Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
since you already have experience with fedora, you might wanna look at nobara, which has an nvidia-specific installer available. i'm running it a bit longer than 7 months now, and don't have any issues with it, and i have a pretty similar hardware config to you (a ryzen 5 instead of a 7, and a 3070 Ti instead of the normal one)
I also run a windows 10 VM, mainly for stubborn installers from cracked games that won't run correctly under wine and for my mouse/keyboard software (they have onboard profiles, so i pass them through to the vm to configure)
FYI: I have a rig similar to yours. I’m currently running Mint and have had no issues. I used to run Pop OS, but even after a fresh reinstall of their LTS, updates stopped working, so I recommend avoiding Pop OS.
What about Bazzite? It's fedora based and made for gaming. I've only tried it on handheld like steamdeck and rog ally but it's awesome, even better than steamdeck os.
I've used it on an old HP all in one and it made it useful again. The daughter tossed it because it lagged hella bad and her Roblox and Minecraft etc sucked, Runs Baldurs gate 1 and 2 just fine and all my older game emulators so I love to bust it out for Wii gaming night etc. The machine is pure crap with integrated graphics and a whooping 8gb ram. Thats gotta burn seeing all the stuff I've got going and knowing you threw it out. Then again I dont know if it's noticed over TIk Tok
Benchmarks online tend to show very minimal performance difference between distros. The main difference with gaming distros will be ease of installation of gaming stuff like gamemode, etc. Some distros also have a Steam Picture like mode if you prefer that. Besides the "gaming" stuff, the distros are otherwise just a normal Linux experience so yes you can install a VM software like normal.
Bazzite and CachyOS are two popular suggestions. Bazzite is a Fedora atomic spin for gaming and has specific images setup for your hardware. CachyOS is arch based and has optimized packages for your specific hardware
Just use Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Mint if you want a hassle free, secure, and stable Linux distro that supports everything and works out of the box.
Don't use those gaming centric distros like Bazzite. It's not worth it. Don't use Arch or other bleeding edge distros unless you want to keep troubleshooting your system because of problems or vulnerabilities.
Take it from me. I've been using Linux since 2001 and Ubuntu based distros have always been the best choice for a secure stable OS.
100 percent agree - just waiting for the Canonical haters to arrive
Bazzite is made for gaming and it's worked for me pretty flawlessly for about 6 months BUT I had a lot of issues getting it to run a VM. I'm certainly not a Linux expert but I eventually gave up trying.
I think there's some hidden complexity with immutable distros that most people ignore, I also had issues getting podman/docker to run properly there IIRC but dunno if its the same thing
I saw "gaming focused distro" and immediately jumped into it without any research but that's just the way I do things. Sometimes I work my way backwards and develop at least some understanding. I believe it's commonly referred to as a learning disorder. Don't regret it though.
There's a ujust script to set up virtualisation on Bazzite. ujust setup-virtualization in the terminal should get you going. Alongside the background stuff it sets up, it installs a GUI virtual machine manager.
Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.
You absolutely can use VMs, but you don't need a VM to run windows software and you won't have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.
Honestly the biggest headache is with the "linux native" stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they're all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it's far from transparent to the user. Maybe I've overthinking it but in my opinion it's a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don't know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.
Give it a try and you most likely wont regret it. Linux has come a long way since the general statement what you want game on it. I purchased a Asus ROG laptop about a year ago and installed Manjaro Linux on it (spare the hate) and its been working flawlessly. With that said. I'm not a hard core gamer and been sticking to Steam and console emulation so others with more time to play games should flank in.
The amount of these posts make me happy.
CachyOS since you're using fedora for 3 years
I am still very happy with CachyOS. That'd be my recommendation. Nobara / Bazzite are good options, too, but I never tested them.
I recently made the switch. Running intel ultra 5 and nvidia rtx 5060. Bazzite and Pop!_OS were advertised as working, out of the box. I couldn't get either to work, following the wiki setup guides. I tried Ubuntu, couldn't get that working, either.
I switched to Nobara, and learned that I was messing up gamemoderun in Steam. So I have no idea if Nobara fixed my issues, or if I was messing something up the whole time, or maybe a little of both. It was fun, though! Absolutely glad to be done with windows.