This again: What distro are you using for gaming?

Yes this has been asked and answered a million times I’m sure. There is a plethora of ‘top ten distros for Linux gaming’ lists out there and the majority of posts I can find on That Other Site seem to devolve into “every distro can do games”.

I’m interested in what you are using and your experience doing so. Any gotchas you wished you knew? Anything you tried that didn’t work, or anything that worked unexpectedly well? What would you say if your friend asked this over a few pints down the pub?

SFaulken ,
@SFaulken@kbin.social avatar

Honestly, I wouldn't make any specific recommendation. Because when you do, you instantly become most peoples personal support technician, when they can't sort something out.

I'd probably make the general suggestions of Fedora/Silverblue/Kinoite, openSUSE Tumbleweed/Aeon/Kalpa, and maybe Pop!_OS if somebody put a gun to my head. But no recommendations.

Tanza ,
@Tanza@kbin.social avatar

i'm just using manjaro right now, works pretty well

ReCursing ,
@ReCursing@kbin.social avatar

Same. Never had a problem with Manjaro. But also never play AAA online games

captainsiscold ,
@captainsiscold@kbin.social avatar

Using Manjaro KDE here, as well. Granted, I mostly play Counter-Strike, Risk of Rain 2, Stellaris, and various indie games, but pretty much everything has been very smooth. Very glad to be free of Windows on my main machine, and it hasn't really affected how I use my PC day-to-day.

Tanza ,
@Tanza@kbin.social avatar

update: i have now had an issue with manjaro (audio issue, low quality, fixed pretty easy, but still)

gruedragon ,

Currently using Debian 12.

nartimus ,

@gruedragon

@jakwithoutac

I haven’t gotten Lutron’s to install anything on debian 12. Was run into some wine error while installing games.

Do you have any guides you used?

-spam- ,
@-spam-@kbin.social avatar

Fedora, apart from the latest nvidia driver rendering Plasma a slide show I've had no real issues.

8565 ,

I run Arch BTW. Even with a Nvidia GPU and never have issues.

nick ,

I'm using Nobara. It's a gaming tweaked Fedora with a bunch of gaming and steaming related software preinstalled and configured. Works well in my experience.

cvf ,

Same, started using it on a pc connected to my tv (for a console like experience, boots straight into gamescope/steam).
Now I also use it on my desktop (replacing Ubuntu).

PlanetWaves ,
@PlanetWaves@kbin.social avatar

I've also been using Nobara and it's been near flawless for me since I started using it months ago

hellfire103 ,
@hellfire103@sopuli.xyz avatar

I was using Debian, but I now daily drive openSUSE Tumbleweed.

danielmark_n_3d ,

Got annoyed with Red Hat so moved to OpenSUSE. Easy transition, no issues so far woth Steam, Heroic, or Lutris

ono ,

Debian Stable + Backports, with a few customized flatpaks. I don’t care that my desktop apps are not bleeding edge. My system always works, and games run great.

Alexmitter ,
@Alexmitter@kbin.social avatar

Fedora without any question. There is no other distro this polished.

jakwithoutac OP ,

Worried about the Red Hat nonsense at all? I’m not super plugged into the news on it all.

Alexmitter ,
@Alexmitter@kbin.social avatar

No.

polygon ,
@polygon@kbin.social avatar

The way it was explained to me was Fedora = RHEL Alpha, CentOS Stream = RHEL Beta, RHEL is Stable, then there are downstreams who build against RHEL. Only those who are downstream of REHL are effected by the changes. Both Fedora and Cent are necessary development platforms to support everything that eventually makes it down to RHEL in stable condition. They both depend on RHEL for funding, but RHEL depends on them for testing.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • [email protected]
  • All magazines