Operating Systems
All things operating system related, from Windows to Mac to Linux distros and the more obscure.
Subcommunity of Technology.
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I was using Gentoo for a while, but I kept having issues with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I set up a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough.
I actually just switched to NixOS, haven’t had a chance to get my games set up just yet but I am excited for the number of people I have seen have success with it. Setting up gaming is next on my list.
I've been on pop os for at least 2 years now, been loving it. Most of my gaming is through steam so compatibility issues are the exception, not the rule. It's a bit of a dream come true to play God of War on Linux, it feels like all the stars aligned.
Even when I bork the install by fucking around in the kernel I wind up getting back on pop rather than finally taking the dive into arch.
Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!
When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.
Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.
I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.
These days Ubuntu can install the nvidia drivers for you during the install as well if you just click the "install proprietary blabla" so you get a pretty game ready system there as well tbh so I'm starting to feel like a more gaming tweaked version of Ubuntu is a bit redundant?
That's a surprisingly pleasing font by the way!
Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There's the occasional weird config mess to get into but it's Linux.
The standalone Nvidia driver install panel makes installing the right gpu drivers a breeze.
The only problem I ran into is that it won't boot with my main monitor (1440p 165hz) plugged. I have to use my secondary monitor (4k 60hz) to install the OS and Nvidia drivers first, then shutdown and plug in the main monitor and everything works on the next boot.
I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.
Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.
NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.
I'm running Gentoo on my gaming PC, and would not want anything else.
It's very customizable, as it allows to tweak packages' optional dependencies at compile time. It's also rolling release, so no stress with distribution upgrades. Despite that, it's also very stable (most of the time...).
So far the only downside I've seen is that updates can take a while, as almost all packages get compiled from source.
I am currently using Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and comes with GNOME but because I don't really like GNOME's interfaces, so I swapped it with Sway and i3bar.
I never played modern games on this thing, so I don't really know how well it does, but I heard it's pretty good for gaming.
As my main I'm currently running EndeavorOS. I'd say it's pretty good. It does all of the legwork of installing Arch, but comes with minimal bloat and really lets you make it your own.
Arch on my laptop but Pop on my gaming rig. At the time I installed it, I wanted the extra relative ease of Pop's handling on video drivers. I have since switched to AMD, so no driver woes at all since they're in the kernel, but I have stuck with Pop for that system. If it ain't broke... who am I kidding, I'll probably switch to Arch soon.
Ubuntu 20.04lts
Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.
Seconded for Nobara, gaming is a smooth experience with it
In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.
It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.
I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.