I heard Mint is really good but am not sure exactly which distro is best to use with Steam, as well as with newer games, as I primarily use my computer for gaming.
I generally play games like Final Fantasy XIV, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Elder Scrolls Online, and Total War: Warhammer 3.
I’ve been using Nobara for gaming a while now, and it’s certainly a good choice from by experience. It’s a modified Fedora distro that’s designed for gaming.
Having used many distros (gaming-oriented and otherwise) Nobara would be my recommendation as well.
People saying “doesn’t matter” aren’t considering someone brand new to Linux would probably benefit from an out-of-the-box gaming ready distro (nvidia drivers ready, rgb drivers built in for gaming laptops, other gaming specific tweaks and fixes that they won’t know to install on say mint, a perfectly fine, general use distro). Not to say they wouldn’t be able to do all that on mint or Ubuntu or whatever with a bit of googling and effort, but they’re asking specifically for gaming.
My desktop is amd 2700 cpu and nvidia 3080. I have been on Linux for at least a year now. Nobara was okay but borked itself from an update. Bazzite is my current os and it’s been rock solid for gaming. Just use protondb to make sure individual games work right.
For me has ubuntu and pop os just worked with all my hardware. I have tried manjaro (it broke often after updates so I gave up on it. This was maybe 5 years ago), arch (worked great but got tired of the tinkering), mint (never wanted to work with my wifi and Bluetooth adapter so I don’t have a ton of experience with it), debian (too long ago for me to remember why I switched), ubuntu and now pop OS for 3 years and I won’t switch. I have only had problems with yakuza 1 (couldn’t save and input delays were crazy) and mafia 1(all icons for the game pad were blank) . I also own a steam deck and play a lot of games on it without any problems. But I do not mod that much, skyrim is the only one I heavily moded and I played it on windows. Cyberpunk did I mod some on my steam deck to fix bugs but it was bellow 30 mods.
Tldr; i am with kaldo! Pop OS is great! And yes I use Nvidia GPU and I have never had a problem with the drivers.
Anything that does not use completely outdated kernel versions (if you're using AMD) should be fine for that, since Steam packages most of the other relevant dependencies already. I personally don't recommend Gnome as a DE and also think KDE or Cinnamon are easier to get into coming from Windows but other than that I'd just try the popular options and see what you'll like most.
The real question should be what desktop environment you want, Linux distros aren’t very different for an average user, it usually boils down to what’s included by default, what the package manager is, and what the desktop environment is. Someone said Nobara, which is a good choice. Use the KDE Plasma version tho
I’ve heard good things about Nobara Linux. It’s basically Fedora but customised for gaming. It’s maintained by GlouriousEggroll, who does a lot for Linux gaming in general. Otherwise I’m using Bazzite on my Steam Deck, which is pretty cool as well. It is a gaming-centric Fedora atomic version. It even comes with the Deck’s gaming mode, but only on amd GPUs unfortunately.
I also recently switched to Linux on my main PC which is also my gaming PC. I tried Mint first but had too many hardware issues, mostly related to motherboard audio chip. Manjaro was next and it resolved my hardware issues but I didn’t like the package manager. Third was openSUSE Tumbleweed and that one stuck. Been using it for several weeks now and I love it.
As long as you don’t have an Nvidia card, choose whichever functional and complete distro (some people call these “beginner” distros).
MintLinux and Pop!OS are normally the two front-runners for new users. Basically, if you use Steam and you don’t play online-only games with bad implementations of anti-cheat software, you are good to game on either.
Make a USB that you can “live boot” from, so you can test out how they work with your hardware before you actually install the OS. Generally speaking, Mint works better with AMD, and Pop! works better with Nvidia.
AMD/Nvidia hybrid user here. I’ve had more breakage in the amdgpu driver than Nvidia by far. I think a more fair comment is “drivers break on Linux occasionally and it’s a good idea to learn how to roll back package versions.”
Nvidia can be tough sometimes with linux, but not impossible. Seems like Linux Mint has a Driver Manager program that can install Nvidia's proprietary drivers for you. When you first install the OS, it'll just use the open source drivers, but those usually don't perform as well while gaming as Nvidia's own drivers, so you'll have to switch them after first boot.
protondb is a website that crowdsources how well specific Steam games work, and any workarounds that may be needed, if you'd like to check game compatibility. You can set it to show only reports from PC users, rather than PC and Steam Deck users.
Nvidia drivers are largely reliable these days. I’ve daily driven AMD/Nvidia hybrid setups since ~2020 and have only occasionally had Nvidia driver issues. I’ve actually had more breakage in amdgpu due to insufficient testing and code churn - I think I’ve reported close to two dozen regressions over the last 4y.
One thing I’d like to ask, as someone also starting to get fed up with windows. I know there’s proton and all but how does Linux work with VR? I have an index and nvidia card, and most of my VR is playing digital combat sim (DCS) but I do enjoy playing actual VR games from time to time. Is Linux still decent with those? Or do I have to stick with windows?
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