Operating Systems

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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

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

I'm using Gentoo.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pop!_OS ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