I’m putting together a gaming system for the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input. Obviously I’m committing myself to providing a certain amount of tech support no matter what, but I’m wondering if any of these modern Linux distros can provide a user experience at least on par with Windows in terms of ease of use and reliability for someone who doesn’t know how to do much more than check their email and log in to Steam.

So far, I’ve looked at Bazzite, Cachy, Nobara, and PopOS based on what I commonly see recommended here. I’m leaning toward Bazzite based on its stated goal of being friendly to Linux newcomers, and the quality and amount of available documentation. Are there any other distros I’ve missed, or other considerations that might sway my preference?

I’d also like to hear about your subjective experiences with Linux gaming:

  1. What distro are you using for gaming?
  2. How long have you used it?
  3. How often have you had issues that require Linux knowledge and/or searching the web to solve?
  4. Have you had any other minor/annoying complaints?
  • @BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1•15 days ago

    Personally I’d say none of the above for newbies. I have had experience with Nobara and it’s OK but I literally had problems with GPG certificates for updates for the second time in 3 months, and yesterday the update engine crashed during an update and my plasma desktop only showed a black screen with a cursor on it when I logged in.

    I can problem solve that but it’s annoying as hell and not suitable for someone who doesn’t want to do that.

    Pick a more mainstream distro and not something that is rolling release. They don’t need that - they need something that is rock solid. The gaming modifications on distros are overrated - they only matter if you really want to push things to the limit.

    I’d probably go with Mint for your scenario. It’s stable, and the 22.1 is a long term release up to 2029 - so it’s unlikely to break with a major update.

    I’d personally go with KDE over cinnamon - it’s user friendly but its slicker than the default desktops in Mint and will make the machine feel more high end as a gaming machine. There is also scope to customise it if the person using that wants to go down that route or has something they’re already familiar with (KDE very flexible - feels like a nicer version of windows GUI by default but can make it look like MacOS or even Gnome, or whatever you want tbh). Cinnamon and Mate have flexibility too but KDE has a whole ecosystem of software to draw on and doesn’t suffer from Gnomes rather marmite design philosophy.

    In terms of games - use Steam where possible. It’ll “just work”. There is almost no configuration required and personally I have a huge games library and haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I don’t play competitive games or the highest end fps games though. But I’ve just completed cyberpunk 2077 on my desktop, which is a 3070 and had no issues.

    Some popular games like Minecraft have their own clients and set up but it’s not difficult to set up once and leave it going.

    Lutris is a good games client if they do have games in other stores like GOG or Epic, and it works well with steam too. Heroic is also a good multi store client - slick and easy to use if that’s preferred, good for gog, Epic and amazon.

    Whatever you chose to do, keep.ot simple. I’d honestly avoid the gaming distros and go for something stable and widely support like Mint. Definitely avoid pure Ubuntu, and avoid rolling releases of anything and you should be fine support wise.