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.
Arch Linux. I wanted to try Hyprland with something and I felt like it was the easiest with Arch.
Just rolling with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Cachy OS on personal PC and Bazzite on steam console (htpc) and a onexplayer handheld. Then just good old steamos on the steam deck.
Mint for two years. Then Arch for a decade. This year I have been trying out CachyOS.
Another vote for Bazzite. It’s been such a smooth experience for a year or so.
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 and extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)
Bazzite. Literally built for gaming.
Fedora KDE works great for me, but I’m quite comfortable with Linux already
NixOS. Works great. I’m a bit of a masochist.
I’ve been using Nobara for about 2 years and it’s been very good.
Debian. It wont win any awards for fastest release cycles but it’s rock stable with great support for my Ryzen 2700 and 6700xt.
Windows 11 :/
Though heavily neutered, where even defender is disabled.
I boot CachyOS Linux with a lot of tuning (and some recent game testing). A linux gaming OS! I’m using Cachy like 95% of the time; I am not anti linux.
But honestly… It’s just not worth a few lost features and performance hit over Windows for me, on top of the extra hassle. Its easier to just reboot. Maybe the experience is different on AMD GPUs, but I suspect Nvidia is at a disadvantage here.
This is on a desktop. Based on my experience with a RTX 2060 laptop I used to have, you also have the to deal with graphics switching, rendering on one device while displayong on another, and making sure your 1050 actually goes to sleep when not in use.
Nobara (Fedora)
Tried Bazzite for a year. Was fun but now back to a normal distro.
Fedora on my desktop, bazzite (rebadged fedora) on my steam deck.
I’m always a lil surprised how few fedoras I see on these posts. Fedora is chill. Considering the difference between distros is basically a package manager, seems weird the second most bleeding edge distro doesn’t get much love.
The package manager is a big deal; it’s amazing how little is packaged for Fedora compared to the Ubuntu family.
Void with X11 (fvwm3). The fussier games tend to be online live-service titles; every new release Genshin Impact does a new weird.
