I just picked up a cheap older gaming PC with a GTX 1050 and and Intel I7 CPU. Trying to decide what distro to load on it for gaming. Curious that others experience is gaming on various distros.
Nobara but considering other option such as Bazzite and GLFOS.
I would suggest you to choose a lightweight DE, in simpler word everything but GNOME. On my machine GNOME was eating ressources resulting in less FPS around roughly 10%-20% performance loss. But from a distro to another one I haven’t seen major gap in my benchmarks. Desktop Envrionement had much more impact
Arch. If it’s not a server, arch. Always arch.
Arch Linux is Linux built my way. My system blends to what I do. Clean and fast, no clutter in sight, with 100% freedom and control. I use Arch BTW !!
It suits my needs because I decide. It’s bleeding edge, so I get latest packages. Just the way I like it.
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)
Debian Stable
Currently Pop!_OS
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!
There seem to be dozens of us
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.
Thank you for validating my pain.
Slackware current.
This isn’t a troll. I use it to game on my dual core pentium lovingly dubbed ‘the craptop’. And I use it to game on my mid-tier gaming PC.
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.
Yes! Tumbleweed squad…rise up.
This got me started with Linux. Such a great first distro.
It ended up being my second distro because Kubuntu completely crapped out after an update. Tumbleweed is excellent!
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.
Void Linux with XFCE on my desktop, and Bazzite on my media center PC.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Meets all my requirements 😀
Fedora KDE works great for me, but I’m quite comfortable with Linux already
Fedora
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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.
Nobara (Fedora)
Tried Bazzite for a year. Was fun but now back to a normal distro.
Endeavour OS! So far it’s been smooth for the past 4 years. I’ve enjoyed it.
