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.
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.
Anything that does not use completely outdated kernel versions (if you're using AMD) should be fine for that, since Steam packages most of the other relevant dependencies already.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.
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.
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.
Check out bazzite.gg - it’s a gaming spin of Fedora atomic and I’ve heard nothing but good things.
Otherwise there’s always Arch, or a derivative like EndeavourOS, that’s where I do my steam gaming. I have, on occasion, had issues with the Nvidia dkms driver and have needed to fork the nvidia-dkms package to track a particular driver release to skip a buggy version. Aside from that it’s been pretty smooth sailing. I use flatpak steam and ProtonPlus to pull Glorious Eggroll releases and everything I’ve played has worked well.
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.
I started using Pop_OS! because it looked like that it was focused to gaming. Then I changed to a rolling release distro to get the latest drivers and kernel (openSUSE Tumbleweed) and I’m pretty happy with it.
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