Gaming on the GNU/Linux operating system.
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Something up to date with a newer kernel. Wine devs say that's best to get updates and benefits quicker given how things are changing quickly.
Given that, I'd say Open Suse, Arch or Fedora. I use Open Suse and am very happy with it. Meets my indie gaming needs.
Steam
Depends.
...from what games you want to play, which hardware are you using, and so on.
I built up a new pc last november, mostly for gaming. So nobara was a great choice and all my games are running fine on it. Including Baldurs Gate3, Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory and Everspace2.
If you are not into buying the top-notch games on day one, you may look into other distros too. Nobara is grear, but I had some issues with my display setup (2 monitors with different rosolution) that may not have happened with mint or another more stable distro
I'm using Linux Mint with an Nvdia card and it works great. But I don't have a completely new PC so I don't need the latest of the latest stuff. Taking your hardware into account is always a good idea.
My advice: don't switch too fast, maybe keep dual boot at first and give yourself time to learn. Try distros with a live USB stick on your system to see if it works. For the look and feel consult https://distrosea.com/ and play around. Linux can be fun and it's serving gamers very well now (for the most part - there are games that won't run mostly due to invasive rootkit 'anti-cheats').
omg that link is so cool thanks
Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and (to a lesser extent) Fedora are basically THE best "desktop" distros. They support a range of desktop evnironments but are mostly built around "just working". If you are coming from windows, you can't really do wrong with KDE Plasma or (Linux Mint) Cinnamon as both of those are "more Windows than Windows" as they heavily crib from the vista/7 era. But even whatever the current default Ubuntu desktop environment is called at this point is fine.
So it mostly boils down to what GPU you have.
Personally? I use Fedora with KDE Plasma for my desktop OS. While I am not huge on either, I vastly prefer flatpaks to snaps for app delivery. And I have a lot of concerns with how Canonical/Ubuntu is handling update cadences as a way to promote their enterprise OS.
But also? The beauty of Linux is that it is trivial to reformat. And the best thing you can do is just distro hop a bit for the first month or so. Install Mint. If you find something bothering you, look at what distro does that better and install that. New distro a piece of shit? Embrace Fedora. And so forth.
The reason so many of us get rather tribal about our distro or desktop environment is because we chose them. In the Windows space, you get cranky and hope Microsoft undo something you hate in the next five years (or you install sketchy third party plugins that never work). In the Linux space? You find out that a bunch of people also hate that clippy went away and built an entire distro around support for clippy like behavior. Or whatever.
If you put a bit of effort in you can even re-use your home directory and lose zero data. Although, personally, I have never had the patience for that. Games go on dedicated drives that migrate between installs. And personal documents get backed up to my NAS. So a reformat is just wiping the OS drive, installing the new distro, and then spending a minute or two to figure out what weird ass name an app I like is in the package manager.
distro hop a bit for the first month or so
I guess that depends on what your goal is. If you want to learn Linux, distro hopping won't help much and can even be counter-productive since you're just looking at different sets of configurations instead of making them yourself. Try a few, but at a certain point, you'll get better outcomes by digging in and figuring out how to get what you want. Most things can be done with any distro because Linux is Linux.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed (been about 4 years now), and that's only because I needed to reinstall anyway because I wanted BTRFS on / for snapshotting. Before that I used Arch (about 5 years), before that was Fedora (1-2 years; switched because release upgrades took forever), and before that was Ubuntu (2-ish years; switched because a release upgrade broke stuff). I tried multiple desktop environments and Window Managers on each, which was really easy to do by just installing and configuring.
If you don't want to learn Linux and just want to accomplish some task (say, playing games), get a distro focused on that task and be happy. But if you want to learn Linux, pick a popular one and get your hands dirty until there's something you want to do that your current distro just doesn't handle well.
I guess it depends on how you define "learn Linux". I "distro hop" repeatedly every day since we use a mix of ubuntu and rhel "at work" and I use a mix of debian and fedora "at home". Except for that one vendor's server that runs (REDACTED).
And the vast majority is the same regardless of distro. Sure I might never be able to remember the package manager flags for each distro and need to figure out where config files are stored but all of that is a quick google away. Because I "learn(ed) Linux" in terms of how to read an error message and search for the appropriate terms. Similarly, some number of months back I ran into an issue with a game but was knowledgeable enough to realize it was a Wayland compatibility issue and did a mess of generating config files in x11 so that I could play the game "normally" after that.
But I guess I take issue with your depiction of this. Mostly? You found shortcomings in distros and picked what you like. Good. But you are more describing "learn openSUSE" or "learn Fedora" as opposed to "learn Linux".
I “distro hop” repeatedly every day since we use a mix of ubuntu and rhel “at work” and I use a mix of debian and fedora “at home”.
My understanding of "distro hopping" is reinstalling the OS to try something different, not just using something different throughout the day. I also use a few different distros for different reasons (openSUSE Leap for my NAS, openSUSE Tumbleweed for my desktop/laptop, Debian for my VPS, Alpine for containers, etc). The package manager is the main important difference between them, and that's really easy to look up as needed.
