From Windows to about 6 recommended distros for gaming.
From Windows to about 6 recommended distros for gaming.
I am not bad with computers and have a beginner+, maybe intermediate level knowledge of Linux and I kept running into some problems here and there with different distros. Most claimed to work out of the box (which may be the case for some users, but I have a shit ass Nvidia 1060 and that was not at all the case, until I installed Nobara KDE/Nvidia.
Just came here to potentially save someone time, this shit is actually working out of the box, closest experience to this was with Arch, but that's definitely not out of the box.
Be careful with Nobara. I've also used it for a bit (fedora 38 base) and had an easier time setting it up than fedora 39. It disables most security features to get better performance. Besides that, it's only developed by one dude and primarily for personal use, so when it went from 38 to 39 he just completely dropped his gnome config, broke the upgrade in so many ways, and switched to kde. Also it didn't have an upgrade notification and I had to accidentally learn that a new major version came out.
Dropped it after that because it doesn't inspire confidence, no matter how important GE is for gaming on Linux. I'd rather spend at most an hour setting up MX (Debian) for gaming.
I tried Nobara and quickly ran into the lone developer problem when it didn't support secure boot. I don't really see the point of secure boot when the machine will still accept any USB I stick in there, but most other distros seem to handle it. I didn't want to spend a lot of time working on it and later find other unsupported things.
So I switched to Bazzite, which other people keep recommending, and that seems to work fine. AMD GPU over here tho, YMMV.
Nobara was my first attempt at leaving windows for good and it was great until it wasn’t. I went a few months without ever booting windows but started having issues when I bought a new gpu. I went from Nvidia to AMD and everything I read online said you just install the AMD gpu, nothing else needed to be done. Every game I tried to play and would crash within 20 minutes every single time. I eventually got so frustrated that I just booted windows, ran DDU, downloaded adrenaline and I was up and running. After I got settled in, I nuked nobara and installed bazzite and haven’t had a single issue since.
I've distro hopped a decent amount over the years, and bazzite is easily the best fresh install and ready to game experience. I am all team red, though. Added bonus you no longer have to worry about updates or breaking things.
Bazzite has an Nvidia image anyway so red, green, or blue team shouldn't matter
I dont know if you really want to have a broken install until you switch XD ostree is just the single best way to manage Linux.
I will write a bigger post about that, AMA
Just read up on the included features, very cool, if I have issues, I'll be trying this next.
Nice job! If you can get the nvidia driver installed properly, any distro should work in theory.
On Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation
On Pop!_OS it should be already installed by default
I've been hearing good things about Nobara, Ill have to try it out!
Arch tends to be close, because it is a bleeding edge type of rolling update model, so any fixes would come to Arch faster than more LTS options.
Some distros like Nobara liek you mention have it built in, Pop OS is another. Different distros will prioritize different aspects and that how itll fundamentally be.
Linux is a game of knowing which distro fits your usecase, the less offending hardware you use, the easier the choices are. take for example those who use bleeding edge hardware might not like the out of the box experience on LTS based distros that take awhile to push something to kernel.
Tried Pop, it was pretty good, but for some reason I just could not get helldiver's to work well. Other OSs didn't even let me get in the menus dx12 error, this is by far the least work and best result I've found.
I got Helldivers to work by making it open in windowed mode rather than full screen, then making it full screen once it opened. Seems to be a common issue with it. someone on protonDB mentioned it iirc.
so any fixes would come to Arch faster than more LTS options.
But so do any bugs. I've never had a stable distro fail to boot, while Arch and derivatives often broke after an update. Btrfs and similar systems help usually, but can't if for example grub released a broken update.
On the other hand, unless you have the newest hardware, most updates won't be relevant, and most distros quickly deploy security updates.
ove seen it one time forst hand and not directly but indirectly second hand. first hand time ive first seen it was actually related to OPish, had friends who needed Nvidia drivers installed for compute(non gaming), borked their distro.
second hand indirect one was the meme moment Linus (tech tips) borked his installation of Pop OS (over Ubuntu) because there was a tiny window period where popos really had a borked version of steam that wouldnt function, and borked it by trying to install steam in a very roundabout way he found online (something a perspn learning to use linux would do often).that situation was only caused by a combination of specific timings and some user negligence
I've had very good luck with Linux Mint and a GTX-1080. It does require opening the Driver Manager and clicking the button with "Recommended" next to it.
PopOS is, in my opinion, the easiest distro to use to get Nvidia cards working without a sweat (as long as you install the Nvidia ISO). I don't use PopOS anymore, been on Fedora now for almost 2 years, and have had 0 issues with my 3050 after installing the drivers, but it does take a bit of configuring to get there.
but it does take a bit of configuration to get there.
Unfortunately, for most people that's already too much..
Yup, that's why I suggested PopOS.
