I just picked up a cheap older gaming PC with a GTX 1050 and and Intel I7 CPU. Trying to decide what distro to load on it for gaming. Curious that others experience is gaming on various distros.
I game on Fedora because it was just the OS I installed on my gaming PC when I moved to Linux. Everything is fine between Steam, Heroic, and Lutris. The NVIDIA drivers were easy to install from the App Store and the only game that doesn’t run well is Death Loop but there’s been some updates and I haven’t tried it in six months so it may be better now. There was a memory leak apparently but I think there were more problems.
Debian. It wont win any awards for fastest release cycles but it’s rock stable with great support for my Ryzen 2700 and 6700xt.
Debain gamer here as well!
There seem to be dozens of us
As a FreeBSD user just trying to game on Unix, I’ve blown up my Debian machine so many times. A couple of years ago, trying to get CUDA in Blender working AND have a recent enough driver for the Windows games I was playing on Proton was killing me. I don’t remember what exactly but it seemed like every time I tried to change something, the whole fragile mess would bork itself.
yeah, back when I used nvidia I had to run their driver installer or nothing would work right, and of course any little system update would bork everything until I ran the installer again. Thankfully everything with AMD just works now.
Thank you for validating my pain.
Fedora
Bazzite and Mint
You can game on just about any distro – I’m using NixOS and it’s great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.
But if you’re looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.
I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)
Fedora KDE works great for me, but I’m quite comfortable with Linux already
Pretty much any distro will work for gaming these days. Really up to personal preference. I use Arch but have heard good things about Pop!_OS.
Rocking Garuda here!
Me too!
Currently Pop!_OS
Cachy OS on personal PC and Bazzite on steam console (htpc) and a onexplayer handheld. Then just good old steamos on the steam deck.
Bazzite. Literally built for gaming.
Fedora on my desktop, bazzite (rebadged fedora) on my steam deck.
I’m always a lil surprised how few fedoras I see on these posts. Fedora is chill. Considering the difference between distros is basically a package manager, seems weird the second most bleeding edge distro doesn’t get much love.
The package manager is a big deal; it’s amazing how little is packaged for Fedora compared to the Ubuntu family.
NixOS. Works great. I’m a bit of a masochist.
Mint for two years. Then Arch for a decade. This year I have been trying out CachyOS.
I’ve been using Nobara for about 2 years and it’s been very good.
Bazzite runs great on my main gaming PC in desktop mode and on my HTPC in gaming mode. Maintenance is minimal and it just works (on AMD hardware), while packages are pretty recent and it’s absolutely stable.
