There's a lot of back and forth on this question constantly in the community. IMO you should just choose a Linux distro that's beginner friendly with sane defaults. Any of them can game, basically.

• Nobara Linux is made specifically for gaming, you might want to start here.
• ZorinOS is made for people who aren't used to Linux. It's got a great UI and good features. I used to play Elden Ring on it, it's very reliable.
• Pop_OS is another great general distro. Lots of people gaming use this. They're also making their own desktop environment which they'll use here when it's ready.
• Arch Linux only if you know what you're doing. If you don't, avoid an arch linux based distro.

Any popular distro will work fine for gaming. The difference between distros are becoming less and less significant with de advancement of sandbox packaging like Flatpak. Pick which ever distro is exiting to yourself!

If you want a subjective opinion: Fedora is my personal favorite for few years now; otherwise Debian is a very strong and stable distro that I daily-drove for ~10 years.

Nobara is my choice. It's based on Fedora, which is a very solid base already, and Nobara adds numerous fixes that will save you days if not weeks of headaches, especially if you have an NVIDIA GPU.

I am surprised no mention of Mint yet. As far as beginner-friendly Linux desktop Mint is one of the better ones and it is just very nice overall. To be fair I have not used it for gaming but I would not think there would be any more issues with that than any Linux distro.

I'm running Ubuntu, and gaming on it has been as simple as installing Steam via apt and having it download my games. I haven't yet found a game I own that won't run.

Win11 is like bill gates stinking finger in your butthole every time you click start or search... I digress.

I went with mint since it is easiest to switch but I am hoping install pop OS if it works. Few minor issues with mint mainly Bluetooth for controller

But like others have said any distro will work at this point thanks to daddy gabe.

I think most distros will work just fine. It's gotten so so much easier since Valve invested in Proton to make the Steam Deck work.

Personally, I'm on EndeavourOS with Gnome and it works fine for all my Steam games on an AMD GPU. Years ago, I was on Linux Mint, and that worked just fine for gaming too.

One caveat: if you have an Nvidia GPU, driver support can sometimes be a headache (or at least it was several years ago when I had one). Some distros claim better out of the box support for Nvidia, like Pop OS

I just made the switch from Windows to Linux a week ago and here are my thoughts:

Use Xwayland if you have several monitors with different refresh rates.
I switched from Xorg to Xwayland because I have three monitors with different refresh rates and Xorg doesn't work well with several refresh rates. XWayland is Wayland but with backwards compatibility so you can run Xorg applications as well.

Use Btrfs filesystem on your drives
Btfs is in my opinion the more modern filesystem and it can handle a lot more files than Ext4.

My parts:

• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX
• 32 GB memory

I am on Arch Linux with KDE plasma as desktop environment and XWayland as display server.
My experience has generally been positive except some annoyances in the beginning and I will never switch back. Although if I wanted less complicated setup but still Arch, I would go with Endevour OS.

I am really happy with the performance so far. I can max out FPS in Overwatch 2 (600 is max) with no stutter or anything.
I get 240 fps in Mount and blade: Bannerlord 2 and same thing here, no stutter.

My gaming PC is Ubuntu 23.04. Steam/proton works for every game I wanted to play.

You can check ProtonDB website to get an idea if your games will run with Proton/steam.

I've liked Mint and Ubuntu for awhile now.

On Fedora Linux. It's basically plug and play with the Steam flatpak.

Discord video streaming works only for the entire screen. OBS works as expected.

Controllers and VRR work fine now as well.

I can say garuda linux (KDE Dragonized gaming edition) myself if you want to give that a shot. I did swap from windows 11 to that after some testing with other distros it was the one that felt like it just worked out of the box. Unless the game you want to play runs some form of anticheat it will typically work.

I did also get CnC3 working on it through steam/proton. As for how fiddly it is to get games running. If you own them on steam you pretty much just need to go into the properties and flip them over to use whatever the latest proton version is and install as normal. Modding will take a few more steps when it comes to skyrim etc but i havent really tried going into that too heavily myself. Unfortunately the vortex mod manager pretty much explodes if you try to use it on linux so you end up having to install mods manually but there is a mod manager that may do the trick "Mod organizer 2" but I've never used it.

arch is what steam deck uses maximum compatibility plus steam puts in code

Garuda Linux if you are lazy.

Any distro if you are not.

Tips and tricks

As much douchey as this may sound... but yeah, RTFM works 100%.

You need to distro hop for a while, in the end, the other aspects of the systems are going to feel more important to you and which aspects you will like the most if only for you to decide.

Try something Ubuntu based, something arch based, debian based...

you might end up picking one distro for a reason completely alien to most, I ended up on garuda because their little maintenance panel felt sexy for example.

Also I didn't get one bug I had runing very old vn's with gamescope and still don't know why it worked on garuda but not on the othe arch including arch itself.

You'll get better suggestions if you mention the games you play and the hardware you're using. For example, destiny 2 is still unplayable in Linux because of choices made by the game devs.

Manjaro user here, it works fine for me Using it for years now

whole point of arch is creating your own environment yes it is the experience we and all those we install for have arch works flawlessly with community constantly adding and improving

I personally use nobara kde because I don't have much time to spend on tinkering and installing things to make gaming on linux a reality. Everything I play is working fine, pre installed obs features preinstalled plugins to easily move from windows. It uses pretty fresh kernel and gpu drivers. Pretty solid foundation if You ask me.

Arch Linux with Gnome Desktop proton-experimental and wine-staging installed just like the Steam Deck Two computers in the house both have 16gb DDR3 ram and 8gb rx 580 gpu Hogwarts Legacy plays smooth as does most modern games.

archlinux.org

I love Xubuntu LTS and have been using it since Ubuntu dropped Gnome 2. It's light and stays out of my way.

Some things that make it really great are these PPAs:

• Oibaf (for the latest mesa graphics drivers) ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
  • Kisak's Mesa PPA as an alternative is great too! ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
• Mainline (for the latest kernels) ppa:cappelikan/ppa
• Xubuntu-dev staging for latest Xfce software ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging
• WineHQ staging (I rarely use wine directly anymore and just launch non Steam windows games in Steam (leveraging Proton) https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

I'm a bit frustrated that Xubuntu is using snap for browsers so I use the Firefox tar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_local-firefox-installation-in-users-account

I guess it depends on what your use case might be. I have heard that Manjaro is decent for a desktop Arch experience, but I have yet to try it.

My use case recently was for a living-room PC that works like a console version of the Steam Deck. For that purpose, ChimeraOS works really well. It's an Arch-based distro that uses the Steam Deck controller-first interface and so far is handling almost everything I've thrown at it. It even has a remote admin app where you can install games from GOG or Epic (although GOG support only installs the base game at the moment, no DLC or updates) or upload console ROMs for emulation.

I would say if you go this route, get a PS4/PS5 controller. The touch space is recognized as a mouse, which removes the need to attach a mouse for those moments when you need to get into the desktop (such as formatting a secondary drive for use in Steam).