I started with Bazzite but wanted a system that wasn't immutable, so I switched to Garuda. Both have been easy and reliable.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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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.
Another vote for Bazzite. It's been such a smooth experience for a year or so.
Fedora KDE works great for me, but I'm quite comfortable with Linux already
Mint for two years. Then Arch for a decade. This year I have been trying out CachyOS.
SteamOS on a Steam Deck.
When I want to game, I want to game, not be stuck playing a round of "tech support simulator"
CachyOS KDE + Windows 11 debloated dualboot with games on shared BTRFS drive and WinBtrfs driver
Debian. It wont win any awards for fastest release cycles but it's rock stable with great support for my Ryzen 2700 and 6700xt.
Debain gamer here as well!
As a FreeBSD user just trying to game on Unix, I've blown up my Debian machine so many times. A couple of years ago, trying to get CUDA in Blender working AND have a recent enough driver for the Windows games I was playing on Proton was killing me. I don't remember what exactly but it seemed like every time I tried to change something, the whole fragile mess would bork itself.
yeah, back when I used nvidia I had to run their driver installer or nothing would work right, and of course any little system update would bork everything until I ran the installer again. Thankfully everything with AMD just works now.
Bazzite. Literally built for gaming.
Arch Linux. I wanted to try Hyprland with something and I felt like it was the easiest with Arch.
Hyprland isn't officially supported on that nvidia card
Well, I just gave my reason for using Arch. Pre-Turing cards are already problematic on Linux, not just with Hyprland.
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.
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.
The package manager is a big deal; it's amazing how little is packaged for Fedora compared to the Ubuntu family.
I've been using Nobara for about 2 years and it's been very good.
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.
Comes with a bunch of warnings for Steam, is there some postinstall setup needed before gaming is convenient on opensuse? Or am I out of loop, I was under the impression that it's not that good for that https://en.opensuse.org/Steam
Luckily I did not read those warnings so they did not apply to me.
So far no problems.
Yes! Tumbleweed squad.....rise up.
This got me started with Linux. Such a great first distro.
Fedora
Bazzite and Mint
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.
I was on pop for a while! It was cool.
Why does the pop shop suck though? Why?? Why is it so slow, why does it crash so much? Why is this such a problem with so many users? It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, it was more like an unnecessary brick the camel had to carry.
Bazzite on the living room PC.
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.
Rocking Garuda here!
Me too!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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