But you are more describing “learn openSUSE” or “learn Fedora” as opposed to “learn Linux”.
To an extent. A lot of people recommend "distro hopping" to try a different desktop environment or something, and I've always just configured those within whatever distro I'm using at the time. I only switch when I either need to reinstall anyway, or something with how the maintainers handle packaging annoys me enough to try something else.
So yeah, I only recommend "distro hopping" when first trying Linux because hopping is fun, but once you see what's available, I think it's counter-productive unless you have a clear reason why your distro won't work with what you want.
My point is that I will "never" learn a particular distro. And I very much argue there is no point. If you focus on learning all the quirks of Linux Mint then you are screwed if the team behind Mint make choices you disagree with. And if that sounds impossible because Linux is open source and people will just fork it and blah blah blah: Canonical. Or even the shitshow that is Centos/Rocky and RHEL.
I've worked with people who insist they are an expert server admin. And, when push comes to shove, they lose their mind over the idea of not running Debian Server or RHEL. That means they are who we call if we have an issue with one of those specific distros but they are pretty much worthless in day to day because they don't really learn how to debug or "learn" and instead just memorized all the quirks that one team have turned into Features.
Agreed. The only people who should "learn" a particular distro are the distro maintainers and support people. Everyone else should just learn Linux generally, and ideally get some exposure to a few different distros if they'll be doing anything admin-y. But "regular users" are fine sticking to one, provided it solves their problems.
I would take that one step further and recommend an atomic release: like fedora silverblue or kinoite for someone new to Linux. The read only base filesystem makes the risk of breaking things basically zero.
It does make some tutorials invalid though, which can be a source of frustration.
I generally don't like atomic/immutable distros outside of an enterprise environment. Odds are you will never run into anything that will bother you... until you do.
Conceptually? I think they are The Future. But I still tend to encourage people to use a more "normal" distro to start with and then migrate if they find problems.
Been eyeing Bazzite up for a bit. How is it using it daily?
I'm been dragging my feet but I think I can dual boot and still mostly avoid Windows outside a few games. I know some Linux basics from playing around but I'm not sure if it's enough to make this not painful.
Are rpm-ostree backups robust enough for the guy who fucks around and tends to blow up the OS often?
I'm too busy gaming right now....but for the meantime:
I made a write up of Universal Blue when it's Kinoite-main image was still in beta for Fedora 38, before Bazzite was out:
Since then I've never had to rollback. I only rebased from Kinoite-main 38 to Bazzite 38 when it came out. And using the -lastest tag auto upgraded me to Bazzite 39 when it came out.
So easy peasy.
Think of Atomic Desktops like Chromebooks or modern Android 14/15 with 1/2 or A/B partitions.
Can't really mess it up because you can't mess with much of it.
If you end up needing to layer many rpm ostree packages.....you could always flatten em right into your image, no more layering.
If you wanna customize Atomic Fedora images to be your own consider:
But between Flatpaks and Distrobox exporting of apps and now Nix/Fleek there's so many ways to install things in containers.
Quickie on how that all works:
Bazzite.....But Why??
Wow, that's a thick write up, started picking though it. I'm still early into planning things out and still trying to settle on my setup. I haven't even figured out my storage mess yet.
Arch
It gets a bad rap. Archinstall is extremely straightforward and after that it’s just installing a DE and it looks and works like every other distro.
As a first time Linux user pretty much what should I use for gaming.
why would anyone recommend arch to a newbie is anyone's guess
Because the FUD surrounding Arch as robust as it is wrong.
Arch is fine, but you kind of need to know what's going on or you'll get overwhelmed and just nope out.
New users looking to accomplish a task (e.g. playing games, as in the OP) should use a mainstream distro with a graphical installer and whatnot. New users looking to learn Linux and want to use Arch can just use Arch. It's really not that hard, but it's also not the easiest to get started with.
I used Arch for 5 years and it was fine, but I got tired of a couple of annoyances and bailed (mostly Nvidia drivers getting out of sync w/ the kernel, manual intervention on upgrades, etc). I now use openSUSE Tumbleweed, which annoys me a lot less and has a very similar feel at the end of the day. I think Arch is fine, but I'm only going to recommend mainstream distros with a GUI-centric UX unless the person gives some indication that something else is preferred.
Probably the same reason you’d recommend c++ instead of Python to a new developer.
Yes, they’ll learn Python faster, but with c++ they’ll learn programming faster simply due to how much Python does on the programmers behalf.
There are valid arguments for both sides
but with c++ they’ll learn programming faster simply
I strongly disagree with this. I've learn to program with C (pure C), and I lost so much time with that language's cruft and idiosyncrasies. Python is a much better tool to teach programming concepts.
with c++ they’ll learn programming faster
I strongly disagree.
