So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don’t wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don’t rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means…
- out of the box support for Nvidia cards
- ships with a lot of useful gaming utilities
- very hard to break as you should primarily be installing Flatpaks and can do rollbacks
Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.
https://bazzite.gg/ if you’re interested.
As other people noted, Bazzite/Fedora Silverblue can absolutely bite you in the foot if you leave the “normal use cases” — and if you’re not just gaming on the device, you sooner or later will. All of this is solvable and IMO worth it, but probably not great for a beginner trying to become more knowledgeable.
Tldr good for absolute beginners, good for “experts” (in both cases because it very rarely gets in your way/breaks)
Always seeing the Bazzite recommendation. Just converted my kid over, 2 weeks ago. 0 complaints which is pretty amazing.
I loved bazzite, it was my first out of the box success with Linux gaming, but if you plan to do anything outside of gaming installing stuff can get a little difficult. It was invaluable for teaching moments, but I’ve moved on to cachyOS and it has been just as seamless and less difficulty installing things after installing yay
My 2c
This is why I personally think Bazzite should only be installed on devices you intend to only game on, especially if you have any intention of learning any more about Linux than the absolute basics. It’ll be fine for a while for beginners, but you’re bound to bump into some things that are a hassle to install and/or keep updated. Perfect examples being for consolafying a PC for playing on a living room TV, or installing it on a handheld PC (Steam Deck etc.)
Agreed - bazzite being immutable (which I only recently learned) means its perfect for gaming only devices. Not even your kid could screw it up.
Yeah, it forced me to figure out why, which was a net positive, but definitely just not feasible in the long run outside of gaming, at least not yet.
I switched to bazzite a couple of months ago and read so much about catchyOS so I tried that too about 2 weeks ago. I couldn’t install shit. Never had any problem installing anything I needed except one thing on bazzite but catchyOS just had me give up. I am not sure what I did wrong but after 2 hours of reading and trying to figure out AUR or whatever I just gave up and booted bazzite again. I just want to play my games with the little time I have but maybe I boot it up again sometime in the future.
Were you installing stuff with pacman or yay?
No clue to be honest. First I used the cachyOS guide installer then I found something else when I didn’t find what I wanted and not sure what that was.
Install cachy, install yay, learn how to use yay, profit. It’ll handle regular pacman installs too
Someone more educated than I may step in and correct me but that’s what I’ve done and its going pretty well.
I second Bazzite
I can’t believe that no one has asked you this question yet (fucking fanboys…):
Do you mind losing access to most features on your GPU, including (but not limited to): RTX HDR, Shadowplay, the Nvidia App, the Nvidia Control Panel and everything it offers, including the 3D Settings page?
If any of this matters to you, you may want to consider switching to an AMD GPU first before you consider Linux. Nvidia does not support it nearly as well as they support Windows. You get a driver that lets you run games, and that’s about it.
Yeah I only kinda really use shadowplay anyway. I don’t have a hdr monitor at all. Firstly I just want to see if my games run well enough. If not I will wait a couple years and then upgrade to an AMD card and then switch for good.
Surprised I haven’t seen Bazzite or Nobara recommended here, those are full desktop experiences with built in features for gaming. I use nobara because it has a version with pre-packaged Nvidia drivers.
FYI: I have a rig similar to yours. I’m currently running Mint and have had no issues. I used to run Pop OS, but even after a fresh reinstall of their LTS, updates stopped working, so I recommend avoiding Pop OS.
I use Mint too and I’ve never had any trouble running my games.
Coming from a Steam Deck, I was really happy when I learned about Bazzite. I tried installing it and stuck with it for a few months now and I’m excited to have gotten rid of Windows. It’s fast and works well out of the box. Plus I have the SteamOS experience without fuss.
Bonus points for you, it’s Fedora based and easy to install on top if Fedora.
Notably I had tried Ubuntu before this and had issues with VRR and a couple of other things. Bazzite is built for this, and it works well.
i love bazzite, just got a new app store too
I just went straight with a bazzite install since fedora literally did not want to work on my pc
There are a ton of distros that work well for gaming. I am currently running CachyOS. It was easy to get set up, runs smoothly, and I’ve been happy with it so far.
Hi I recommend against using an Arch based distro like manjaro or cachyOS ( arch by nature demands active maintenance ) also depsite the brand name ubuntu is a very bad place to start ( due to them forcing snap packages ). Go for something like fedora kde or bazzite, most of the app you need can come from flathub.
For games you got Steam, Heroic ( for epic games ), lutris ( for everything else ). You will have to quit the habit of hunting .exe file online, most of your apps will come from your store ( discover in your case ).
