What's the best Linux alternative to Windows for gaming

It kind of doesn’t matter which distro you use. They should all work similarly with gaming, there’s no distro with some magic formula that makes it more compatible or with better performance than the alternatives. So pick one that strikes your fancy.

If you’re new, it’s probably better to stick with well known distros. I recommend Mint and Pop OS. Both are based on Ubuntu, so every time you run into an issue or have a questions, you can google solutions for Ubuntu which will also work on Mint/Pop OS. But both also have big communities, so you’ll always have help.

Word of advice that Nvidia and Linux don’t really work that well together. Some games will have issues. AMD GPUs work just fine though.

I want to share though. AMD RX 7xxx do not have overclocking options along with fan controls. I track news since January and they probably won't have till the end of the year or even later. Other generations are pretty flawless.

Overclocking on Linux for this generation is "deprecated" and no new mechanisms are introduced yet, so better avoid this generation at least for now. You will be able to only control power limit for now.
Yeah I have a lot of experience with Ubuntu but I was wondering if there were any more optimal distros for gaming.

But I'm glad you mentioned Nvidia cause I have an Nvidia graphics card so that might be an issue for me
- Well, if you're up for it then try anyway. I tried to use Pop OS in my gaming machine for some months, then Endeavour OS, despite also having an Nvidia GPU. It was a cool experience, but the small issues I faced started to pile up. The last straw was when I was going to play in a lan party and Company of Heroes just wouldn't start.
  
  I came back to Windows and honestly... It's better for gaming. Things just work. Doesn't matter if it's niche or AAA or has some anti cheat software, it will work. Regardless of your GPU, or updates, etc. No need to check protondb, troubleshoot, waste hours to make a niche game work (Dragon Commander from GOG... I just gave up and bought it again on Steam to be able to play for example), etc etc
  
  But I'm really happy to see how far Linux has come, and hopefully someday it will be as seamless as Windows. My Steam Deck works really well and it's only going to get better, but we're not there yet.

ATM I use PopOS on my rtx3050m laptop. Once you understand how to setup all the command for using the discrete graphics it runs flawless.

I use PopOS too. With Lutris, most games run out of the box.
- The problem are only native linux games runned trought Steam. In hybrid mode they will not use the discrete graphic card. For the rest I have no problem

Isn't this Pop-OS's thing? Being literally for the gamers on Linux?

I dont know that its how they brand themselves, but Pop!_OS is a fantastic linux gaming distro.

Its based on Ubuntu, but they do several very important things: they update/patch the kernel with the latest drivers and goodness and provide the latest nvidia proprietary drivers. So you get the stability and durability of ubuntu + newer kernel support which means things like much more current mesa drivers (for radeon cards).

I've been using it full-time for 3 (or 4?) years now. I technically have my PC dual booting with Windows for gaming reasons, but since the steamdeck took off all of the big games I want to play are available on linux. I've logged into windows exactly 2 times and that was to run updates.

Pop has been rock solid and turned out to be a great gaming OS.

I use Linux Mint and running ProtonGE with Steam means everything works. Personally I would recommend Mint over Ubuntu at this point. I have seen others have good experiences with Nobara and Garuda as well.

Another recommendation for Linux Mint here. I've bounced between Manjaro, Ubuntu, Fedora, and I've found Linux Mint to just be fantastic for beginners, in that everything just works, and it does a great job of guiding the user through installation, updating drivers, updating packages (including choosing an appropriate package mirror), and setting up backups.

It's just really nice all around; the only thing I could complain about is lack of touchpad gesture support, but that's probably not an issue for desktop PC usage.

They just announced touchpad and touchscreen gestures are coming in the next release!
Another big benefit to Mint is its huge userbase means an equally big community and lots of user support.

I'd say for a first time user its a very easy transition.

There's two recent posts about this topic that might give you some answers: https://lemmy.ml/post/1130762 https://lemmy.ml/post/1171529 I'm also gaming on Linux with an Nvidia card and I know there used to be issues, but I didn't have a single problem so far.