If you want someone to learn how programming works mechanically, recommend C. It's a very simple abstraction over the hardware, unlike C++ which comes with a ton of complexity that's completely unrelated to the task of learning how programming works. There's way too much magic with things like templates, operator overloading, etc that gets in the way. In fact, I recommend learning C on very simple hardware, like an Arduino, where you don't have any of the nonsense associated with operating systems, like system-specific nuances in file handling and whatnot.
That said, I'll always recommend Python first to new programmers. It has relatively little magic while abstracting away most of the annoyances and footguns that you'll get in lower-level languages like C. Once the user is comfortable using Python to get things done and is interested in learning more, I'd throw them in the deep end and recommend Rust, which forces you to contend with things programmers are expected to understand (but can easily get away with not understanding) in C/C++, such as ownership and lifetimes. Python is the "get stuff done" language, and Rust is "theoretical CS in practice." If they really like Rust, I'll steer them toward functional languages like Haskell which go even harder on the CS theory. Or if they want something a bit more "mainstream" than Rust (e.g. they want to make games), going for C++ makes a lot of sense, and they'd probably write better C++ because they've learned the strategies and terminology from Rust.
Too many experts who value the deeper teaching potential angle seem to never want to acknowledge the bounce rate it will also have.
No, not everyone asking about how to get into the Linux ecosystem is doing so specifically because the knowledge itself is its own reward. Those who are will tighten their belts, whiten their knuckles, and figure it out just like you hoped they would. Those who aren't will collapse under the sheer weight of all the bullshit and bail out. Frankly I'd consider the bulk of curious new users to be the latter and I default assume it for everyone who appears unless they indicate otherwise.
Some people think this kind of filtering based on willingness to learn is a good and healthy thing. I call it elitism and gatekeeping.
garuda is one I’ve been playing with recently, and have been very pleased with
It’s built on arch, so not the most beginner friendly base, but they add all my favorite tweaks into the base install. Including fish as the default shell which is more beginner friendly imo
And it’s built and optimized for gaming and comes with all the needed software and drivers pre installed, so even less tinkering required to get it working.
I've been running Garuda for maybe 4 months primarily for gaming on a desktop and it has been fantastic. Basically everything runs beautifully, even stuff only advertised as being for Windows.
I'd strongly recommend to stick to a mainstream distribution like Fedora, Debian, Mint,...
With bigger distributions you have more people working on them (-> more packages well maintained), you get a bigger community, and therefore it's easier to get help if anything breaks.
I'm not sure which distribution to recommend though, as they all have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gaming. Ten years ago I have switched to Gentoo (which is definitely not a distribution for new Linux users) when I got fed up with Ubuntu's Enshittification, and have stayed there ever since, so I lost a bit track which distributions are good for gaming now and which aren't.
This might be my misunderstanding but when you say mainstream distribution what do you mean. My understanding is mint is built on Ubuntu similar to how nobara is built on fedora. So for example if something broke or I wanted to something on mint I can follow Ubuntu instructions (kind of) and follow fedora for nobara? Sorry if this is dumb question
Mint is a huge community distribution and Nobara is one guy maintaining a gaming PC for himself and his father. He has done a lot of good for the community and is very smart, but I would never use his kernel, ever.
Yea so I tried nobara and to be honest unless I'm stupid it sucked... Constant graphical issues no matter the application(I could not play halo Infinite it started I old load game but then it would break). So I then put on mint after a day and downloaded Nvidia drivers through there GUI and then wine (not entirely sure what it does to be honest) and tried some games all worked great/well.
It's not a dumb question at all, and there is no "agreed upon" definition.
For me the most important characteristics of a "Mainstream Distribution" would be the size of their maintainer team - though that is also inaccurate if we are talking about distributions that are built on top of other distributions - as in your example.
Another indication is to check who is sponsoring a distribution's development. If there are plenty of commercial sponsors, then chances are that the distribution is well maintained. Similarly, if the distribution is created by a commercial company (Intel, Canonical, RedHat,...), as those companies also have an interest in keeping their product in a good state.
Age of the distribution might be another indicator. If a distribution has been around for a long time, chances are it isn't bad either.
However, I am lazy and would not actually check any of this by hand. Instead, the thing I would actually do is to just go to https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major and read through their list. 😉
Nobara. Easiest install for gaming.
Can confirm, after distro hoppong through Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora and Nobara, Nobara has been the most straight forward and least problems. And KDE has and will have better support for stuff like VRR and HDR coming soon and even a joystick calibration builtin
Bazzite! Especially if you don't want to tinker with the system too much.
Edit: regarding security/stability; Bazzite is an unofficial member of the Fedora Immutable (erstwhile Silverblue) family. It stays in lockstep with their release cycle and the RPM OStree, so the actual "system" part is pretty much the same.
I tried mint and had some issues with nvidia drivers, which seemed out of the ordinary since other people were fine with it. I tried PopOS next and it was fine (Bottles had some issues but games through Steam or Heroic worked out of the box basically).