For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular. I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it. I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn’t used it in yonks. Good luck!
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Typhoonigator@lemmy.world 13 hours agoDo you have a recommended flavor of Linux for gaming?
justlemmyin@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
chaogomu@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Almost any is fine, but if you want a distro optimized for gaming, Garuda has been treating me quite well.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.
Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
derpgon@programming.dev 13 hours ago
Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn’t come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.
aeiou_ckr@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
SteamOS isn’t out for download if I remember correctly but you are correct about Bazzite and Novato being similar and great gaming specific distros.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Bazzite is modeled off of Steam OS
derpgon@programming.dev 11 hours ago
Good news, it actually is and had been for a few months! help.steampowered.com/en/…/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#re…
Wolf@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC’s like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.
While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC’s, Valve doesn’t recommend doing so.
They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC’s in the future, but it’s not there yet.
If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it’s designed for.
You are correct that it is possible to do, but it’s not recommended.
Typhoonigator@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don’t show as playable. I’m not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any advice?
Wolf@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
A lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn’t been test yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require ‘kernel level anticheat’.
Typhoonigator@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Thank you so much, I was worried I’d have to scale back my gaming significantly
derpgon@programming.dev 11 hours ago
Depends, the best source for running games is www.protondb.com
For games that are not on Steam, you can try Lutris.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
moody@lemmings.world 12 hours ago
Steam doesn’t have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you’ll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
That’s what lets it use Proton for everything by default.
Wolf@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
That used to be the case, it is enabled by default now.