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.
Debian Stable
Guix
Fedora atm, I heard it’s pretty good I haven’t really tried anything else.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Meets all my requirements 😀
I just run Arch, I’ve been an Arch guy for years and never saw any reason to switch
Slackware current.
This isn’t a troll. I use it to game on my dual core pentium lovingly dubbed ‘the craptop’. And I use it to game on my mid-tier gaming PC.
Eh, I don’t find dnf very limiting nor do I frequently get stymied by a missing package.
Currently Pop!_OS
I don’t think the hard part of linux is getting proprietary GPU drivers. They all have package managers that will grab them for you, after quick google search anyway. Mint will have the most specific google support for more esoteric problems/goals. Pika OS includes gpu driver bundles and is similarly debian based. But it wasn’t good at waking from sleep on my old hardware with 1650super. Too hard to fix.
Endeavour OS! So far it’s been smooth for the past 4 years. I’ve enjoyed it.
I started with Bazzite but wanted a system that wasn’t immutable, so I switched to Garuda. Both have been easy and reliable.
Fedora and steamOS
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 as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)
Bazzite and Mint
Bazzite runs great on my main gaming PC in desktop mode and on my HTPC in gaming mode. Maintenance is minimal and it just works (on AMD hardware), while packages are pretty recent and it’s absolutely stable.
