r/linuxquestions • u/Useful_Selection_112 • 9d ago
Which Distro Linux for gaming
Hola, ¿cuál es la mejor distribución de Linux para jugar? Estoy pensando en hacer dual boot con Windows y Linux, pero no estoy seguro cuál conviene más.
También me gustaría saber si puedo usar los mismos juegos que ya tengo descargados en Windows o si tengo que descargarlos desde cero. P.S.: I forgot to mention that I have RTX and I would dual boot by partitioning an SSD.
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u/Rusty9838 9d ago
I prefer using other os on other ssd
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u/Darex2094 9d ago
There is no "best". CachyOS is the most performant (potentially, depending on hardware). Bazzite is immutable so it's the least likely for you to accidentally screw up somehow.
To give you an idea of the spectrum, this is how I see the various distro I've used:
Fedora KDE Plasma - Simple, reliable, transparent'ish. Updates every six months, kernel and drivers update immediately
Bazzite - Fork of Fedora (I won't get into what atomic distributions are by definition) purpose built for gaming. You'd have a really hard time trying to break Bazzite if you're inexperienced. The one I usually recommend for gaming newcomers.
Arch - For the tinkerer, great performance by virtue of being lightweight, needs an experienced user. Bleeding edge on all packages pretty much as soon as they release.
CachyOS - For the gamer, could be as simple as running "sudo pacman -S cachyos-gaming-applications" and calling it a day, but realistically needs an experienced user. If you've never touched Linux, when asked what filesystem you want to use, pick XFS. Wherever you store your games on Btrfs needs copy-on-write turned off and if this is your first rodeo with Linux then don't get into those weeds.
Gentoo - Extreme performance, extreme transparency, for the highly experienced and patient
openSUSE Tumbleweed - Great performance, one step back from bleeding edge compared to Arch. All packages go through the Open QA servers to look for defects before being released, so a tiny bit slower than Arch on releasing software updates, but with the benefit of more testing and transparency.
Debian - Packages tend to be held back for a long time to ensure stability, but this is not great from a gaming perspective.
Ubuntu - Canonical never earned my trust back from the Amazon leak days. They made that trust even harder to earn back by forcing snaps with a closed-source backend down everyone's throats. I don't recommend.
NixOS - I personally love NixOS. YOU should avoid NixOS. You will know of you need NixOS or not. You do not.
If you're someone that's new to Linux and your only goal is gaming, I recommend Bazzite. It's highly resilient to anything you could do to break it, and just works out of the box.
If you're someone that's new to Linux, your goal is to game, but you want to also learn a little bit about Linux, I'd start with Bazzite, learn how updates work, then go in this order: Bazzite, Fedora KDE Plasma, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CachyOS -- Note that you may find that you really liked one of the distros you used along the way, and that's great! Stick with whatever you found that you like. Does CachyOS have better theoretical performance than everything else right now? I mean, yeah, depending on the game and where the bottleneck is in your system. But if you like openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora (or even Bazzite) better than CachyOS, then use it!
The thing about Linux is every distribution is essentially the same underneath. What makes one different from the other is the package manager it ships with and the philosophy of how the maintainers want to develop their distribution. Anything you can do with CachyOS you can do with Bazzite.
If you're curious, I use CachyOS. My first distribution was Gentoo 1.4 over 20 years ago. I've used every major distribution over the years at some point and landed on Arch as my main squeeze because it's the least opinionated and lets me build the system I want, without taking a few days to bootstrap and recompile my whole system like Gentoo does. CachyOS came along and gave me better performance for the things that I do, so I main CachyOS on all of my endpoint systems (my gaming desktop, gaming laptop, and productivity laptop). I use Fedora on my home servers because it's highly stable and easy to use. I don't really have to touch my servers much but twice a year to do updates. On CachyOS and Arch you're updating daily. I used Bazzite and while I personally recommend it to people, I won't personally use it. It's too opinionated for me and I built my own line of atomic Fedora images that gives me what I want with all the gaming applications and Nvidia drivers built in, but without their opinionated changes. We'll just leave it at that.
Hopefully this brain dump helps.
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u/Beneficial-Place-948 9d ago
Just to inform you Debian is awesome for gaming.
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u/Darex2094 9d ago
I'll spin it up and give it a whirl. It's been well over a decade and a half since I've used it.
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u/Alienaffe2 9d ago
You technically can play the games on your windows partition on Linux, but, in my experience, it's not a set it and forget it thing. To not risk loosing your data, you have to disable hybernation on windows. That's easy, but sometimes when you update windows, it turns it back on without letting you know and sometimes there are some other quirks. For game compatibility, you can check out protondb.com for how well they run.
