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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I’m throwing in my vote for CachyOS. Not because it’s the easiest to use (though it isnt difficult imo) but because it works out of the box, then they have nice wiki to guide you through simple things (like using Lutris and Proton). It’s also Arch based so there’s the arch wiki to fall back on also. I ran Windows for 35 years and just switched to Linux in like October, fwiw.
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it is very popular here, since it does not support the KDE Plasma desktop environment, the Cinnamon DTE is ugly and outdated garbage, and Mint has more hardware problems than other distros on newer gaming hardware.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Bazzite KDE version is a great option, as long as you install apps from the built-in Bazaar store, it’s hard to mess anything up, and it already includes most of the software you’ll need so it usually works well out of the box.
If your friend has to troubleshoot issues on bazzite, it’s better not to install extra system packages on top of the core OS (“layering”), because that can sometimes cause problems and make things harder to fix.
You can also set up a tool called Winboat, which lets you run Windows inside Bazzite; it integrates nicely and isn’t too difficult to configure.
Bazzite is the first recommendation if the apps your friend needs are available on Flathub. If they need more complex software that only comes as Debian (.deb) packages, Linux Mint is probably a better choice because installing non‑Flatpak apps there is much easier, although the trade‑off is that installing a lot of extra packages can potentially break the system if you are not careful. If they mostly stick to the Mint software store, it should stay stable and they are unlikely to run into problems.
+1 for Winboat. As long as you’ve got the RAM and CPU cores to spare, it’s a really nice solution to the Windows software that you really can’t replace. My PC has an 8core CPU and 16Gb RAM. Much less than that and it gets pretty taxing.
WinApps is more complete, in that you can right click on a file to open it in an installed Windows app, which isn’t something you can (currently) do with Winboat, but WinApps is more of a bastard to set up.
Honestly, my recommendation for new users who are into gaming is Bazzite. Just install everything through the software store and it just works. Well, everything that’s available as a flatpak at least. Steam comes preinstalled, as do all the drivers (among some other various gaming-oriented things like kernel optimizations and Lutris), so it’s basically just install and done. The software store, Bazaar, will find basically anything a normal user needs. The nice thing about atonic distros is that you generally don’t need to do anything through the command line,as installs are perfectly consistent across all computers (so no random things breaking in the background without someone else noticing and either filing a bug report for you in the beta, or fixing the issue outright). After over a decade of Linux use, I’ve never found an easier distro. I honestly have switched to it as my main distro because I love Fedora, and the atomic features are nice (and Bazzite is just a little nicer for my use case than Kinoite).
When I set someone up with Bazzite, I just tell them to install everything through the software store, and I rarely get questions other than “how do I install this software that isn’t available on Linux”, which I usually meet with a recommendation for an alternative, or if it’s really critical, I’ll have them install through Bottles or something. I always mention the “no Adobe or Autodesk” caveot before they install, so I never really get questions about that except for “well, what would you recommend I use instead?”
As to answer your questions directly:
- It is very common, so you can find Bazzite specific answers,
- As far as I’ve used it (which is a couple years now) things never break, so finding solutions that work in other distros doesn’t tend to apply for me (except for when I want to make custom scripts like when I bound a mouse button to hard mute and unmute my mic, though I just had to look up generic Pipewire stuff)
- Everything installs as a flatpak, so selinux is essentially completely unnoticed. I’ve never had a single issue with selinux and I’m a power user. I’ve used Fedora-based distros for many years and only ever encountered selinux issues on my server, and that was for low-level processes that aren’t relevant to desktop use (for instance, setting up NUT to automatically power off all devices on my network during a power outage when the UPS battery is low)
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.
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.
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.
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.
CachyOS
Trust me it’s super easy and nice.
My choice also. Specifically with KDE Plasma
^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.
Anyone in these comments claiming there is a big difference between “gaming distros” and any other is flat wrong.
Any distro works. It’s about the initial experience they want without having to fuss about changes. You can switch Desktop Environment on any distro easily, none of them offer massive gaming performance differences over the others. It’s subjective. For a beginner, don’t recommend immutable. That’s pretty much it.
