Linux gamers, what distro are you currently on?

I use Pop!_OS and have been happy with it for the last couple years or so.

I would take a look at pop_os. It's Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.

I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)

I've been on Manjaro for 3 years, honestly love it, it's treated me great for gaming and given me so little to have to fix that my wife has also been running it for 2 years.

I've been running Linux Mint for a few years now and it's been really good for me. Runs games through Steam and Lutris about as good as I've had it.

I've also run other distros like Pop! and Fedora here and there but they seem to give me more issues.

I have been quite happy with Arch Linux, up until I got my Steam Deck, at which point I stopped playing on my non-Deck PCs, so... SteamOS, I suppose.

A very simple, almost stock setup of Arch + KDE.

I weirdly did not see anyone mentioning SteamOS? Formerly based on Ubuntu, now based on Arch, I believe.

It's the distribution that the #SteamDeck is packaged with, and so it's become my main gaming distrib now. :]

I use Arch with KDE. I've been daily driving Arch coming up a decade now and despite testing various other distros on laptops over the years, I haven't seen anything yet to tempt me away. I heart Pacman.

Personally I find most of the laziness factor with Arch is a non issue once you get installation done. My previous install was 6 years old and the only reason I reinstalled was because I got a new PC.

That said if an installer is a must-have then I would recommend Endeavour OS or Manjaro for best of both worlds.

I use Arch with KDE Plasma for that comfy desktop environment feel but switch to BSPWM ever so often for productivity or to use my pc as just a media center

A little background for context. I’m gamer and professional software developer. I’ve been dual booting windows 11 and pop os for awhile. Windows for games and pop os for everything else… Over the weekend I switched to NixOS. This came with a learning curve which I spent a day or so learning. I’ve been getting the hang of it now and I love it so much. I definitely recommend it. I managed to get steam working without much fiddling and my emulators. It’s been great! The benefits for programming are obvious. Allowing me to basically stop using docker dev containers.

I completely removed windows from my computer and I’m very happy.

EOS / Arch.

Does StreamOS count?

Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a secondary SSD to put Linux on instead of doing a traditional dual boot. Normal dual boots with windows suck ass and lead to problems.

As for a distro, I keep going back to endeavourOS. It's just so minimal out of the box, and I still can't find anything to match the convinience of the AUR + Pacman for package management.

garuda, it's just a fancy arch install with the ugliest, bloatiest, default theming you can imagine, but once you get rid of it it's pretty solid.

I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn't even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it's not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I've used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.

I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don't know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn't game.

As a former Arch user, Fedora has been so amazing for me. It's so rock solid and simple to use. It also has great software compatibility because lots of software is distributed as rpm due to businesses using CentOS and RHEL.

I'm currently running Nobara and I really vibe with the Gnome desktop and Fedora in general. However, I recently installed Linux Mint for my girlfriend's gaming rig and I was surprised by how lightweight and responsive it felt. It was also dead simple to use during the entire setup process and I can absolutely see how you'd never need to enter a terminal if you didn't want to. If I ever have a reason to leave Nobara, I'm definitely going to go with Mint!

Ubuntu's done. Use Mint now.

I'm really comfortable with mint cinemon

Pop!_OS. It just works, it's easy, and it makes me enjoy using my computer.

I've been using base Debian with KDE Plasma for the past month or two and gaming on it, and it's worked really well, about as good as any other distro I've used. I always eventually end up back on Debian regardless of what I try using. I could technically get a better experience on rolling release because of mesa and kernel updates, but I've never noticed much of a difference, ymmv depending on hardware though.

They recently started supporting closed-source firmware officially so there's no longer that notorious hunt to find the right .iso just to get your wifi and nvidia GPUs to work.

Running Ubuntu 22.04

In my case, I use Fedora exclusively (no dual boot).

I tried PopOS, but I had problems with each update.

Tumbleweed, but waiting for VanillaOS 2.0

I use a steam deck.

I am on Manjaro. To be honest there isn't a big difference between distros nowadays because more and more apps are on the web or deployed via AppImage/shell script. Manjaro does rolling updates, makes it easy to install drivers and the install is easy, but you can still follow the Arch wiki and use AUR.

