important) is NVIDIA doesn't work. Call me lazy but I haven't felt like switching to an other distro, plus I'm not much of a hardcore gamer.

@nlm CachyOS. It's Arch based with a bucketload of performance tweaks & bespoke patches, including a kernel scheduler developed by distro maintainers. It also has a small but super-responsive community that tends to resolve issues quite rapidly

Ubuntu 20.04lts

I'm running Gentoo on my gaming PC, and would not want anything else.

It's very customizable, as it allows to tweak packages' optional dependencies at compile time. It's also rolling release, so no stress with distribution upgrades. Despite that, it's also very stable (most of the time...).

So far the only downside I've seen is that updates can take a while, as almost all packages get compiled from source.

Linux mint gaming

Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There's the occasional weird config mess to get into but it's Linux.

Arch on my laptop but Pop on my gaming rig. At the time I installed it, I wanted the extra relative ease of Pop's handling on video drivers. I have since switched to AMD, so no driver woes at all since they're in the kernel, but I have stuck with Pop for that system. If it ain't broke... who am I kidding, I'll probably switch to Arch soon.