Any distro works.
Any non-LTS distro works*
Using a distro release based on a 2 year old kernel with brand new hardware is asking for a horrible experience. For gaming especially, you’re also losing out on months/years of improvements to Mesa.
I’ve been running CachyOS and they have some gaming packages, but I forgot to install them and haven’t run into any issues just installing Steam.
Fedora or Ubuntu. No need to overthink it. They are the two biggest distros in popularity by far (except Arch, which probably beats Fedora), so you have access to maximum mindshare and previous troubleshooting.
Including Arch, these three distros are among the most polished, stable, and well-documented. Arch takes quite a bit more effort, so a beginner without much time on their hands should start with Ubuntu or Fedora.
Avoid Ubuntu like a plague it’s one of the least googleable distros there are. It suffers massively from poor documentation and out of date fourm posts. Not to mention gnome at this point has endless weird problems for new users.
Iv helped over 200 people over the last year change to Linux. Gnome has been the cause of almost every major problem with them.
Stick to kde, stick to fedora or arch, stay away from lts releases or anything with an older kernel.
There’s a really good reason steam went with arch.
I have felt this way about ubuntu since the beginning. It’s always a mess.
I was surprised two years ago about how good Fedora got, while also being really up to date.
And Debian? I don’t understand how you can list Arch as one of the most stable distributions when, based on its update model, it doesn’t seek stability but rather constant updating. If you’re referring to operational stability, in my opinion it’s not on the same level as Debian, Leap, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Stability is not synonymous with number of users.
Stability in the sense of: my computer does the thing i expect with the hardware i happen to have, every time, over many years.
I agree Debian is up there. I only mentioned Arch because of the massive userbase. I think Debian is a little more technical (for a new user with limited time and attention) than Ubuntu or Fedora, but much less so than Arch
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch are undoubtedly the big 4 Linux distros in terms of long term community, stability, and documentation
Mint (LMDE). It might actually be easier to use than windows. My dead dad could use it and he was a moron. I held out for quite a while to try out ‘cooler’ distros but yeah, Mint is what I’m telling anyone moving from windows to use now.
My dead dad could use it and he was a moron.
I really was not prepared for that sentence 😅
LMDE 7 and send it. Regular mint has Ubuntu nonsense baked in, lmde is basically the same end user experience and smooth Debian jazz underneath.
Like someone else said, steam, heroic.
I’d avoid any of the gamer distros.
Nobara is alright if you just want games to work without tinkering etc
It’s also developed by glorious egg roll, the GE in GE-proton. I wanted to love it but Wayland + multi monitor + KDE + Nividia = pain
Everything except nvidia is how I use it and it works very well. I have had a few issues with kde once but never again since then
Which Ubuntu stuff does Mint Cinnamon have? I thought the point of Mint was that they removed a bunch of that stuff like Snaps.
Mainline mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Lmde is largely the same OS with a pure Debian heart without Ubuntu clogging the arteries
Yes, I know Mint is downstream of Ubuntu, that’s how I know it doesn’t include Snaps. What exactly other “nonsense” is there or was your statement just a general LMDE puritan hand-wave?
I’m an ubuntu hater / snap hater. I prefer my mint without junk in the trunk. I’ll confuse people though, I think systemd rocks. And let’s make more people mad, vim is a pointless flex and nano is better.
Fair enough, I totally agree about Ubuntu, although Mint doesn’t have most of the bad Ubuntu stuff. What it does benefit from is Ubuntu’s superior hardware support, PPAs (most important for up-to-date Mesa) and GUI stuff like Driver Manager/Update Manager. For a beginner or casual user there’s no contest.
LMDE is missing various useful programs, such as the GNOME disk utility. Just stick with stock Mint if you’re going Mint.
I could spin up a VM and check, I’m 99% sure you’re wrong. Also lmde includes almost the same preinstalled programs.
or…
apt install -y gparted
Well it was missing something I needed when I tried it a while back.
I mean, fair. It also doesn’t have mint’s driver manger, which is a bummer.
