Yes this has been asked and answered a million times I’m sure. There is a plethora of ‘top ten distros for Linux gaming’ lists out there and the majority of posts I can find on That Other Site seem to devolve into “every distro can do games”.

I’m interested in what you are using and your experience doing so. Any gotchas you wished you knew? Anything you tried that didn’t work, or anything that worked unexpectedly well? What would you say if your friend asked this over a few pints down the pub?

  • eitch@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT

  • -spam-@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    Fedora, apart from the latest nvidia driver rendering Plasma a slide show I’ve had no real issues.

  • spriteblood@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Mint for my desktop, SteamOS on Deck. Both do what I need, and the only issues I’ve run into since switching have been random things like GOG not having an updated Planescape Torment build that works out of the box. I don’t play many online competitive games with like invasive anti-cheat stuff, so I haven’t run into a ton of compatibility issues.

    • JakwithoutacOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      I forgot about the anti cheat stuff. That may well be an issue - some VM toe-dipping appears to be in order for me

    • Tanza@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      update: i have now had an issue with manjaro (audio issue, low quality, fixed pretty easy, but still)

    • captainsiscold@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Using Manjaro KDE here, as well. Granted, I mostly play Counter-Strike, Risk of Rain 2, Stellaris, and various indie games, but pretty much everything has been very smooth. Very glad to be free of Windows on my main machine, and it hasn’t really affected how I use my PC day-to-day.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Arch linux, minimal install. Feels really nice to have control over my whole distro and to not be clogged by third-party annoyances.

    • JakwithoutacOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve used it in VMs before. Never been brave enough to take the plunge for real

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I mean…Steam OS on Steam Deck…and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.

  • nick@forum.fail
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m using Nobara. It’s a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.

    • cvf@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
      Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).

  • daredevil@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I’ve been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it’s been nice. However, I’m not as big of the DE and don’t have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.

  • stevecrox@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Debian Bookworm

    I run AMD kit (not the latest) and install the KDE desktop, Steam and Crossover.

    I choose Debian because its packaged extremely well and I want an OS/Applications to be things that just work.

    The only bugs I suffer are Proton issues playing Windows games and the recent steam ui update doesn’t seem to work with steam link from a wayland desktop (has to be x11).

    • JakwithoutacOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Been doing some testing today and am hitting the same steam issue on Pop!_OS. Something to do with the new gui and it seems to be pretty widespread.

      flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam -vgui from prompt gets the launcher running but missing the friends network. Obviously this will change based on what package system you used to install. I think it’ll be the -vgui launch option that makes the difference

  • Crozekiel@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    I installed Garuda on my main desktop PC and have been absolutely loving it. I’m not a linux expert, this is the first time I’ve dived in with my main pc on linux only (but I have been “trying” linux every so often for as long as I can remember basically). It is amazing how far Linux has come in just the last few years. It is very close to what I would consider a full replacement mainstream OS. I am on a fully AMD system though, so I can’t speak for nvidia issues (but honestly I’ve been sick of them even under windows for a few years now…).