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?
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.
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 The issue that you’re coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated.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.
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.
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
Games that just come out could be an issue regardless of distro. Sometimes Wine/Proton needs to fix a few things… no distro is going to help, in that regard. I suppose a more regularly updated distro COULD help with getting updates faster… but it’s usually nothing you cannot already solve with Pop. ProtonUp-QT is a great tool to help get you the latest Proton versions, including the Eggroll fork. It’s available as a Flatpak, so it’ll work on most modern distros (including Pop).
If you must switch to a more regularly updated distro, you have a couple of options. Nobara (based on Fedora) will give you a nice middle ground between your current setup and Arch. Speaking of which, Arch is a great distribution, with fantastic documentation. That being said, it IS NOT new user friendly. It WILL break, and you WILL need to look stuff up. You’re on the literal bleeding edge, of Linux. The Arch forums can also be quite toxic, in comparison to what’s available on both Pop/Ubuntu and Nobara/Fedora. If neither is appealing to you, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s very up to date, but I often find it more stable than Arch.
I recommend Garuda. It’s an arch based distro with a focus on gaming. Arch is great for gaming and developing as it’s bleeding edge. Base arch is very minimal and needs a lot of packages to be installed and configured before you can game. Garuda has all of that installed and configured when you install the distro.
The only complain I hear people have about Garuda is that they find it too bloated. But I find it easier to uninstall whatever you consider to be bloat, rather than install and configure all the gaming stuff you need. As a bonus, Garuda automatically sets up btrfs snapshots when you install it. So if you break something while uninstalling what you don’t want, you can just go to a previous snapshot.
I can’t reccomend arch or arch based enough, it is not that hard, you will become somewhat adept in the terminal in the process. Arch wiki is very extensive and the community is huge, package management is a breeze.
