I have heard good things about nobara. I don’t mind doing a little thinkering to have things work but I also don’t want to spend hours doing recharch on how to fix things.
Edit: thanks for giving input everyone. I will try Linux mint and if it does not go well will give nobara a go instead.
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
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. 😉
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.
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
If you mainly play Steam games, Mint will do the job just fine. Just install Steam and you’re good to go. No tinkering required.
You need to change steam configuration to unable to enable compatibility for all games, or only Linux/proton approved will work. I agree mostly works out of the box, but eventually is good to check protondb website if for tinkering.
In general, pick big well supported distros.
Smaller more specific distros like Nebara may sound good, but if there are issues, you will have to wait a long time for a small team to fix them, or work it out yourself.
All standard distros can be used for gaming, you may need to find a way to pull in the latest kernel/drivers/packages if you want thr most optimises experience though.
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).
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.
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 distroYou can use my post as reference: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
You can use any distro you want for gaming. Maybe try to choose a more popular one, niche distros like Nobara often aren’t as secure as major ones.
