Operating Systems

Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.

Without actually installing anything.

This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.

I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.

All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!

Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.

Edit: typos!

I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you'll get 12 different answers

I was using Gentoo for a while, but I kept having issues with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I set up a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough.

I actually just switched to NixOS, haven’t had a chance to get my games set up just yet but I am excited for the number of people I have seen have success with it. Setting up gaming is next on my list.

Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!

When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.

Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.

I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.

I'm running Kubuntu which is just Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma instead of Gnome

For me Fedora is my go-to, but I'm looking at moving to Nobara

Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.

I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.

NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.

Arch on my laptop but Pop on my gaming rig. At the time I installed it, I wanted the extra relative ease of Pop's handling on video drivers. I have since switched to AMD, so no driver woes at all since they're in the kernel, but I have stuck with Pop for that system. If it ain't broke... who am I kidding, I'll probably switch to Arch soon.

As my main I'm currently running EndeavorOS. I'd say it's pretty good. It does all of the legwork of installing Arch, but comes with minimal bloat and really lets you make it your own.

I am currently using Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and comes with GNOME but because I don't really like GNOME's interfaces, so I swapped it with Sway and i3bar.

I never played modern games on this thing, so I don't really know how well it does, but I heard it's pretty good for gaming.