Recommended linux variant for gaming.

If you like Ubuntu but don't like the direction it's going, you can try Mint. It's Ubuntu, but with the bad decisions reversed. Or use LMDE, which is Mint but Debian based.

I game on Arch, works great. Flatpak Steam, X11. 👍

Pop OS works great for me. It's Ubuntu minus snaps and imo some of the rough edges

I've been using Nobara for some time now, and I've been successfully able to play on Nvidia & Wayland, so that's quite a feat in itself. Also, everything is setup at install time, so you don't have to setup many things yourself.

There is no such thing as a "gaming distro" -- all GNU/Linux distros are equally good for gaming and any other task.

Get the Garuda gaming edition and the only real learning curve is apt vs pacman.

I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos... With many, many more packages being in AUR!

By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you'll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the "bloat" like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

Personally, I think it's better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it's not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.

Endevour os for me. No issues on kde nvidia and wayland, pretty straightforward installation. If I were you I'd do some distro hopping in the new PC. I'd try one of those ublue images, then nobara then endevour and see what you prefer.

Fedora or Nobara if you're lazy are a good option. If an immutable variant appeals, I have a good time on Kinoite. There is a gaming centric ublue version now too IIRC

I'm currently struggling with Nobara and the growing amount of bugs with each new kernel update.

Otherwise I would have recommended that one, since it offers some great convenient features, like a graphical management tool for all sorts of Wine versions, which can be installed in parallel. The kernel supports fsync and is tuned for low latency. Game performance is decent and I also got all my games and launchers (native Linux and also Wine) working.

For the audio part, there is pipewire, which works like a charm. There is also a compatible flatpack for DSP/equalizer which I couldn't find it on Ubuntu's snap store: JamesDSP. Now, after some tuning, my rather flat-sounding headphones sound do super boomy.

Fedora Atomic, especially Bazzite.

Bazzite is a project of uBlue, which is Fedora Silverblue with a lot of gaming stuff on top, similar to Nobara or the tweaks on the Steam Deck.

It has the same big advantage of every other immutable distro, that you don't have to manage your system yourself. It updates without you noticing, will never break, you can easily roll back if something doesn't work as intended, and so on.

The cool thing is, that you can just rebase to another atomic variant if you don't like it, or when you realize, that every gaming distro is just as capable for gaming as every other conventional distro too.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, removing corporate shinanigans.

Realistically just use what you prefer. The differences between distros, even when it comes to performance, are very small when it comes to gaming. The most important things IMO are good Wayland support, stability, and consistent updates.

Personally, I really like Garuda Linux and CachyOS for Gaming. You can also check out ChimeraOS or uBlue Bazzite if you want something closer to the Steam Deck.

Linux Mint Debian Edition and Fedora are some general recommendations of mine. Nobara is a fork of Fedora optimized for Gaming.

That valve uses Arch is irrelevant in all honesty. Proton is not a Valve product, Valve is merely one of its users and contributors, and it is not wedded to one distro..Similarly Valves own Steam packages are not distro specifi, and there are other gaming platforms to consider which also benefit from Proton (for example you can get Gog windows games working in Linux too quite easily), as well as all the Retro gaming options.

Pick a distro you personally like. I use Mint as I like the cinnamon desktop interface and the distro is pretty much good to go from fresh install. I use Mint both as a dual install with Windows on my PC and also within VMs in Windows. I still spend a lot of time using Windows because of specific games compatibility and work related apps.

EndeavourOS seems a good choice if you do want to go the Arch route but it's only something I've played with in a VM.

If you want something gaming specific then Draugar seems like a good choice - it apparently uses Ubuntu LTS but with the mainline Kernel updates optimised for gaming. But I have no personal experience with the distro.

I also see a lot of people seem to like Pop!_OS, but again no personal experience.

I've had no issues with Mint on my setup.

Garuda or Chimera, depending on what you want, exactly.

I always recommend Linux Mint Debian edition. I don't use it, but I've had friends who've had good luck with it. Straight Debian is a great choice as well. If packages aren't new enough, you can always use testing and keep a really stable experience.

It honestly doesn't matter much which you pick unless you're using the absolute latest hardware or something. I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which has worked really well for me. I don't recommend it because there just isn't as much help available online specific to the OS, so I tend to recommend more mainstream distros. I used Arch for a few years before I switched, and Tumbleweed feels pretty much the same, but with less fiddling.

Anyway, regardless of what you pick, feel free to come back and ask questions. Most problems have similar solutions regardless of distro because Linux is Linux, so please don't hesitate to ask.

I think PopOS is the best option if u have Nvidia graphics card

I moved from Kubuntu to Endeavor (Arch-based) and was also afraid of bleeding edge stuff breaking all the time. I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised by how stable it is. The only couple issues I had was 1 bad kernel version and vmware update. I learned how to roll back and avoid upgrading these 2 packages for a couple weeks until the new versions of both fixed everything. I was also reluctant to learn a new package manager since I already know apt, but yay is arguably easier to use than apt. My gaming has been great, no issues.

I use Debian with steam installed via flatpak

I have EndeavourOS, but with the nature of Bleeding Edge packages, things can break, so setup automatic snapshots with btrfs (you want this for your data anyways).

Bleeding Edge packages have the advantage of you getting the latest features, patches and improvements, which is required for some gaming cases.

Go with nobara.

I use tumbleweed, but I had a strange issue with the flatpak version of heroic launcher. I ran a benchmark of cyberpunk 2077 with the flatpak heroic, and was averaging 100 fps. I had nixos installed on a separate hard drive and that benchmark was 160 fps. I thought there was an issue with opensuse, but I installed the flatpak version of heroic on nixos and also got 100 fps. So I installed the regular version on tumbleweed and have 160 fps. I would keep that in mind when looking at programs to launch games, whether it's wine, bottles, heroic, lutris, etc

I second Nobara, but IMO get the KDE edition of it if you're used to Windows. You'll feel much more at home.

Anyone that has video drivers and flatpak should work in your case. If you dislike Ubuntu and don't like the direction, usually poops and mint are the ones recommended.

Debian with KDE Plasma desktop, it's unbeatable.

Fedora. Cutting edge but works out of box. Very little change in use compared to Ubuntu.

Debian is good but very stable so no guarantee for some package updates which is useful for gaming and maybe proton.

On a related note, this is pretty useful: https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/

Not much a of a definitive answer here imo. There's a lot of distros that fit this criteria, but I would definitely stay away from Debian due to the age of the packages. As said, you don't have to go with a rolling distro but at least look for those who keep at least their gaming related packages fairly updated.

The tough part about Arch & similar rolling distros is that they can and will break when you update something, and then you have to know how to fix it. I used Manjaro & EndeavourOS for quite a while. Manjaro was actually stable for me, but when I wanted to reinstall after a couple years to switch to btrfs I thought I try EndeavourOS, due to the criticism towards Manjaro. Unfortunately it didn't even took a year for it to break and now I'm on Nobara, which is okay but also has many issues that annoy me. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is another often mentioned one, which is rolling but with a delay too, but when I tried it out (before installing Nobara) it was extremely hard to install as the installer was buggy and when it finally was installed it was extremely broken to the point where I couldn't even change my resolution properly.

Ymmv but since I dabble a bit with audio, I went with Ubuntu Studio. It has a real time kernel, and has been fantastic for gaming.

Garuda is amazing