I recommend Fedora (I use the KDE Spin). I have an Nvidia Laptop, which is supposed to be the worst nightmare for Linux gaming, and Fedora handles it brilliantly. The packages are newer than you get on the Ubuntu-based distros like Mint and Pop, and it really makes a difference in performance, when it comes to graphics card drivers (plus you get Wayland and Pipewire which are great).

I have wanted to try Fedora. Maybe I should just try them all and see how it goes lol
- If trying them all sounds like fun, go ahead! I personally love downloading a bunch of isos and poking around the live usb (pre installation) version of different distros every once in a while.
  
  Though honestly, if you just want to get started you can probably do anything you want on any distro. Distro choice seems to matter less and less these days.

Using openSUSE Tumbleweed and it works very well with gaming. Like others said, the distro doesn’t matter but check on the hardware compatibility. It really depends on what you have in there.

Dropping in here to ask a side question

My biggest concerns with finally making the switch to gaming in a linux distro are

Will the biggest releases generally be guaranteed to (eventually) work in wine?
For game with multiplayer that use invasive anti-cheat third party systems, what's the hit/miss rate of people getting unfairly banned because they're running it on linux? I'm generally playing multiplayer in FFXIV and WoW these days so I'm sure that's fine, but I don't want to worry about being VAC banned down the line for playing some non-AAA game with a trigger happy cheat detection software.
~~Follow up for this last question - if that's just a reality of gaming on linux, what anti-cheat softwares do I have to be weary of?~~

I found such a list

Bless this community.

I think a guarantee that they will eventually work would be difficult, but Proton has really changed the game. I'm using a Steam Deck (SteamOS, but there's Chimera.....more on that below) and there's a lot of things, including recent AAA games, that work really well with it.

Chimera supports FSR and seems to be the biggest alternative out of the box to SteamOS. A lot of game companies are making sure they can run with at least 30fps on Steam Deck because it's becoming a pretty good revenue stream for them which benefits everyone running Linux.

Protondb.com has a great list of what is currently working.
- Spent a lot of the day thinking in the back of my mind what games on game pass ultimate I want to sit down and play at the computer, and what I came up with basically are games that would be perfectly playable via the ultimate cloud option on linux since the game pass games can't run without UWP so far on linux. Anything that would have such a degraded experience I could just play on the xbox one. Combine this with the results from running my library through prontonDB and this seems like a realistic possiblity!
  
  I may be sold on finally ditching windows as the last great bastion of staying on windows for gaming falls, ironically, with the rise of microsoft introducing cloud gaming ^^
  
  Now I need to see about using some vacation time to port everything over and tweak the new OS...
To your first point, in my experience, most single player games end up perfectly playable. For multiplayer it is entirely dependant on what sort of anti-cheat they use.

If you're new to gaming you might do well with ubuntu since it tends to be a good distro to start with with lots of support.

One of the big things is to do research and make sure how your hardware might perform on linux because some hardware can surprise you.

Yeah that's a good point about hardware cause it might not perform as well with Linux drivers

I haven't used it, but https://nobaraproject.org/ aims to be a great gaming distro. I personally use EndeavourOS (Arch based) and have found being an up to date rolling release to be pretty useful and I've seen games run better over months of updates. For example Cyberpunk 2077 ran terribly when other titles ran well. But there's been updates recently and now it's doubled the frame rate to a playable level.

I used arch, cause the archinstaller makes the install easy, while getting a lightweight customizable system at the end. But when it comes down to it, Ubuntu also worked for me. The major advantage of arch is it's aur, bleeding edge packages and the docs.

I've heard good things about Nobara Linux for gaming. It's basically Fedora but with some patches to make it work better out of the box for gaming. Stuff like proprietary Nvidia drivers can be preinstalled. I have Fedora on my machine personally, but installing Nvidia drivers can be a pain if the open source drivers don't give you a working system with your card.

used it for a while, eventually things began to break. Switched back to fedora and installed everything manually and haven't had a problem since. Had to switch to windows though for software :(

I use endeavourOS and it's fantastic

I mean feel like most Linux distros are the same performance wise. Always like POP OS had a nvidia driver already set up which made things easier.

I’ve installed steam and wine on Gentoo and it works great… so any other distro will work too. Main concern might be 32-but library support out of the box, but generally any “established” distro will have it

Try lutris, and use Fedora. It does help