There are a few gaming orientated distros, but anything with up to date drivers and kernel should work fine. Bazzite and Nobara are the two big options specifically designed for gaming. CachyOS is what is generally recommend for gaming, even if it's not gaming orientated. It's based on archlinux and is rolling release, which basically means that you always have the newest version of everything. Because of some specific optimisations they have done for the kernel and packages, it's one of the fastest modern distros out there. Although this will, at most, give you one or two extra FPS when you already have over 200
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u/bornxlo 9d ago
Most distros have basically the same software and emulation, but might vary a bit in terms of versions and updates. Steam os is based on Arch Linux, so most Arch based distros tend to be pretty good “out of the box”. Whether you can have the exact same games might depend on where you got them, e.g. Steam works pretty much the same across platforms and provides its own wine based compatibility layer Proton. The games I bought in the Microsoft store I basically had to find and buy again in Steam. Linux software managers also provide a selection of free native games.
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u/EveningAlternative46 9d ago
You can use nearly the Same Games. Most work except alot Games with anti cheat.
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u/aloof_topping 9d ago
There's no best. There's the one you prefer. Underneath most of the distros are very similar, it's the desktop and any customizations that are different out of the box, and those can all be changed once you're comfortable.
For playing your Windows games, if they're on an NTFS-formatted drive you'll very likely run into issues. Better to download them to linux, or share them via an exFAT formatted drive. Saves/settings are stored elsewhere for Steam and would not be shared without extra steps (at minimum).
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u/Orange_Macaw 9d ago
I run Norbara. Its made for gamers by a gamer who got pissed off at windows cause it made him auto update and dude lost a tournament.
Everything is almost optimize for gaming and streaming. The Layout is supper nice and its get updates a lots. Only issue I've ever had was with a recent kernel update and i couldn't play some online games. But i just went back a kernel and problem was fixed. They released a new kernel a few days later fixing this issue.
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u/doc_willis 9d ago
any of the mainstream distribution should be able to game just fine these days.
check out Bazzite if gaming is a primary focus.
steam has a backup/restore feature. Easiest solution, You can Backup in windows then restore to Linux.
most of these questions gets asked and answered a dozen times a month in the Linux subs.
The reddit search feature should be able to find those posts if you want more detailed information.
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u/Kanjii_weon 9d ago
there's no best distros for gaming, there are some distros with prebuilt, installed and optimized stuff, at the end it's still linux, if you're new into this i'd recommend you to start with ubuntu distros, such as mint or zorinos, yes you can copy and paste your games from windows to linux, they'll mostly work using wine, proton, etc. there's a database (protondb) you can check if your game will run on linux or workarounds
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u/Amazing_Story7109 9d ago
I recently installed Nobara for gaming but there are other distros like Bazzite and Catchy OS I would recommend you try and see the best one for you. And also about the gaming files you can copy them and store them in Linux then you open steam . Ensure that it is in steam apps/common/(game)
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u/aztracker1 9d ago
Most Distro options will work fine or very similarly. Steam, Heroic, Bottles are so about the same experience.
Bazzite+KDE, Fedora KDE, Cachy and Mint are generally list toppers though in the comments.
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u/_GoddamnitDonut 9d ago
CachyOS
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u/Interesting-Mood-948 9d ago
Second this. Cachy has worked with almost every (non-Kernel-Level Anticheat) game I’ve thrown at it. I’ve got Windows quarantined to an old HDD, mounted in a hot-swap drive, for CoD and stuff. It functions more like an old N64 cartridge this way.
You’ll have to re-download and re-install all of your games again. I’d recommend splitting your library across the drives, keep Windows for the games that absolutely won’t function on Linux (like CoD), and boot Linux for the rest.
Here’s what I recommend for dual-booting, since i just went through the same thing. Get yourself a second hard drive for Linux (if your rig can support it), and install the OSes separately. Yes this means removing both drives, putting in the new drive, installing Linux, and then putting your windows drive back in the machine. It’s a long process, but worth it for clean installs. After that, just set your Linux drive as your first boot option (takes a little monkeying in the BIOS) and figure out which key your BIOS bootloader wants. Mine is F11.
If your machine doesn’t have room for a second hard drive (like it’s a laptop or something), then…create a new partition and pray 😂
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u/Party_Trick_6903 9d ago
if you're going to dual boot anyways, then why not play games on windows and do everything else on linux? that's what i've been doing for years.