I’m putting together a gaming system for the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input. Obviously I’m committing myself to providing a certain amount of tech support no matter what, but I’m wondering if any of these modern Linux distros can provide a user experience at least on par with Windows in terms of ease of use and reliability for someone who doesn’t know how to do much more than check their email and log in to Steam.

So far, I’ve looked at Bazzite, Cachy, Nobara, and PopOS based on what I commonly see recommended here. I’m leaning toward Bazzite based on its stated goal of being friendly to Linux newcomers, and the quality and amount of available documentation. Are there any other distros I’ve missed, or other considerations that might sway my preference?

I’d also like to hear about your subjective experiences with Linux gaming:

  1. What distro are you using for gaming?
  2. How long have you used it?
  3. How often have you had issues that require Linux knowledge and/or searching the web to solve?
  4. Have you had any other minor/annoying complaints?
  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    1. Arch

    2. For gaming, ~7 years. For everything else, ~20 years. I’ve used Windows for gaming in the past, but I’ve been a long-time Arch user in general, who switched to Linux full-time (also for gaming) once it got so compatible with running Windows-based games. Which was approx. 7 years ago. Since then, I don’t have any Windows partitions anymore.

    3. For gaming, really minor things only sometimes, and that amount also decreased over time as the compatibility layers and tools got better and better. I think Linux is in general very newcomer/mainstream-friendly for gaming and general use right now, just pick the right distro for you. Since I’m on Arch, I obviously have to put in slightly more time, and I wouldn’t recommend Arch to new users, unless that new user is also willing to enjoy the benefits of having a technically simple and lean OS while not caring about the disadvantages (having to invest slightly more time into it). That said, I also usually game on Steam and don’t play games with invasive anti-cheat-systems in them. Which makes it even easier.

    4. No.

    For newcomers, best picks for a gaming-optimized Linux distro right now would be Bazzite, Nobara or simply any general-use but up to date distro like Fedora, Pop!OS, Kubuntu, OpenSuSE, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Arch (the last three only if you can deal with the Arch-based distros, it’s not for everyone). If you have a designated gaming machine, I’d probably use a gaming-centric distro. If you also use the machine for other tasks, I’d pick a general-use distro which can do gaming just fine as well. There’s really no difference in capability between the two types other than what’s already preconfigured OOTB and how fast you can go from zero to gaming.