Just plain ol Fedora. Lots of recommends for Nobara but I doubt the performance increase from the tweaks will make much of a difference with modern hardware. I went down the “gaming distro” path years ago and it’s just not worth it imo. You do you though because whatever distro you’ll still be in go ol’ Linux.
If you care about VRR or HDR, you need a distro with KDE Plasma and use a Wayland session. Plus, you’ll need the latest drivers, so… a rolling release.
Arch based like Manjaro, or OpenSUSE.
If you don’t like that, or you have an NVIDIA GPU then I suggest you try Nobara, made by Glorious Eggroll, big contributor to Proton (Valve’s fork of Wine, what makes Windows games run on Linux).
One that is relatively up to date with their graphics drivers. Then just install steam/lutris flatpaks and go crazy. Performance difference is pretty much negligible once it’s set up.
I had a beelink ser5, and without giving you the bench marks, I can tell you that many games that were unplayable on cinnamon or kde, did work in openbox. I would log out and back into that DE just to play games.
Just my observation. I have upgraded my PC so I haven’t needed to repeat that with my new one.
I have an NVIDIA and I dont understand why everyone says its buggy. What kind of problems are people having? I use Nobara for AV work + gaming, it installs the propritary drivers automatically. The few games I’ve tried worked flawless, better then on Windows on the same machine. There’s one game I’ve tried were I had to switch to X11 but all the others works on Wayland.
It’s far better than it used to be. They didn’t get the reputation for no reason. There were lots of Nvidia-specific bugs that have been slowly sorted out over the years. I’m told Wayland is even in a roughly usable state now. But it takes a lot of time to regain the lost trust. Let’s see how long it takes them to support HDR, and what that support looks like.
Well up until the last driver version I was scared of putting my lappy to suspend cuz it wouldn’t wake up sometimes and I’d have to directly power off sometimes causing a kernel panic. 545 was a blessing.
It depends on your card & if you’re using Nouveau or the proprietary driver. NVIDIA has always been far behind in terms of Wayland compatibility when compared to AMD or Intel. Recently they seem to be putting in a lot more effort and now after Fedora officially announced that they will be dropping X11 by default in the KDE Plasma 6 Fedora Spin 18 months from now, they’re likely going to be trying much harder as Fedora sets the precedent. Even if it works on your hardware rn, that doesn’t mean it’s yet feature complete or bug-less.
As others have stated, as long as you are using a distribution with reasonably modern (and maybe frequent) updates of the kernel and mesa stack, it doesn’t matter much. The updates of these two packages are what will provide updated hardware support and performance improvements.
Steer clear of Nvidia. It can work on linux, but is a pain due to Nvidia not providing proper open-source driver support. I also highly recommend ensuring you have an intel chip if you need wifi, as realtek and broadcom can be a bit variable in terms of support and stability for wifi.
Wayland is also preferable in my view, due to its significant benefits over X11 - it is more secure, makes your computer much smoother, and supports modern niceties like better multi-monitor support, gestures, lack of tearing, HDR (in the future), etc.
This segues into my next point. It makes more difference what DE you use when gaming - GNOME currently doesn’t support VRR on Wayland (appears to be coming in next release at least experimentally), while KDE does. So that is something to think about. I would stick to either of these two DEs as these are the only two that are both user friendly for beginners, and have excellent wayland support. Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE all do not yet support Wayland.
I would steer clear of distributions that are not established, and/or only have very small or single person teams (as this has potential security, stability and support implications) and would recommend Fedora. Fedora has a bleeding edge mesa and kernel (that roll between releases), but stability elsewhere with a solid community behind it and a dedicated security team, built on cutting edge technologies throughout. If you need VRR I would use the Fedora KDE spin. OpenSUSE tumbleweed is also a great choice.
Many users will recommend Arch Linux systems, as this is the hotness, particularly as this is what SteamOS is based on. I wouldn’t recommend this even as a very happy Gentoo user, however, as relatively “pure” Arch Linux distributions (and Gentoo), will require you to follow notices on the website, and will require your knowledge and intervention at some point based on this notice; without your intervention, it will likely break your system. So as a beginner I would avoid Arch Linux and Endeavour OS.
Manjaro has had many too issues with the security and stability of their distribution to allow me to comfortably recommend it, and the Nobara and Garuda Linux teams are both too small for me to be comfortable recommending them. Zorin OS, Pop_OS and Linux Mint are all excellent workstation distributions, but their outdated kernels and software (they are based on a long-term support base) mean you may be either giving up some performance or hardware compatibility.
Whatever you know best. My personal choice of distro is Gentoo, my gaming pc and my carry laptop both run it. My games run great in gentoo, and because I understand it best, I deal with few issues. For a long time it was Arch, and before that Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu for only maybe 2 months before moving onto Arch then Gentoo. My games always worked, but once I really understood Linux, they ran great.
Counter point, Ubuntu specifically has so many old posts and answers that aren’t necessary in modern systems, deprecated, or straight up no longer correct. Also a lot of recommendations that can screw up a system in strange ways. I feel like many issues (ie. Bluetooth, USB, Wifi) are due to people stumbling on old posts with configs and tools that have changed and blindly applying them
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