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.
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Echoing what others have said, a “gaming distro” really isn’t necessary. I have used Ubuntu for years on and off. When I switched my gaming PC to Linux earlier this year I went with Kubuntu, because it’s just Ubuntu and I like KDE Plasma better than Gnome. I do feel like Ubuntu is one of the easiest to find support for when you’re looking online.
For gaming, start with Bazzite. It “just works” and is almost impossible to break.
If your friend wants more control, switch to Fedora KDE.
If your friend is very technically inclined — comfortable on a command line — and wants even more control, switch to CachyOS.
Whatever you choose, I strongly recommend using the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
I do not recommend Mint, even though it is very popular here, since it does not support the KDE Plasma desktop environment, the Cinnamon DTE is ugly and outdated garbage, and Mint has more hardware problems than other distros on newer gaming hardware.
Fortunately, switching Linux distros is fast and easy, unlike Windows. So you can quickly and easily try different things to see what you like. Consider putting Ventoy on a USB drive, since it lets you copy ISOs straight onto it and you can boot directly to whatever you want. It’s a handy way to test drive any distro you want that has a “Live” image.
If you absolutely must keep Windows around, install it to a separate physical drive to prevent it from destroying your bootloader. Then configure BIOS to boot to your Linux drive.
I can’t speak about Bazzite, but I installed Mint for a friend about two months ago and he was totally able to web search himself through a few problems. I didn’t have to intervene at all.
mint is in a weird place with wayland right now so I’m not putting him on that.
Garuda, Bazzite, Zorin, Pop OS…and get a seperate machine for work. Hell no, I’m not letting my employer on to my personal machine.
The employer should have a way for you to remote in. There is no reason for you to have a work machine at all anymore.
And I am not talking a VPN.
Don’t even get me started
Mint/Ubuntu simply wasn’t feasible for me as a beginner. The Nvidia GPU drivers weren’t updated properly enough to run games after waking the PC for some reason and trying to fix it myself kept making things worse. CachyOS works fine for gaming and has plenty of support considering it’s a mutable Arch-based distro.
I wouldn’t put my work system running inside my first Linux distro. This is a recipe for disaster.
I came here to say this also. First bad update and then both would be broken and pretty stressful for your friend…
Pile in if I’m wrong, but I dual boot win11 and linux it works fine. The only condition is it has to be separate physical disk. I wasn’t able to use the same hard drive with just partitions had to be completely different drives.
Mint, Fedora, openSUSE.
On dual booting, I’ll say I’ve been running Win11 through several updates with GRUB and Mint installed on a second SSD with no issues for over a year now.
do you think it could be safer to dual boot if windows an linux are on separate physical drives? he really doesnt want win11 but for a few of his games he’s going to need it.
My instinct would be yes, and this was the recommendation I found while researching it before implementation. Windows is less likely to screw with another drive than it is the partitions on it’s own drive. That said, it’s a best guess and you never know what Microsoft vibe coders will break next! But I have foubd it stable.
Linux Mint
I don’t have a recommendation other than don’t recommend something to your friend for which you’re not willing to provide tech support.
Arch or Debian. Depends on their personality and use case. I prefer Arch, but have no problems with recommending Debian and use it on one machine myself.
Edit: after re reading I’d say Debian. Little more stability but it is more annoying if they ever do wana tinker more. OpenSuse is an honorable mention as well!
Arch as a first distro? 🧐
Yeah, but depends on the person I guess. Its just so simple, and nice to set up without needing to do any backtracking or opt outs right out of the gate.
“depends on the person” alright.
He’s not going to want to tinker. This is a pc he wants to work like a console
I have a specific use case for CachyOS but I see two categories:
- Bazzite, not intending to use the terminal much. Also less frequent updates which ought to be very stable. Atomic.
- CachyOS, using the terminal and frequent updates. Rolling, and good support base.
Both use flatpaks which will keep apps sandboxed. A lot of users don’t seem to like snaps being pushed by Ubuntu so flatpak is the big choice.
Cachy at least doesn’t do flatpaks out of the box.
Ah my mistake, I must’ve installed it shortly after installing CachyOS.
I am not too clued up to say this or that, but Mental Outlaw on YouTube has been doing very good breakdown on loads of Linux stuff to noobs.
So I will link to this, https://youtu.be/3MwJbRq3-rM
I saw no one mention ZorinOS.
I personally love Mint, tried different distros but I keep crawling back to green Ubuntu
Side question: his job is asking him to run work programs on his personal machine? If they are not willing to provide a work laptop or if it is something that does not require powerful hardware to run, I feel like in that situation I would buy a burner laptop off ebay to run the work thing on.
That’s just my personal preference, but I do not mix work and personal things on the same computer.
There’s also the security concern. A workplace should not have an employee run work software on a machine that isn’t bound by group policy.
So I can address this from my experience, their mileage may vary: sometimes it’s about saving yourself time. Say if your normal daily driver is a desktop for some reason, but you’re on call to do a task. You can (in theory) do that task from your home PC or you can drive in to the office for (arbitrary round trip time) to do it ‘properly’. Even when I used windows at home /and/ had a work laptop I still maintained a VM (an ersatz air gap) for work shit on my personal PC for convince sake.
CachyOS
Trust me it’s super easy and nice.
^This is the answer.
Mint still does not work well with Wayland from what I can tell, and if you need features like HDR, you’re gonna have to stick to something that runs Wayland well.
While Bazzite seems fine, it is an atomic distro. If you were to try installing certain software natively, like another Firewall for instance, it might not work. And if you continue to layer such software, the update times can take longer.
Cachy(with KDE) seems very stable to me. You’ll pretty much find every software through the repo. If not, you’ll have to manually install flatpak yourself. Never had to do it myself though. But it shouldn’t be a hassle, I think.
It has its own proton variant and they recommend that you disable Steam preshader caching and increase maximum shader cache size when you’re using Proton-Cachy or GE.
My choice also. Specifically with KDE Plasma
