Like, why Valve? I was so close to clearing out all the games I was partway through, now I need to add some demos to my backlog (not many, this Next Fest is kinda weak).

Probably could’ve made it but I haven’t picked a distro. I’m planning on turning my desktop into a dedicated gaming computer and not daily driver, because of the malware risk. I wanted something not finicky, something devs would test on as a known quantity, and preferably something Arch-based like SteamOS.

  • Garuda (Arch-based)
  • Bazzite (Known quantity, immutable, Fedora-based, I don’t trust it for some reason)
  • Nobara (Proton-adjacent distro, Fedora-based)
  • CachyOS (Super fast, Arch-based, presumably finicky?)
  • Windows 7 (Based, unsupported by steam, insecure)

BTW I have an AMD CPU and GPU. Figured I should’ve mentioned that.

  • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    I’ve been using Bazzite for months.

    If it’s a gaming PC, you want the OS to be stable and reliable. Bazzite is that.

    Not saying your other choices aren’t, just that there’s no reason to be afraid of Bazzite.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 day ago

      I vaguely remember being distrustful of something about it. Either Universal Blue has something in their ethos that I disagreed with or I just generally don’t trust Fedora because of their dependence on Red Hat.

      I can’t really remember.

      But I’m probably gonna end up on Bazzite.

      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        It’s an excellent first choice if you are a bit of a noob on Linux and are primarily or even moderately interested in gaming. I tried many Linux distros in the past, but bazzite was the one where I finally settled into Linux long term. I’ve been on Linux for nearly 4 years now and I’m finally getting my first Linux phone. There are many other great OSes of course but they often don’t include the proprietary drivers needed to get good gaming performance on Nvidia, and they don’t come with the whole environment set up for gaming out of the box.

        Other cool options are, Alpine, for a really tiny Linux system with a light c lib, Debian for a really simple Linux system, cachey which can give you a few percentage points more performance which could be useful in certain contexts like heavy data processing or gaming on a potato, Ubuntu if you like their stuff which is meant to be a bit more user friendly. Mint is supposed to be more familiar to windows users, but I like bazzite with KDE. I have such a hard time setting Linux up to do what I want, like play games. I love valve in general, they are a single good company in an ocean of shit. Linux in general has a real issue with people making shell apps but not going the extra mile to make a user interface, and bazzite just skips most of this for you to be sort of a windows XP of Linux. My brain just does not work that way. I’m partially deaf so to me the whole world is visual not logical. Shell tools work better for people who are more blind and dream in language and stuff. Language is a bit unintuitive to me, but spatial things are very natural to me. I really suck with shells and setting up environments, but I’m good at modeling and even writing really clever code in a mathematical and geometric sense, just not understanding shell stuff. I always recommend bazzite as a first distro because it mostly just works out of the box without needing to go full hackerman on it for 72 hours only to break it because you don’t understand Linux yet.

        • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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          19 hours ago

          I’ve been using Kubuntu on my laptop for a while now, and I’m changing my AMD desktop to Linux. So a lot of this doesn’t apply. I think I’ll go with CachyOS because the performance boost on my … not quite a potato but not avocado either, is not worth passing up all else being equal.

  • Sonalder@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Nobara isn’t Arch-based but Fedora-based like bazzite. And Glorious Eggroll isn’t behind Proton but a popular fork of it (he does contribute to main Proton from Valve too I think)

    Honestly every distro will do the work and you won’t find your perfect distro on the first hop, you probably never will. Just pick one that have good track record, a big userbase for help on forums if something goes wrong.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 day ago

      Oh, that’s embarrassing. I’ll fix it up.

      Given the shear amount of games I’d need to install, I do kinda need to get it right on the first hop. Demos I can’t really mass install and don’t get me started on the nightmare that is installing games on itch io.

      • Sonalder@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Doesn’t change the fact that you will have a great experience from any of these distro when it comes to gaming. Most of the changes in UX come from the Desktop Environment (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc…). Other difference are packages availablility but beside Steam which is on most distro package you will probably use Flatpaks anyway. Also you should be able to swap distro without loosing files and games.

        So beside some minor changes you won’t notice much else. If it’s your first time on Linux I would suggest you Bazzite (or Mint).

        • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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          1 day ago

          I’m experienced using Linux (Kubuntu daily driver), but not gaming on Linux.

          In terms of desktop environment I’m definitely not going with GNOME (or a GNOME derived distro) for gaming because that’d feel so wrong. Meaning KDE … or KDE. Was gonna say COSMIC but that’s based off a GNOME fork too.

          I get the sense that Steam will work better with the Arch base because that’s what SteamOS is based on. But also Bazzite is built basically specifically to work with Steam so that’s probably not a concern.

          It’s not the game files I’m concerned about so much as adding them to the launcher (i.e. Steam or Itch io). I’m planning on installing them all on a separate partition but I don’t imagine it’ll do much good. Maybe I shouldn’t jump straight into installing everything right on day one.

          Bazzite is probably inevitable.

          • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 day ago

            COSMIC, the new desktop in beta, is written from scratch in Rust. Cosmic the older version was a fork of Gnome. 2 different DEs, made by the same company with the same name. Different codebases.

            • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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              20 hours ago

              COSMIC feels a lot like GNOME based on the images I’ve seen. Given it’s in alpha it is probably also similarly uncustomizable.

              • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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                19 hours ago

                It’s in beta as of a couple weeks ago and it looks quite customizable, in fact. Lots of themeing options and an optional tiled mode. If it lives up to its espoused design philosophy, it looks to me like it’ll be awesome but I haven’t tried it yet.

          • Sonalder@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            Well if you’re daily driving Kubuntu and wants an Arch-based distro go for it, CachyOS is really popular these days.

            I think it made sense for Valve to go with Arch for a custom Hardware with console-like experience cuz they can tweak it and optimize it in depth but for a desktop PC you won’t have big difference from a gaming perspective.

            I’m not 100% sure about this but I think you could copy/backup the file that create all the non-steam link and metadata if you make the switch to another distro. But you’ll have to do some research I guess.

            • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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              1 day ago

              I looked it up and as far as I can tell there’s no way to get the itch io launcher to recognize games restored from a backup. Though even on Windows that launcher is garbage and buggy, I’d almost rather use my browser if not for the updates.

              I’ll look into CachyOS on YouTube, but it seems very finely tuned with not a lot of room for error. Or maybe give up and go with Bazzite like a normal person. With my outdated PC (especially CPU) I could, very rarely, need the performance boost.

  • arcayne@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    CachyOS is solid, it effectively put a stop to my distro-hopping days(years). Been daily driving on my desktop and laptop for well over a year now, no complaints. Desktop: RTX 4080 / 9800x3d

    Edit: Felt I should mention I haven’t come across any games (old/new/big/small) that I can’t run. To be fair, though, I don’t tend to play any competitive online FPS.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      20 hours ago

      If it’s solid then I probably should go for it. All else being equal a higher performance distro is better.

      • arcayne@lemmy.today
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        17 hours ago

        Yep, out of all the “gaming-friendly” distros I’ve tried (Bazzite, Nobara, Garuda, Pop!_OS, Mint, etc) Cachy has had the best performance and stability by far, and the least amount of weird quirks or bugs. Genuinely, one of the best distro experiences I’ve had in a long time.

        I do work with linux in a professional capacity every day and have been using Arch on and off for over 15 years, though. My perspective is likely a bit different than the average gamer. That said, I don’t find myself having to dig into things very much/often with Cachy, unless of course I want to. :p

  • Metju@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    From your list I ran the following:

    • Bazzite: worked AMAZINGLY (to the point of me double-checking whether I’m getting any updates 😆) until some image screwed up the boot process (some versions I could boot into, some were crapping out right after GRUB). Can recommend if you have a relatively normal hardware configuration (so, as long as your machine is not a Clevo-reseller laptop with NVIDIA GPU and Intel CPU, you should be fine).
      • Addendum: some binaries might not be available for you OOTB due to Bazzite’s root filesystem being immutable. Read their docs on how to run packages / binaries that do require root access (or learn basics of self-hosting, I guess…?).
    • Nobara: FUBAR’d it myself through… Well, being an idiot (had SOME regrets about that 😅); ran into some small issues with GPG keys, but otherwise used it w/o any major problems (see above) for… I think a year with some change? Can wholeheartedly recommend it, as long as you’re somewhat familiar with what RPM packages are and how to work around issues with their signatures (usually - a trivial matter); updates are not as smooth as on Bazzite.
    • CachyOS: my current daily driver. Barring some extremely minor issues in some games (usually solvable through Proton options- and versions fiddling), as was the case with Nobara - can wholeheartedly recommend it (this time, without caveats; despite the memery around Arch, it feels stable; the updates by default are a bit more annoying than on Bazzite though, similar in nature to Nobara: you get a notification “X packages have updates”).
    • xavier666@lemmy.umucat.day
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      16 hours ago

      I’m currently using Nobara. I shifted from Bazzite to Nobara because I also use my PC for work and package installation was a pain if it was outside flatpaks.

      Nobara is only an issue if you are using very old Nvidia GPUs. It’s been working fine for me.

      as long as you’re somewhat familiar with what RPM packages

      Agree. It’s very similar if you know apt

      how to work around issues with their signatures (usually - a trivial matter)

      Haven’t faced this so far.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      20 hours ago

      I checked the Steam Hardware Survey and CachyOS is the most popular distro on my list so as the sheeple I am I’m probably gonna go with CachyOS now. Probably gotta look up how to configure it properly first though.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      20 hours ago

      PopOS is a distro famous for it’s Nvidia support. I’m on AMD so that’s not a concern for me. Also System76 develops PopOS and they’re squarely American so I’m hesitant to partake with them.

      EDIT: Though it installs with full disk encryption by default, and I appreciate that even if I would probably disable it on what will be my dedicated gaming desktop.

  • Lemmchen@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Setup some VMs and try each of them for a view days. Stick with the one you like best.

    • Tenderizer78@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 day ago

      That woke VM nonsense will just tell me whether I like KDE (I do, despite it’s flaws).

      • Lemmchen@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Not really. You can compare which packages are available and at which version. You can see design philosophies in the default settings. You can see which installer you like most, what default applications are selected. You can test native snapshotting/backup and restore and see which works most intuitively.
        Honestly there are a ton of out of the box things that can differ and can make your life easier (or not) especially when you’re coming from Windows and aren’t familiar with customizing a Linux distribution to your liking.