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?
I mean…Steam OS on Steam Deck…and probably on PC when they release that. If you mean on PC now, Kubuntu. Because I like KDE and Ubuntu is well-supported.
Using Linux Mint Cinnamon for most things currently, gaming included. I’ve been dabbling with the gnome DE so I can use Wayland, and it’s been nice. However, I’m not as big of the DE and don’t have time to tweak things to my preferences so I use it sparingly.
I very recently (like last week!) stuck a new drive in my PC to run Pop!_OS, with the aim of switching over from Windows entirely if it pans out. So far I’ve only tested Steam for games, but it’s worked flawlessly for the games I’ve tried using Proton.
I’ve had a Steam Deck for some time which convinced me to make the jump. My desktop was my only Windows machine and I’d love to properly switch it to Linux.
Mint for my desktop, SteamOS on Deck. Both do what I need, and the only issues I’ve run into since switching have been random things like GOG not having an updated Planescape Torment build that works out of the box. I don’t play many online competitive games with like invasive anti-cheat stuff, so I haven’t run into a ton of compatibility issues.
I’m using Pop OS and it worls flawlessly!
Me too!
Arch linux, minimal install. Feels really nice to have control over my whole distro and to not be clogged by third-party annoyances.
I’ve been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT
Debian Bookworm
I run AMD kit (not the latest) and install the KDE desktop, Steam and Crossover.
I choose Debian because its packaged extremely well and I want an OS/Applications to be things that just work.
The only bugs I suffer are Proton issues playing Windows games and the recent steam ui update doesn’t seem to work with steam link from a wayland desktop (has to be x11).
I’m using Debian 12 with KNOME (basically Plasma that has a gnome-like feel to it.)
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, YaST is the deity I pray to
Been using arch, don’t have issues. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with dwm, but if I switch to xfce then games run without issue. My current computer has an nvidia gpu, next one will be entirely amd based.
Do you have issues? I run a 12th gen I7 and a 2070 Super and everything just works
Not really. If I do it’s usually because of my weak components. Dwm causes issues sometimes but it’s just cause whatever I’m playing doesn’t know what to do with a tiling window.
i’m just using manjaro right now, works pretty well
update: i have now had an issue with manjaro (audio issue, low quality, fixed pretty easy, but still)
