Basically the title. Loving PopOS as my daily, but I understand that PopOS uses their own process and makes sure that only a checked driver gets wide release. Great for stability, less great for playing games that just came out. Is there a distro that this community generally recommends for gaming?
Gentoo. It will be the last distro you hop to. Because it’s whatever you want it to be. Don’t be afraid. It even has a special command and portage repo to install all the support files and ancient libraries from 2002 your old games need in one shot.
You can snag a binary kernel, browser and some compilers now too if you don’t want to deal with that. It’s not much more difficult than Arch nowadays.
Nobara is pretty good for a “just works” gaming-centric distro. The issue that you’re coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated. Most of System76’s dev team are likely working on COSMIC.
If you want the absolute most, contiuously up-to-date packages, then I can’t recommend anything other than Arch. I’ve used it as my daily driver for a little over 2 years now and I’ve always come crawling back if I try something else. Gaming on it isn’t a hassle, most of the time it just works, not to be a stereotypical Arch user but do read the Wiki. Arch was also my first ever distro, a friend got me into it.
If Arch is a bit dawnting for you then something Arch-based is just as good, from experience I recommend EndeavourOS. Do not use Manjaro.
I second the “Do not use manjaro”. It has incredibly many issues that arch doesn’t have and the only advantage is that it comes with an installer.
Arch with nvidia is a bit of a pain though. The nvidia driver updates break my system or some games every 1-2 months.
Also the new Arch install script is very easy and reduces the need for Manjaro, even for new users.
I disagree, it just does the steps in the manual for you. You still need to know what’s happening.
I tried using it, got a bunch of python stack traces and eventually decided to do it manually. The reason why it failed was that windows put my EFI partition onto a different drive than itself.
An installer needs to catch stuff like that, so archinstall is beta at best.
I did my personal yearly “year of the linux distro” litmus test with Nobara and I had many problems tbh, two of the most notable ones were fullscreen video stuttering and shader cache stutters.
So I was like, we are getting close, but I am not sold.
Then I decided to try arch and shit just works tbh, basically no issues with stuff I play usually, the biggest struggle was getting Battle.net up and all it took was changing proton version on steam to get it installing.
“severly outdated”? You mean updated kernel, mesa, NVIDIA and other important packages?
https://github.com/pop-os/linux/pull/282 https://github.com/pop-os/nvidia-graphics-drivers/pull/191 https://github.com/pop-os/mesa/pull/18
On my gaming rig I run and love Garuda, which is also based on Arch. I’m technical enough to handle Arch but I don’t like having to search around a bunch to figure out which combination of packages I need to make certain things work. Garuda comes with a ton of stuff preinstalled, which makes it a lot less lean than Endeavour, but I think they generally make good choices for default settings (I love their Fish terminal setup), and things like Nvidia drivers and configuration backups through btrfs snapshots just work out of the box.
For gaming I think Garuda or Nobara are the best bets, personally.
ive been using Rhino Linux and have been very happy with it!
Nobara Linux. It’s a fedora derivative that’s focused for gaming, with regular updates. It even comes with all the important things like Steam and Feral Gamemode installed. Make sure to download the Nvidia version if you have an Nvidia GPU.
