Linux Gaming

Fedora and steamOS

Currently Pop!_OS

Endeavour OS! So far it's been smooth for the past 4 years. I've enjoyed it.

Bazzite and Mint

Bazzite runs great on my main gaming PC in desktop mode and on my HTPC in gaming mode. Maintenance is minimal and it just works (on AMD hardware), while packages are pretty recent and it's absolutely stable.

I'm on Mint with an RTX 3060ti and Ryzen 5. Pretty much everything "just worked" except for the proprietary software for rebinding my mouse and gaming controller. I found alternative software for the mouse (Logitech g300s) but I'm still having difficulty with the controller (8bitdo Ultimate 2).

I use stock Arch with i3wm. My girlfriend uses Nobara with KDE.

You can game on just about any distro -- I'm using NixOS and it's great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.

But if you're looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.

I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)

Cachy OS on personal PC and Bazzite on steam console (htpc) and a onexplayer handheld. Then just good old steamos on the steam deck.

Just rolling with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

SteamOS on a Steam Deck.

When I want to game, I want to game, not be stuck playing a round of "tech support simulator"

Another vote for Bazzite. It's been such a smooth experience for a year or so.

Mint for two years. Then Arch for a decade. This year I have been trying out CachyOS.

CachyOS KDE + Windows 11 debloated dualboot with games on shared BTRFS drive and WinBtrfs driver

Fedora KDE works great for me, but I'm quite comfortable with Linux already

Debian. It wont win any awards for fastest release cycles but it's rock stable with great support for my Ryzen 2700 and 6700xt.

Arch Linux. I wanted to try Hyprland with something and I felt like it was the easiest with Arch.

Bazzite. Literally built for gaming.

NixOS. Works great. I'm a bit of a masochist.

Nobara (Fedora)

Tried Bazzite for a year. Was fun but now back to a normal distro.

I've been using Nobara for about 2 years and it's been very good.

Fedora on my desktop, bazzite (rebadged fedora) on my steam deck.

I'm always a lil surprised how few fedoras I see on these posts. Fedora is chill. Considering the difference between distros is basically a package manager, seems weird the second most bleeding edge distro doesn't get much love.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed here, both on my desktop and Steam Deck. i like the stable rolling release model. Allows me to get shiny new things that have at least gone through automated tests.

And in case anything goes wrong it comes with snapper configured by default for easy rollbacks.

Pretty much any distro will work for gaming these days. Really up to personal preference. I use Arch but have heard good things about Pop!_OS.

Bazzite on the living room PC.

Fedora

I game on Fedora because it was just the OS I installed on my gaming PC when I moved to Linux. Everything is fine between Steam, Heroic, and Lutris. The NVIDIA drivers were easy to install from the App Store and the only game that doesn’t run well is Death Loop but there’s been some updates and I haven’t tried it in six months so it may be better now. There was a memory leak apparently but I think there were more problems.

Manjaro (Arch) with hyprland for my window manager.

Void with X11 (fvwm3). The fussier games tend to be online live-service titles; every new release Genshin Impact does a new weird.

Rocking Garuda here!

I switched to Cachyos KDE a week ago. It's the best distro I've used (previously I ran Debian KDE, and Mint Cinnamon before that). I have a GTX 1070 ti and it set up with zero issues. Steam installed perfectly, and I used AUR to install the gaming-meta package.

I'm a Linux Mint user and I've not had many problems using Steam as a Flatpak.

I've been enjoying EndeavorOS on Plasma.

Tumbleweed. Stable rolling release distro.

I use it for general things as well, but I have MX Linux on my laptop and it works well enough for the type of games I play ( nothing all that requirement heavy ). Steam's Proton works fine. So does WINE for modern games.

I've tried WINE without any tinkering on a couple old abandonware games ( 3D-Ultra Minigolf and some other game ) and both had issues with scaling, fitting into their borderless window, and crashing when selecting a menu button thing. So, older titles like those might be out of the question... if I don't try them on DOSBox.

Windows 11 :/

Though heavily neutered, where even defender is disabled.

I boot CachyOS Linux with a lot of tuning (and some recent game testing). A linux gaming OS! I'm using Cachy like 95% of the time; I am not anti linux.

But honestly... It's just not worth a few lost features and performance hit over Windows for me, on top of the extra hassle. Its easier to just reboot. Maybe the experience is different on AMD GPUs, but I suspect Nvidia is at a disadvantage here.

This is on a desktop. Based on my experience with a RTX 2060 laptop I used to have, you also have the to deal with graphics switching, rendering on one device while displayong on another, and making sure your 1050 actually goes to sleep when not in use.

Linux Mint Xfce

Mint because it doesn't break often and usually fixes are simple enough, and Xfce because, though I don't know how well it fares compared to others nowadays, it was the variant that would run the lightest in a previous computer I had some years ago, so I grew attached to it.

Also besides Steam, Heroic (for GOG, EGS and Amazon Prime) and Mitch (for Itchio) work fine on it.

PopOS. Lots of folks recommend bazzite for gaming though.

Arch, all flatpacked.