A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
Just install Mint. Honestly, “gamer” Linux is a pretty silly concept. You can install Steam and Lutris on any distro which gets you access to basically all modern PC gaming. Even something as slow to embrace change as Debian has recent enough drivers and kernels available.
I have a mini PC for gaming and originally installed Mint, but switched to Bazzite to see if it would fix an issue with my XBox controllers cutting out. It didn’t, and I also didn’t notice any better performance in games. After coming to the conclusion I’d have to rebase to uninstall Steam (I only use Lutris), I decided immutable is cool, but I’ll stick with Mint.
Fact. I game on Debian (mostly through Steam flatpak) and it works great. I tried the so-called “gaming” distros and eeked out 0-5% fps gains while also experiencing paper cuts or bugs in other areas of my daily driving that weren’t present on Debian. I’m not into e-sports so so long as I’m not hitting a 30 fps floor I’m fine. The time I save not having to navigate paper cuts I get to put toward fun things, like actually playing games.
(Edit: typos)
I would recommend installing Heroic Launcher too. It works good for GoG, Epic & Amazon games.