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.
Debian
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.
Pop here also. I tried several different distro's, pop worked out of the box. Only issue was my cheap little Bluetooth USB wart, but five minutes of searching showed me how to get it working. That's it. I like it. Familiar enough for a windows refugee, plays enough steam games without issues to keep me happy. No crashes, no freezes, unlike windows 10/11.
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'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 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 installed Kubuntu.. I couldn't be assed to resize my efi partition to a gig and disrupt windows.. Done that in the past with varying results. Wish they didn't require it to be that big tbh.
I do miss Arch.. wouldn't surprise me if I'll install it again soon.
Kubuntu works. But where's the fun in that? :)
It's like.. I installed it, messed with lutris a bit (needed a newer version) and installed Diablo 4, everything works.. and now I feel like I'm missing out somehow. :)
You're missing out on chasing the dragon for the latest and greatest. :)
Arch is fine once you get it setup, but I feel like the nerd in us can never just leave it be. I'll probably go back to pop_os next major release they have.
Sometimes I wish I had a machine dedicated to nothing but reinstalling different distros. :)
It can get a bit disrupting to do it on your main rig too often.
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.
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.
Here's my config (no hardware):
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.
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.
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.
Arch Linux. Been using it since long ago and play most of my games on it.
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.
With some of the news going around about the new windows versions and what-not, this sounds really interesting. I have a couple questions if you could answer them, that would be awesome!
How does a new release of Windows affect the compatibility of this set up? I know programs with for a while on older releases, but after a time, that version will be phased out. That might be more about the VM than your setup, but I don't have a lot of experience with those either lol.
Does this introduce some system lag for input in any way? If I ever do get the confidence to abandon my system to go to Linux, it would suck if this really cool sounding method added response time to inputs.
So the only problem is you'd have to update every VM over time to get security patches, this is mainly a problem if you're on limited internet(like me). Im capped at 100gb a month and my download speed is almost always less than 1mb/sec.
Windows has a feature that if one system on your network is updated, other systems on the network can download locally from that one and save your data, which is wonderful. But you still need to update Nvidia drivers for each VM, and update games, etc. You can connect a hard drive(virtual or physical) to multiple VMs, but only run VMs with a common hard drive one at a time.
And mind you this isn't to save compatibly, for me once it works it works. I just like to keep security patches updated because I download a lot of sketchy programs lol.
Latency is non-existent. I use a program called lookingglass, which allocates like 32mb of GPU memory to be dedicated to passing frames between the VM and the host. Or non-existent for my level of perception. If you're Spidey senses tingle more easily you can pass through a secondary keyboard and mouse and just literally have two screens two keyboards two mice one box. It would have the same latency as bare metal. And even have two people play multiplayer games together off of one box if you have the horsepower.
So, there are a couple of things that have happened recently. I have an old laptop that I've messed around with different distros of Linux on. I installed Arch on it and am trying to do some different things. It's not a good laptop, so the VM set up I'm really interested in won't happen until I get a few more drives for my main PC and set up a dual boot abd some other things. I am really interested in this set up because it just sounds neat.
Are there some things I should try to do to help me get better at working with this OS? I'm currently seeking up a server with a reverse proxy using nginx and its... Going. The server works I think, but the proxy doesnt yet.
With some of the news going around about the new windows versions and what-not, this sounds really interesting. I have a couple questions if you could answer them, that would be awesome!
How does a new release of Windows affect the compatibility of this set up? I know programs with for a while on older releases, but after a time, that version will be phased out. That might be more about the VM than your setup, but I don't have a lot of experience with those either lol.
Does this introduce some system lag for input in any way? If I ever do get the confidence to abandon my system to go to Linux, it would suck if this really cool sounding method added response time to inputs.
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