Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There’s the occasional weird config mess to get into but it’s Linux.

I’ve been on Manjaro for 3 years, honestly love it, it’s treated me great for gaming and given me so little to have to fix that my wife has also been running it for 2 years.

I’ve been running Linux Mint for a few years now and it’s been really good for me. Runs games through Steam and Lutris about as good as I’ve had it.

I’ve also run other distros like Pop! and Fedora here and there but they seem to give me more issues.

I would take a look at pop_os. It’s Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.

I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)

I use Pop!_OS and have been happy with it for the last couple years or so.

I weirdly did not see anyone mentioning SteamOS? Formerly based on Ubuntu, now based on Arch, I believe.

It’s the distribution that the #SteamDeck is packaged with, and so it’s become my main gaming distrib now. :]

I have been quite happy with Arch Linux, up until I got my Steam Deck, at which point I stopped playing on my non-Deck PCs, so… SteamOS, I suppose.

A little background for context. I’m gamer and professional software developer. I’ve been dual booting windows 11 and pop os for awhile. Windows for games and pop os for everything else… Over the weekend I switched to NixOS. This came with a learning curve which I spent a day or so learning. I’ve been getting the hang of it now and I love it so much. I definitely recommend it. I managed to get steam working without much fiddling and my emulators. It’s been great! The benefits for programming are obvious. Allowing me to basically stop using docker dev containers.

I completely removed windows from my computer and I’m very happy.

A very simple, almost stock setup of Arch + KDE.

EOS / Arch.

I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn’t even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it’s not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I’ve used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.

I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don’t know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn’t game.

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Does StreamOS count?

Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a secondary SSD to put Linux on instead of doing a traditional dual boot. Normal dual boots with windows suck ass and lead to problems.

As for a distro, I keep going back to endeavourOS. It’s just so minimal out of the box, and I still can’t find anything to match the convinience of the AUR + Pacman for package management.

I’ve been evaluating NixOS to make sure I can run games on it. I’ve only tried a machine with Intel graphics so far, but I see that AMD and Nvidia drivers are packaged. It seems convenient now that I’ve figured out the setup.

Vulkan is set up out of the box.

It’s necessary to enable 32-bit DRI support by adding this line to /etc/nix/configuration.nix:

hardware.opengl.driSupport32Bit = true;

To use Lutris install the package and use its UI to install runners. I didn’t have to configure any extra libraries to get Battle.net running. You can configure the “system wine” that Lutris sees, and extra libraries your games might need like this:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  (lutris.override {
    extraLibraries =  pkgs: [
      # List library dependencies here
    ];
    extraPkgs = pkgs: [
      wine-staging
    ];
  })
];

Those lines go in a Home Manager config file, like ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix. That installs Lutris, and any listed dependencies at the same time.

NixOS does not put dependencies in the file paths where programs usually look for them. That traditional directory structure is called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or FHS. But Nix packages can create a virtual FHS where needed, and that is what the Lutris package does. That lets software that isn’t built for Nix work, like Lutris’ Wine runners. That means that for games to access libraries those libraries must be listed in that extraLibraries option so that they are included in the FHS.

32-bit libraries are in pkgs.pkgsi686Linux.* if you need them.

I haven’t tried Steam yet, but I think it has an option similar to the extraLibraries one for Lutris.

A nice feature of NixOS is that if you add a bunch of libraries to your config trying to get a game to work, those libraries are automatically unlinked when you remove them from your config so your system stays nice and tidy.