It runs Steam totally fine. Thanks to Steam (and WINE) I basically don't use Windows anymore.

I've been evaluating NixOS to make sure I can run games on it. I've only tried a machine with Intel graphics so far, but I see that AMD and Nvidia drivers are packaged. It seems convenient now that I've figured out the setup.

Vulkan is set up out of the box.

It's necessary to enable 32-bit DRI support by adding this line to /etc/nix/configuration.nix:

hardware.opengl.driSupport32Bit = true;

To use Lutris install the package and use its UI to install runners. I didn't have to configure any extra libraries to get Battle.net running. You can configure the "system wine" that Lutris sees, and extra libraries your games might need like this:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  (lutris.override {
    extraLibraries =  pkgs: [
      # List library dependencies here
    ];
    extraPkgs = pkgs: [
      wine-staging
    ];
  })
];

Those lines go in a Home Manager config file, like ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix. That installs Lutris, and any listed dependencies at the same time.

NixOS does not put dependencies in the file paths where programs usually look for them. That traditional directory structure is called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or FHS. But Nix packages can create a virtual FHS where needed, and that is what the Lutris package does. That lets software that isn't built for Nix work, like Lutris' Wine runners. That means that for games to access libraries those libraries must be listed in that extraLibraries option so that they are included in the FHS.

32-bit libraries are in pkgs.pkgsi686Linux.* if you need them.

I haven't tried Steam yet, but I think it has an option similar to the extraLibraries one for Lutris.

A nice feature of NixOS is that if you add a bunch of libraries to your config trying to get a game to work, those libraries are automatically unlinked when you remove them from your config so your system stays nice and tidy.

I am on Mint, but I have a GPU accelerated VM running Windows 10 for gaming. It performs very well, but you run into the occasional game that detects VMs and will refuse to run.

I've been running Pop for a bit over a year now and am (mostly) satisfied with it. The only issues I had were due to kernel updates, it would cause flickering on my screen and (like someone else mentioned) had to revert to an older kernel until the situation was resolved.

I've been on arch with swaywm for about 3 years now, have't really had to tinker with it at all after getting everything set up. Mesa drivers with amd cards are awesome. Biggest issues I've had were not with gaming but with proprietary codecs in firefox or getting MS Teams to play nice for work. Other than that once in a blue moon the gpg keys for pacman may need to be updated before running the regular update command. I don't recommend sway for everyone, i just find it convenient for me, gnome or kde is fine too.

Fedora, KDE spin. Been working great, and I'm kinda liking DNF

Here's my config (no hardware):

• OS: Arch
• Kernel: linux-zen
• Window Manager: i3-gaps
• Compositor: picom

I've been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it's been working really well for me right up until recently.

After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I've exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it's just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who's been running it to play games for several years in a row.

The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to "in-game", changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC... and back on the same config after that as well.

I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there's been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam's most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game's demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you're hovering your mouse pointer over the game's thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you're actually trying to click: for example, if you're hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide "Install Demo" button, which is floating over another game's thumbnail, you'll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.

As I haven't been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June's Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can't deny that it's been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I'm doing at my PCs: it's great for my work, it's even great for my gaming, it's great for my leasure, and I don't want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.

Now, I know there's sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can't run it as easily: I'll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it's just time for me to tinker again.

Currently running Fedora on my laptop and Arch on my desktop, though I’ll probably migrate from Fedora to openSUSE next month.

I'm currently on Pop! OS 22.04 LTS. For me it worked out of the box. That installer with the NVidia drivers already included was a dream, so I didn't have to set up anything special. I did end up preferring the KDE desktop over Gnome, so I just went screw it and installed KDE plasma on top of it. It's been my daily driver like this for years.

Though, honesty requires me to mention that over the 4-ish years I've been using it they pushed a kernel update twice which killed the nvidia drivers, causing you to be unable to boot to the desktop. Solution was as simple as just rebooting into the previous kernel for a while and waiting for an update which fixes it, but still...

