Operating Systems

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

Ubuntu 20.04lts

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.

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.

As my main I'm currently running EndeavorOS. I'd say it's pretty good. It does all of the legwork of installing Arch, but comes with minimal bloat and really lets you make it your own.

SourceMage! It's a source based distro like Gentoo. I've been using it as my main distro for a solid 10 months now, I'm very happy with it! We have flatpak so steam works great, as well as lutris and everything else. Definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!

Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!

When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.

Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.

I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.

I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.

My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn't want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don't need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.

This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.

Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.

I was using Gentoo for a while, but I kept having issues with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I set up a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough.

I actually just switched to NixOS, haven’t had a chance to get my games set up just yet but I am excited for the number of people I have seen have success with it. Setting up gaming is next on my list.

Currently on Artix, but planning on changing to Gentoo soon.

NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.

I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.

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

I am currently using Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and comes with GNOME but because I don't really like GNOME's interfaces, so I swapped it with Sway and i3bar.

I never played modern games on this thing, so I don't really know how well it does, but I heard it's pretty good for gaming.

Linux mint gaming

EndeavourOS with Plasma. migrated from Manjaro after one too many questionable decision on their side.