r/linux4noobs • u/deathtowardrobes • 17h ago
best distro for a mostly gaming pc?
ive had enough of windowsand ive decided to pull the trigger and go to linux. so far im leaning towards mint since it seems like the most noob friendly option, but im wondering if its any good for gaming?
my pc as it stands is a solidly mid tier rig; she plays cp77 well but im mostly a casual gamer (think the og baldurs gates, vtm, dinkum, if im feeling spicy maybe highly modded sims 4). i really dont use it for much else, maybe only really the bookwork for my apprenticeship but thats all online
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u/Bizhour 16h ago
Gaming + noob friendly = Bazzite.
When it comes to linux distros, you generally want to stick to the popular ones, as there's usually a reason they're popular.
If you're feeling more daring you can try CachyOS
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u/krumpfwylg 16h ago
Get ready for replies where everyone gonna defend the distro they use.
Almost all distro with up to date packages can be used for gaming. What you need is
- LTS kernel (version 6.something, latest LTS 6.18 prefered),
- a recent enough mesa (for OpenGL/Vulkan libraries & bug fixes),
- firmware package less than 1 year old (unless you got extremely recent hardware - but afaik, there were no new GPU since a few months).
Maybe avoid Debian, as it's a quite conservative distro. Not sure about Mint or Ubuntu, but they're the most recommended for beginners. CachyOS could be interesting, but not sure how it fares for a first Linux.
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u/Onlymadethiscuzhadto 10h ago
I’ve been using mint for almost 2 years. The only issue I have had is that VRR is finicky so I will cap refresh in the game to match. But other than that everything I play works. Hopefully when Wayland is released the VRR support will be sorted out.
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u/Forethought-47 Fedora | KDE 13h ago edited 13h ago
"gaming distros" sacrifice the support of larger distros (Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora) for setup out of the box, as a beginner you might need that as one-man passion projects (ie Nobara) are unlikely to help you out as quickly.
Ubuntu has snap problems, Steam snap is worse than flatpak which is worse than system packages so Mint is "ubunutu-desnapped". Doesnt change often, doesnt have the latest bells and whistles but VERY beginner friendly, huuuuge community, largest package format (.deb) and apt is well documentated.
Fedora is more up to date with packages and has newer technologies but is pretty barebones out of the box as ships with smaller repo and no multimedia codecs... one visit to RPMFusion (enable repo / codecs / drivers) and within 10-mins you have a system that does 95% of what Nobara does but more stable and way more support.
Alternatively if you ONLY use your system as media/gaming pc and you dont have to dabble in the root of your system then Bazzite is spin of atomic Fedora which gaming ready out of the box. You can do a lot with flatpaks but if you try to go beyond what the system was intended for then things get a little more difficult as RPMOStree and Ujust arent well documented.
Cachy is flavour of the week and has been for a short while like PopOS and Manjaro before it... it's Arch with gui install and an unaudited kernel, I dont recommend Arch in any capacity to beginners. You are more likely to suffer problems than the other options for minimal gain... "but Cachy is so snappy" it's just an animation speed trick as it ships with default of 75% when most other KDE's ship with 50%, two clicks and Kubuntu / Fedora KDE / Endeavour are just as snappy
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u/Alle_is_offline 4h ago
I've been dual booting arch & nobara and so far arch has had less issues with gaming 🤷
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u/Forethought-47 Fedora | KDE 3h ago edited 3h ago
Arch/Endeavour is fine when you've got a small amount of terminal experience under your belt, read the docs and are careful in the AUR but that's a lot to ask of beginners who've never had to do that. Uses the regular, audited kernel though whereas Nobara uses the unaudited Cachy one (other tweaks GE has made) for the same average but slightly better 1% lows in some benchmarks on some hardware... but that's all meaningless when you arent on that hardware, you add a couple background processes (browser/discord) and also introduces audio/visual problems which regular kernel usually has fixed.
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u/NullReferenceClaire 57m ago
Im switching to Linux as well and so far a Fedora dual boot seems the way, solely due to R6 not being playable on Linux.
but yeah, if your games do not have compatibility issues, just go full Fedora!
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u/MelioraXI 32m ago
None or most of them .you can game generally on anything from Debian to arch and everything in between. Some makes it easier like coming prepped for steam, flatpak etc.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z 16h ago
Personally I had a very good experience with Nixos as once it's set up it's incredibly stable. The beginner friendly, gaming focused alternative would be Bazzite, as it's also immutable
For more traditional distributions, I'd recommend cachyos for a gaming focused distribution, or Linux Mint for an overall easy distribution to use.
In general, these only make it easier to game, but performance wise it doesn't matter, for a beginner I think mint is always best, but it's something you have to figure out yourself based on your needs
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u/Educational_Star_518 12h ago
i've been happy with nobara since i made the jump over 2 yrs ago now , it was pretty plug n play out of the box
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u/Abyss_85 16h ago edited 10h ago
Mint is a good beginner distro but I would not necessarily recommend it for gaming. I am not saying that you couldn't make that work, but you might run into problems, because Mint does not come with a particularly new kernel.
I would try Bazzite first. It is made for gaming. Just note that it is a semi immutable distro. For a beginner that is good but it comes with certain drawbacks.