Isn’t it because SteamOS is based on Arch?
Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora’s getting in on gaming.
Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness
Once you’re a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it’s wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don’t even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.
Holy shit there’s so many sub-distros in this thread:
Arch
- EndeavorOS
- Cachy
- Void
- Nix
- Manjaro
Which one do we install for gaming, or do we wait for SteamOS on Desktop?
Void and Nix aren’t Arch-based.
Which one do we install for gaming
If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s not Arch based, which is a good thing because it’s going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.
Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.
If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you’ll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.
Previously was a Manjaro gamer, and had a perfectly seamless experience.
Migrated to Fedora, got some weird new issues, but running games through Steam solves everything.
Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.
To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.
It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)
Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.
I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)
I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.
