Keep noticing that when taking about Linux distro recommendations (on Reddit) users recommend Mint and Ubuntu for gaming.
Now don’t get me wrong, they’re great distros and with a bit of work are great for games, but I feel like theres better recommendations for new users looking into getting into gaming on linux.
What are the better recommendations in your opinion?
I keep seeing Pop!_OS brought up for gaming.
I’ve been using Pop for a few months as my daily driver to replace Windows. It had been a few years since I’d used Linux and I wanted something stable for Nvidia drivers. I’ve had next to no issues with it.
Mint lets you install Nvidia drivers pretty easily nowadays. My surfacebook 2 has a 1050 mobile built in and it couldn’t have been easier to get the drivers installed.
Ubuntu I don’t recommend, nor Pop_OS simply due to Snaps. Where as flatpak is the standard built into Mint.
Snap is installed, but the default app store, Pop!_Shop, only has .deb and flatpak that I’ve seen.
https://pop-os.github.io/docs/manage-apps/using-pop-shop.html
I tried Pop!_OS 3 times, and all 3 times, my computer crashed irrecoverably at some point.
I ended up replacing it.
I like Bazzite
I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Up to date packages but with relatively good stability due to how they’re tested. Rolling release distros are always more risky, but for gaming you probably do want up to date packages to ensure graphics drivers and bleeding edge versions of Proton, Vulkan and even Wine work as expected. I think that’s most true for newer games and those where you may need to use Proton Experimental. Its also a good broad distro for other uses, rather than solely focused on one element like gaming.
Steam Deck is based on Arch; it’s not quite rolling release but they do relatively frequent updates to their version of Linux so a rolling release distro is probably going to be closer to it than most annual release and certainly LTS released linuxes.
Nobara is also a good distro to consider. It’s made by the guy who game up with Proton-GE and is gaming focused. It’s also rolling released and optimised more for gaming including the kernel. I use it on a living room PC for the past 5-6 months and like it so far.
Pop or Fedora unless there’s a reason not to.
Pop is basically Ubuntu minus snap, plus flatpak, plus their PPA, no?
Heavily customized desktop, one day to be fully custom.
Yes. With a custom gnome shell fork.
Their summer release will have the new desktop environment they have been working on (Cosmic) which will be a big point of differentiation