Its easy and quick to set up, easy to use, and has a lot of ancillary tools and stuff preinstalled to make getting into the gaming easier.
I'm not gonna say its the second coming of christ, or all sunshine and rainbows, so to be upfront and honest... Dualboot at first, if you can. Its, presumably, your first time using linux, so you will run into more roadblocks to start simply due to lack of knowledge and experience on how to navigate things, but you'll get your baselines down quick and start getting into the windows-like usability and flow.
An extra suggestion is to put the /home mountpoint on a separate volume ( if you're comfortable doing so). This will make reinstalls easy, should you have need
My /home partition is the same one I setup almost 12 years ago. It's been through multiple versions of Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu reinstalls, a switch over to EndeavourOS, a reinstall of EndeavourOS, cloned to multiple drives as each one failed or was upgraded to a larger sized drive. But it's the same exact /home data.
Nobaras kinda a new distro, but its based on Fedora (the 39 indicates its based on Fedora 39) which is well established.
I've been using it, and the previous version of 38, and I've had a great experience with it. It also has a very active discord full of kind people willing to help.
Definitely Nobara, it's a distro optimized for making games actually work. On other distros I always had some games that wouldn't run, but never on Nobara. Zero hassle.
Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.
Games have largely caught up. Fifteen years ago, you couldn't run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted. With WoW, you had to manually copy the files from each CD, save them locally and then run the installer because otherwise the installer would shit the bed and fail halfway through Discs 2 or 3.
The final hurdle for gaming on Linux is anti-cheat and that's going to be a mountain to overcome. Only two solutions (to my knowledge) currently have native Linux support and those are Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) and Valve Anti Cheat (VAC.) You're not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
You're not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
Good. Kernel mode anticheat is fucking malware. Anticheat for a game should never have the same power over the system as a driver, which needs those privileges to communicate with hardware.
Fifteen years ago, you couldn't run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted.
Hey! I was playing LOTRO just fine on Linux back then. It actually worked better on Linux than Windows back then too.
Maybe for home users. Working at an MSP, I can't see small to medium sized businesses making any changes here anytime soon, especially those that use specialized software built only for Windows.
In my experience, many business applications now run on the Web or are being upgraded to be. Where I work Windows pcs endure only for those who have to do technical drawing, most terminals are Ubuntu updated by ansible scripts and connected to an active directory domain running on Samba. The few PCs with Windows are slowly disappearing as hardware is upgraded ( medium-sized company with about sixty PCs ). There are also a couple of Mac's used by in-house developers/IT.