A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
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I am not too clued up to say this or that, but Mental Outlaw on YouTube has been doing very good breakdown on loads of Linux stuff to noobs.
So I will link to this, https://youtu.be/3MwJbRq3-rM
I saw no one mention ZorinOS.
I personally love Mint, tried different distros but I keep crawling back to green Ubuntu
I don’t have a recommendation other than don’t recommend something to your friend for which you’re not willing to provide tech support.
I have a specific use case for CachyOS but I see two categories:
- Bazzite, not intending to use the terminal much. Also less frequent updates which ought to be very stable. Atomic.
- CachyOS, using the terminal and frequent updates. Rolling, and good support base.
Both use flatpaks which will keep apps sandboxed. A lot of users don’t seem to like snaps being pushed by Ubuntu so flatpak is the big choice.
Cachy at least doesn’t do flatpaks out of the box.
Ah my mistake, I must’ve installed it shortly after installing CachyOS.
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Get a usb with decent capacity
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Install Ventoy
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Drag and drop whatever linux iso you feel like trying (put in as many as you can)
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Boot them one by one to try the out live
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CachyOS
Trust me it’s super easy and nice.
^This is the answer.
Mint still does not work well with Wayland from what I can tell, and if you need features like HDR, you’re gonna have to stick to something that runs Wayland well.
While Bazzite seems fine, it is an atomic distro. If you were to try installing certain software natively, like another Firewall for instance, it might not work. And if you continue to layer such software, the update times can take longer.
Cachy(with KDE) seems very stable to me. You’ll pretty much find every software through the repo. If not, you’ll have to manually install flatpak yourself. Never had to do it myself though. But it shouldn’t be a hassle, I think.
It has its own proton variant and they recommend that you disable Steam preshader caching and increase maximum shader cache size when you’re using Proton-Cachy or GE.
My choice also. Specifically with KDE Plasma
Fedora or Ubuntu. No need to overthink it. They are the two biggest distros in popularity by far (except Arch, which probably beats Fedora), so you have access to maximum mindshare and previous troubleshooting.
Including Arch, these three distros are among the most polished, stable, and well-documented. Arch takes quite a bit more effort, so a beginner without much time on their hands should start with Ubuntu or Fedora.
Avoid Ubuntu like a plague it’s one of the least googleable distros there are. It suffers massively from poor documentation and out of date fourm posts. Not to mention gnome at this point has endless weird problems for new users.
Iv helped over 200 people over the last year change to Linux. Gnome has been the cause of almost every major problem with them.
Stick to kde, stick to fedora or arch, stay away from lts releases or anything with an older kernel.
There’s a really good reason steam went with arch.
And Debian? I don’t understand how you can list Arch as one of the most stable distributions when, based on its update model, it doesn’t seek stability but rather constant updating. If you’re referring to operational stability, in my opinion it’s not on the same level as Debian, Leap, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Stability is not synonymous with number of users.
Stability in the sense of: my computer does the thing i expect with the hardware i happen to have, every time, over many years.
I agree Debian is up there. I only mentioned Arch because of the massive userbase. I think Debian is a little more technical (for a new user with limited time and attention) than Ubuntu or Fedora, but much less so than Arch
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch are undoubtedly the big 4 Linux distros in terms of long term community, stability, and documentation
Try them all 🤔
Side question: his job is asking him to run work programs on his personal machine? If they are not willing to provide a work laptop or if it is something that does not require powerful hardware to run, I feel like in that situation I would buy a burner laptop off ebay to run the work thing on.
That’s just my personal preference, but I do not mix work and personal things on the same computer.
There’s also the security concern. A workplace should not have an employee run work software on a machine that isn’t bound by group policy.
So I can address this from my experience, their mileage may vary: sometimes it’s about saving yourself time. Say if your normal daily driver is a desktop for some reason, but you’re on call to do a task. You can (in theory) do that task from your home PC or you can drive in to the office for (arbitrary round trip time) to do it ‘properly’. Even when I used windows at home /and/ had a work laptop I still maintained a VM (an ersatz air gap) for work shit on my personal PC for convince sake.
Just install Mint. Honestly, “gamer” Linux is a pretty silly concept. You can install Steam and Lutris on any distro which gets you access to basically all modern PC gaming. Even something as slow to embrace change as Debian has recent enough drivers and kernels available.