Yeah IIRC with Pop!OS it just asks you if you have an Nvidia card during install, and then it takes care of it all for you. I run it on my desktop machine and have had no issues so far.
Although word of caution, they're supposed to be transitioning to the brand new COSMIC desktop environment sometime this year, so I don't know if that will cause any instability.
Those are wise words of caution. Anyone planning on getting or staying on PopOS should heed those words.
Mint handled my 1060 really well and it's really good on arch too with the newer driver. Still just running Xorg with cinnamon, though. I guess mileage still varies with this stuff.
For me fedora did not handle my 3080 well at all. Switched to mint and only real want is to upgrade Nvidia drivers to the 550 or whatever is the current best one. For me it is not available in the driver settings and not sure how else to get them...
From my experience, it might be better to try gaming on a stable distro rather than a gaming distro to get a better feel for Linux first. Seems you already have some experience of that already, so here are the gaming distros I've tried and some thoughts about them. Keep in mind I've been using AMD stuff for my latest computers, but I do have an Nvidia laptop that I don't game much on but often run the same distro on.
Solous was the first gaming distro I've tried, might be close to ten years ago, so memory is kinda fuzzy. But it had support for most of the things you needed for gaming out of the box back then, which was rare. Development on it kinda went into a standstill or something, which made me go distro jumping.
Manjaro was where I ended up. Most everything worked out of the box. I ran it for a long time, but there are some problems in how it's being managed. The Arch but not Arch approach made it feel unstable sometimes. So when I made a new computer, I distro jumped again.
Nobara which build on Fedora was much more stable than Manjaro had been for me. I had no real problems with it. Lots of patches and tweaks to make gaming a smoother experience build in. But I've stated eyeing the atomic OS that had been pooping up. The benefit of not having to run a custom-made updater every time you wanted to update made me do the latest jump.
Bazzite is built on an atomic Fedora, so some settings and tweaks are a bit harder to do. But the benefit is that updates are automatic, and it comes with a lot of good tools and guides on how to work with an atomic OS. As a power user, you will have to familiarize yourself with containers to get full use of it. I'm not gonna lie, the out-of-the-box experience was a bit smother on Nobara, but I don't really see me going back.
Pop!_OS I've never really given it a good chance. I did try it for shorter periods, a couple of years apart. One time I just did not like its default windows manager and another it did not have support for my GPU.
uBlue Bazzite is pretty cool, Fedora/Nobara, Pop!_OS, Mint, etc. mostly just work, Gauda is arch-based, is optimized for gaming and performance and is pretty user friendly.
A ton of people recommended it, so I went ahead and installed it this morning, same if not better result than Nobara and just as easy to install.
You mean Bazzite? Yeah, it's really great. Based on uBlue, which is actually based on Fedora's Atomic spins. It's very stable, secure and reliable, and pretty hard to mess up. Basically the closest thing to SteamOS that you can get.
6 for gaming? There are only a few real serious Distros: Fedora, Opensuse, Debian, Ubuntu and MX/Mint/Arch(all in the same category). From what Ive seen there is only 1 serious distro: Nobara. That comes with Kernel Patches.
How dare you not use the same distro as me. Just kidding. Glad you found one that works for you. :)
1060 3gb here, worked fine on all distros i tried when i switched and hopped a little. Used mint, mx, debian, manjaro, artix, void and arch.
I'm thinking this is where my lack of experience really shows, fixing some things, like audio issues was a bit rough for me on certain distros, or understanding how to install/remove drivers on certain distros. Out of the box is I think and important step for newcomers, but I also like being forced in a way to learn the environments a little more. It can be frustrating when you're just ready to play something right now and haven't resolved it.
That said I celebrated as if I had just beat my first Dark souls boss, a lot of hype involved.
I agree with you. Every time I would encounter a distro that "works out of the box" only for it to crash and make me lose all the files in my hard drive.
Until I installed manjaro KDE. I haven't had any crashes so far, I've been using it for months!
I know people say that Manjaro sucks and etc, but it's the only one I've used that doesn't crash, how am I gonna use something the community says is better if I don't know if it will crash 2 months down the line?
I've been using Linux for 15+ years and it never corrupted my data. Even if it completely breaks you can always (arch)chroot and recover everything.
Honestly I never expect any system to work out-of-the-box, not even Windows.
Most of the time if I see something JustWorks(TM) I suspect it is using some general ass drivers that may work, but with functions lost.
Probably this isn't the case anymore, but it still gives me a lot of work to verify everything is REALLY fine and dandy.
Seconding nobara. Garuda also worked out of the box for me and also mint. (Except that I had to force update the kernel for mint because some stuff wasn't working with the recommended one)
I'm using a 2060 with Mint with no problems. Well, short of the game I'm playing (Enshrouded) needing to validate its install every single time I open Steam, but I suspect that's on Steam.