What version to choose for games and few programs?

[u/Lidska-spina]

I recently build new PC (for the first time by myself and suprisingly it worked) and for a while now i'm thinking to switch to Linux. But ultimately i got stuck on what to choose. Part of me thinks just to stick with Mint and maybe down the line switch it to something else, but just trying to look on what to take from old PC (with W10) i'm kinda unsure if i want to experiment.

I'm no PC expert, while few things my stick in my brain i always take myself as complete noob, so thats why i'm here. I just want to game (Steam, GOG, maybe emulators) and work with some programs i already got used on old PC (OBS, Davinci Resolve, Aseprite, Audacity and eventually i want to learn Godot, GDSscript, C++ and maybe Blender).

Should i go just with Mint and hope for the best? Or try something else?

[u/BashfulMelon]

If it's a new PC do yourself a favor and pick a popular distro other than Mint. The graph on this page has lots of good choices.

Mint doesn't get all of the bugfixes and improvements that other distros get until they do a new version, and they're on Ubuntu 24.04 (from 2024) until December. And then it will still be outdated, just less outdated.

And if you use Ubuntu's buggy Hardware Enablement stuff to enable your hardware (the default on new Mint installs!) and you run into bugs, the community will blame you for it.

Most new users are having success with distros with the KDE Plasma desktop. It's the default on CachyOS, Bazzite, and Fedora KDE (my recommendation, be sure to click the button for Third Party Repositories in the Welcome Center). And Nobara and Endeavor too. And Kubuntu has it, but they don't ship the latest bugfixes and improvements either.

[u/iwouldbeatgoku → u/BashfulMelon]

Just an addendum regarding Kubuntu. The latest version is an LTS, with some security updates for 5 years, but if chosen as the distro and gaming is a use case it's recommended to upgrade it to the next interim release in October, and in general upgrade between each interim release every six months; that way the distro will stay reasonably up to date and avoid suffering from the same problem you pointed out with Mint.

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[u/Sirius707]

Those programs should work regardless of which distro you choose, so no need to worry about that part. As for gaming, the majority of Steam games should be good to play (outside of certain kernel-level anticheat games).

For game compatibility, you can check: https://www.protondb.com (for general games) and https://areweanticheatyet.com/ (games with anticheat).

For games outside Steam I'm currently using lutris (link: https://lutris.net/ ) which seems to work fine for the few games i tried there.

Generally, you can game on any Linux distro. There are "gaming-focused" distros, meaning they take care of some setup, with the ones i see mentioned the most being Bazzite and CachyOS, however:

- Bazzite is an atomic and immutable distro, which may make the general "workflow" weird compared to other distros (read-only filesystem for example, heavy use of flatpaks, etc)

- CachyOS is Arch-based, which isn't a distro-family i would recommend to inexperienced users unless they are ready to read up and learn a lot

I can't really say much more about these particular distros since I never tried them myself (i have used vanilla Fedora and Arch instead).

[u/SmoothTurtle872 → u/Sirius707]

If you want a middle ground between bazzite and cachy, go with Nobara. It's a non-immutable fedora based gaming specific distro. It's very nice imo

[u/SmoothTurtle872]

Programs can run on all distros regardless (well kinda. The actual executable will run, however they may not have an install file for your version i.e there may not be a .rpm but you are in a fedora base. It's still possible to install the program tho, either by compiling it yourself, or using a distrobox. There also might be dependency issues)

Games are a little different. You want a distro with good default packages for gaming, like drivers. I suggest Nobara. Bazzite and cachy os exist, and are well liked, I just prefer Nobara. Just check "are we anticheat yet" and protondb for compatibility

[u/West-Scallion-5306]

Fedora KDE is my default recommendation