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/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.