I have a mini PC for gaming and originally installed Mint, but switched to Bazzite to see if it would fix an issue with my XBox controllers cutting out. It didn’t, and I also didn’t notice any better performance in games. After coming to the conclusion I’d have to rebase to uninstall Steam (I only use Lutris), I decided immutable is cool, but I’ll stick with Mint.
Fact. I game on Debian (mostly through Steam flatpak) and it works great. I tried the so-called “gaming” distros and eeked out 0-5% fps gains while also experiencing paper cuts or bugs in other areas of my daily driving that weren’t present on Debian. I’m not into e-sports so so long as I’m not hitting a 30 fps floor I’m fine. The time I save not having to navigate paper cuts I get to put toward fun things, like actually playing games.
(Edit: typos)
I would recommend installing Heroic Launcher too. It works good for GoG, Epic & Amazon games.
After I left Bazzite I switched to Garuda, it is also gaming and performance focused, works with Nvidia, and has been super easy as a beginner.
It may be worth a look.
We aren’t building with nvidia. Absolutely not.
Anyone in these comments claiming there is a big difference between “gaming distros” and any other is flat wrong.
Any distro works. It’s about the initial experience they want without having to fuss about changes. You can switch Desktop Environment on any distro easily, none of them offer massive gaming performance differences over the others. It’s subjective. For a beginner, don’t recommend immutable. That’s pretty much it.
I’ve been running CachyOS and they have some gaming packages, but I forgot to install them and haven’t run into any issues just installing Steam.
Any distro works.
Any non-LTS distro works*
Using a distro release based on a 2 year old kernel with brand new hardware is asking for a horrible experience. For gaming especially, you’re also losing out on months/years of improvements to Mesa.
Mint (LMDE). It might actually be easier to use than windows. My dead dad could use it and he was a moron. I held out for quite a while to try out ‘cooler’ distros but yeah, Mint is what I’m telling anyone moving from windows to use now.
My dead dad could use it and he was a moron.
I really was not prepared for that sentence 😅
Bazzite is great out of the box. My favourite part is that the menu automatically suggests flatpak apps you might want to install without getting in the way of your existing apps.
No matter the distro (since there’s plenty of good ones out there), help your friend set up Winboat and you’ll be all good.
Ask him which software it is that requires him to run windows. If it can not be used with wine their is also winboat. Which is technically a windows VM where programs seemingly integrate on the Linux DE
I didn’t k ow win oat was VM based. I thought is was like a prettier wine.
LMDE 7 and send it. Regular mint has Ubuntu nonsense baked in, lmde is basically the same end user experience and smooth Debian jazz underneath.
Like someone else said, steam, heroic.
I’d avoid any of the gamer distros.
LMDE is missing various useful programs, such as the GNOME disk utility. Just stick with stock Mint if you’re going Mint.
I could spin up a VM and check, I’m 99% sure you’re wrong. Also lmde includes almost the same preinstalled programs.
or…
apt install -y gparted
Well it was missing something I needed when I tried it a while back.
I mean, fair. It also doesn’t have mint’s driver manger, which is a bummer.
Which Ubuntu stuff does Mint Cinnamon have? I thought the point of Mint was that they removed a bunch of that stuff like Snaps.
Mainline mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Lmde is largely the same OS with a pure Debian heart without Ubuntu clogging the arteries
Yes, I know Mint is downstream of Ubuntu, that’s how I know it doesn’t include Snaps. What exactly other “nonsense” is there or was your statement just a general LMDE puritan hand-wave?
I’m an ubuntu hater / snap hater. I prefer my mint without junk in the trunk. I’ll confuse people though, I think systemd rocks. And let’s make more people mad, vim is a pointless flex and nano is better.
Fair enough, I totally agree about Ubuntu, although Mint doesn’t have most of the bad Ubuntu stuff. What it does benefit from is Ubuntu’s superior hardware support, PPAs (most important for up-to-date Mesa) and GUI stuff like Driver Manager/Update Manager. For a beginner or casual user there’s no contest.
Nobara is alright if you just want games to work without tinkering etc
It’s also developed by glorious egg roll, the GE in GE-proton. I wanted to love it but Wayland + multi monitor + KDE + Nividia = pain
Everything except nvidia is how I use it and it works very well. I have had a few issues with kde once but never again since then