Other than that, pretty happy with it and I'm unlikely to change anytime soon.

I've been using Mint without any issues for a while now. I only play Steam games, though.

Zorin OS 16.2

Ubuntu 20.04lts

Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.

Without actually installing anything.

This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)

On my gaming desktop, I am using Fedora currently with the Awesome WM. That might change though with all the RH stuff going on. On my gaming laptop I switch between Arch and Void with Qtile on both.

I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you'll get 12 different answers

My main distro for years has been Mint, but I play around with a several others frequently. For me, it comes down to the package managers I feel most comfortable in (I know apt the best, but I know zypper and pacman ok enough to get by) and the window manager integration. Personally, I prefer Cinnamon and I think Mint has the best integration for it. My only complaint with Mint lately is the difficulty of getting nvidia drivers to work properly. It should be as simple as selecting the driver you want in the driver manager, but secureboot complicates things a bit.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - it works perfectly all the time now. I have no idea at this point why anyone would continue to use Windows, tbh. A couple of years ago, audio management and networking were still a little bit fiddly, but I have not typed SUDO in almost two years now. I game with Steam, and Proton works with pretty many titles, but not all; I guess I am not that heavy a gamer - having a hard time getting past Kerbal Space Program 1.0 with its endless variety of fanbase mods and CKAN for mixing and matching them.

Like several others here I am using pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop though so they kind of go hand in hand.

I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.

My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn't want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don't need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.

This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.

Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.

I've been using PopOS for about 3 years now. I found it easier to get Steam to work compared to Linux Mint (can't remember why though). I've never tried Ubuntu or non-Debian based systems.

Im running good old Ubuntu with gnome. I mostly play terraria, minecraft I and Bethesda rpgs these days so it does everything I need.

Debian

Pop!_OS ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ

Now I am on fedora. Before I used debian stable and before that I tried some other distros, like some flavors of ubuntu, endeavor, mint, manjaro and so on.

PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it

Not at all an expert, but I'm doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.

@nlm CachyOS. It's Arch based with a bucketload of performance tweaks & bespoke patches, including a kernel scheduler developed by distro maintainers. It also has a small but super-responsive community that tends to resolve issues quite rapidly

I’ve been running Arco Linux just up till now and have switched to the new Debian 12 release. It have not been to much trouble to get my Nvidia card and Steam running. I mainly switch because of all the updates and “maintenance” that I feel is associated with a Arch system, so kinda like you said.

Arch/EndeavourOS. Updates for the recent hardware come pretty fast and they are stable. Most of the time I use gamescope from Valve to get better latency.

I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.

Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.

EndeavourOS with Plasma. migrated from Manjaro after one too many questionable decision on their side.

I'm running Gentoo on my gaming PC, and would not want anything else.

It's very customizable, as it allows to tweak packages' optional dependencies at compile time. It's also rolling release, so no stress with distribution upgrades. Despite that, it's also very stable (most of the time...).

So far the only downside I've seen is that updates can take a while, as almost all packages get compiled from source.

In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.

It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.

I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.

Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There's the occasional weird config mess to get into but it's Linux.

NixOS. If you played around with Arch you'll be fine. My only gripe (although it's kind of important) is NVIDIA doesn't work. Call me lazy but I haven't felt like switching to an other distro, plus I'm not much of a hardcore gamer.

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

Linux mint gaming

I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.

I'm on Arch right now, migrated to it after almost 2 years on Fedora. I'll probably still go back and forth between the two.

I was using Gentoo for a while, but I kept having issues with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I set up a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough.

I actually just switched to NixOS, haven’t had a chance to get my games set up just yet but I am excited for the number of people I have seen have success with it. Setting up gaming is next on my list.

Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!

When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.

Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.

I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.

Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.

NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.

I am currently using Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and comes with GNOME but because I don't really like GNOME's interfaces, so I swapped it with Sway and i3bar.

I never played modern games on this thing, so I don't really know how well it does, but I heard it's pretty good for gaming.

As my main I'm currently running EndeavorOS. I'd say it's pretty good. It does all of the legwork of installing Arch, but comes with minimal bloat and really lets you make it your own.