Vms will not let you bypass anti-cheat stuff so keep that in mind. Check for game compatibility on protondb if needed. Don’t be afraid to ask question ( even dumbs one ).
Thanks for the first part.
I know how apps and that works I have been using fedora for 3 years on my laptop.
VM is meant for apps that do not work with wine like photoshop.
What about Bazzite? It’s fedora based and made for gaming. I’ve only tried it on handheld like steamdeck and rog ally but it’s awesome, even better than steamdeck os.
I’ve used it on an old HP all in one and it made it useful again. The daughter tossed it because it lagged hella bad and her Roblox and Minecraft etc sucked, Runs Baldurs gate 1 and 2 just fine and all my older game emulators so I love to bust it out for Wii gaming night etc. The machine is pure crap with integrated graphics and a whooping 8gb ram. Thats gotta burn seeing all the stuff I’ve got going and knowing you threw it out. Then again I dont know if it’s noticed over TIk Tok
You don’t need a gaming specific distro. Those just mean some apps are pre-intalled, like Steam and Heroic (for GOG, Epic, Amazon games). If you like Fedora, keep using Fedora, it games just as well as any other distro.
Garuda dragonized gaming will get you everything out of the box and you can change the theme after. It will walk you through a lot with assistants, which is nice to learn things on an arch based distro. Its an easy switch from windows, plus, now I can use fish konsole htop and paru alright.
My husband built me a gaming computer and wanted to install the OS. Told him he probably wouldn’t be able to as I had picked out an arch based distro. I’d never installed arch myself. He’d never installed any linux. He had no problem putting dragonized garuda on there. It’s been nearly 3 years now and I still haven’t changed the theme tho.
Edited to add: I ain’t got any nvidia anything in that PC, so can’t speak to that.
Ah I have two nvidia GPU laptops running it right now and its great!! A 2070S and one even older tho. Nothing considered modern by todays standard.
Second time tonight I have heard of this distro - I may have to check it out.
Bazzite is made for gaming and it’s worked for me pretty flawlessly for about 6 months BUT I had a lot of issues getting it to run a VM. I’m certainly not a Linux expert but I eventually gave up trying.
There’s a ujust script to set up virtualisation on Bazzite.
ujust setup-virtualizationin the terminal should get you going. Alongside the background stuff it sets up, it installs a GUI virtual machine manager.It’s all a blur now but I know I did something with ujust. I’ll try it again to make sure, thank you for the info.
There is a ujust script for enabling KVM.
I forget exactly how I had to do it. If there’s anything need beyond ujust, if you search for it, you’ll find solutions (if nothing for Bazzite, try “silverblue” instead in your search as it’ll likely be the same solution)
Never heard of silverblue. That should narrow things. Good info, thanks
It’s another immutable Fedora spin that predates Bazzite.
If you’re using Bazzite and have trouble finding solutions online, usually substituting silverblue works for me. “Kinoite” might also work. Anything with ostree is going to have similar solutions for most things.
Awesome, thank you
I have a very similar build as yours, just with a RTX 3090 instead. I switched to Pop!_OS about a year and a half ago, and it’s been running like a charm ever since.
Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.
You absolutely can use VMs, but you don’t need a VM to run windows software and you won’t have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.
Honestly the biggest headache is with the “linux native” stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they’re all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it’s far from transparent to the user. Maybe I’ve overthinking it but in my opinion it’s a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don’t know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.
I will try just normal fedora and if stuff does not work I will try bazzite. VM would be used for stuff that does not work through WINE like photoshop (10 year old cracked version).
I’d give WINE a go before messing with a VM, I know some versions of photoshop do actually work: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41345
You can get cracked versions of the CC 2023 version, but if you wanna use your current version then yeah, just give it a go. Worst case you waste 30 minutes and have to install a VM anyway.
I mean I already know how to setup one I have 3 VM on my laptop for different OS
Yeah that’s fair, the only reason I suggested WINE still is VMs are a fair resource hog but whatever works for you friend :)
I see bazzite mentioned a lot here, but wasn’t there a post here a while ago saying that it might stop existing if fedora pushes through with the decision to ditch 32bit support? Did they decide not to do it after all?
The proposal to ditch 32 bit support was withdrawn
I recently made the switch. Running intel ultra 5 and nvidia rtx 5060. Bazzite and Pop!_OS were advertised as working, out of the box. I couldn’t get either to work, following the wiki setup guides. I tried Ubuntu, couldn’t get that working, either.
I switched to Nobara, and learned that I was messing up gamemoderun in Steam. So I have no idea if Nobara fixed my issues, or if I was messing something up the whole time, or maybe a little of both. It was fun, though! Absolutely glad to be done with windows.