Arch on my laptop but Pop on my gaming rig. At the time I installed it, I wanted the extra relative ease of Pop's handling on video drivers. I have since switched to AMD, so no driver woes at all since they're in the kernel, but I have stuck with Pop for that system. If it ain't broke... who am I kidding, I'll probably switch to Arch soon.

I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.

Currently on Artix, but planning on changing to Gentoo soon.

Nobara, Gnome version. I had tons of problems with PopOS on Nvidia GPU with a HiDPI monitor. X11 for whatever reason was completely borked when it came to gaming - I am 100% positive it was a niche issue with my machine, but it happened - and switching to Wayland also caused a bunch of issues.

Nobara worked out of the box with no struggles.

I use Void Linux. I like how much more up to date the libraries and apllications tend to be, it's quite similar to Arch in that regard, as it's a true rolling release just like Arch.

It also tends to be very stable as well, with couple minor issues I had ever experienced got fixes within 48-ish hours. One was hugin not launching, and the other a transition issue between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber being the default.

Void uses runit for service management, and is still multithreaded despite taking a more similar approach to just plain shell scripts, and constantly monitors services. What I like about this is more much simpler services are to write compared to SystemD, and then you just put a simlink to them from /etc/sv/<name> to /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/ to enable or disable.

Void also uses their own XBPS package system, which operates similar to pacman, and is equally fast. Void is basically a rolling release like Arch, with the latest updates, but instead has a more "classic" system management style, which I for one greatly appreciate.

After nearly a decade of distro hopping, Void is where I landed for at least the past several years, and I see no reason to leave. Just sharing incase someone else out there thinks this sounds like the system for them, and if so, Take a Step Into the Void, it might be what you're looking for. That's what I like about there being so many distros, there's choice to match each one's needs.

For me Fedora is my go-to, but I'm looking at moving to Nobara

Fedora but I'm about to move to NixOS Unstable or VanillaOS if it gets better NVIDIA integration.

SourceMage! It's a source based distro like Gentoo. I've been using it as my main distro for a solid 10 months now, I'm very happy with it! We have flatpak so steam works great, as well as lutris and everything else. Definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!

I'm running Kubuntu which is just Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma instead of Gnome

I'm on EndeavourOS, but my laptop will be moving to Fedora Sericea (Silverblue, but Sway) to try that out.

Been gaming on Gentoo for over a year, even if I haven't found much time for gaming in the last few months.

Don't do it if you've gotten too lazy for Arch though. Try Pop!_OS or Linux Mint or something. Enjoy an easy distro for a bit, till you get the itch for Arch back.

I use Arch with KDE. I don't recommend Manjaro because it has historically had some serious problems, so for people who want Arch without as much hassle, I'm recommending EndeavourOS. It's what Manjaro should be like.

I've been using Fedora for the past few years and have been pretty happy with it. It updates at just the right cadence for me where I get new stuff pretty quickly but I'm not on a rolling release.

Most of my gaming these days is done on my Steam Deck running stock SteamOS. I also play a few games on my main Linux Mint system.

gentoo!

i love the versatility it offers, but it's very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a "linux enthusiast" should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it's a great learning experience.

for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it's great because it's completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it'll just work.

All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!

Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.

Edit: typos!

I'm using Gentoo.

If I wanted a smooth no-tinkering experience, I'd use Ubuntu. Or hell, steamos.

I've been on pop os for at least 2 years now, been loving it. Most of my gaming is through steam so compatibility issues are the exception, not the rule. It's a bit of a dream come true to play God of War on Linux, it feels like all the stars aligned.

Even when I bork the install by fucking around in the kernel I wind up getting back on pop rather than finally taking the dive into arch.

Arch Linux. Been using it since long ago and play most of my games on it.

I'm on Slackware - it's a bit of a pain because Steam is 32 bit so you have to install the compat libs.

I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it’s so big and well supported by most things. I’ve run Arch in the past but I’ve gotten too old and lazy for that if I’d be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though… and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.

Are you me? Did you also use BlackArch for a while, and still use Rainmeter? :P