this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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What’s the best Linux distro to play games? Im currently on Ubuntu 22.04 and won’t leave it as my main but I have a AMD TR 1950 with a GTX 1080 TI will to play some final fantasy.
If you just want an experience as straight forward as the steam deck I have heard that the move is to just run Bazzite.
All the major desktop distros play games about as well as one another, assuming you set them up correctly.
Choose a distro based on other criteria, like the release cadence and admin tools that you find most comfortable. If you don't have any particular needs or preferences, I guess you could save 10 minutes by choosing a distro that installs Nvidia drivers by default, but it's not going to run games appreciably better than the others.
Garuda Linux if you want something that just works out of the box, but with the power to do whatever you want. It's basically Arch with all the gaming stuff pre-configured for you.
Not sure what you’re saying…. I download drivers for my hardware, download and install steam and my game and start playing? Or is it not that straight forward yet?
That's exactly how straight forward it is.
Which distro you pick is mostly a matter of taste.
If Ubuntu works, I rather stick with that. Just weird I haven’t seen anything about using that one. If I can home lab/self host and develop either gaming, that would be sweet.
Nothing wrong with Ubuntu. If you like Ubuntu, go with Ubuntu.
Most people don't mention Ubuntu because they are pushing Snaps real hard, which cause issues for people. Mint is basically the same as Ubuntu, but without the stuff Ubuntu does people don't like.
I left Debian for Arch recently and let me tell you, you immediately feel the difference with running the latest drivers for your machine. The bleeding edge drivers have upped my frames per second significantly in videos games compared to sticking with stable releases on Debian (and Ubuntu).
With the built-in
archinstallscript making Arch so easy to get going, I’d only reach for anything else if I really needed the stability.For anyone else reading this who plans to use Debian Stable for gaming, you really should enable Stable Backports. This gives you the option of newer drivers, kernel, etc. (you pick what you need individually) without having to give up the low-maintenance stability of the base system.
I use arch, but they're all equivalent. A distro is more like a preconfigured linux
Just pick one of the popular ones and tinker
Arch is the one thing that should be absolutely not recommended to beginners. Even implying that it is a suitable beginner distro in any way like you have done in this comment is only likely to drive away users when they inevitably get confused.
Existing Windows users mostly are not interested in even knowing of the existence of the Arch Wiki. They will just give up and conclude Linux is shit.
I highly recommend Nobara.
idk why you're downvoted hella ppl use proton ge and hes the one making nobara
Exactly. Maybe I could have given more context but I wrote that comment right before my flight took off.
Like the others have said, all major distros are fine. Ubuntu is or used to be Valve's "favourite distro" and the package that you can get from Valve's website is for Ubuntu. That being said, software on Linux should be installed using the package manager (the Software Centre) and not downloaded from the Web.
You may wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. This is fairly easy (you can use the Software Updater application) but the newer versions have better drivers and newer GNOME versions which may bring better performance.
All major distros are fine, but there are some niche that specialise in making it easy for people to play games. I use Garuda Linux for that reason. It has it's own app that helps handling OS maintenance, you can install things like Heroic Launcher, Steam, and Proton with a couple of clicks, you have a nice app that checks for updates, etc., etc.
It's still Linux, which means random shit breaks for no reason, but for gaming and not having to worry about keeping the OS alive it's great.
Linux in no way means that "random shit breaks for no reason", if anything that's Windows. Some distributions may be easier to break if you don't know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
Things that randomly broke for no reason:
Things that broke after I installed a dGPU:
Things that broke after a system update:
This was all in a span of around 3 months.
If it was "if anything that's Windows", then I would be doing nothing but fixing user issues with my ~300 Windows devices. That's not the case.
Funny, that's not the experience of the majority of people in this thread. Several flavors of Linux that have been listed are rock solid and require little to no user action to work and launch games. You can list all of the problems you want, that's just 1 person's experience. It could be because of the distribution you chose, because of your skills, anything. But it's not statically relevant.
Also, please, Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly. Don't you think there would be a tiny bit more Windows dominance on the servers side if the opposite were true?
I'm willing to bet the majority of people in this thread already forgot about the "linuxism" they had to deal with when they were starting, and are experienced enough to handle any new ones as they come along.
Linux dominates the server realm for a completely different reason - Linux-based servers supported hot-updates much sooner than Windows Server did, and in systems where uptime was critical, people chose Linux. That also meant that the vast majority of "server admins" had Linux experience which also contributed.
This is slowly changing now - if you look at market stats, you can see that Windows Server is (painfully slowly, granted) regaining some momentum.
EDIT: also, fun fact - I used to work at a company that had around 300 MacBooks and 2500 Windows devices. Back then I was working as a Service Desk agent. The distribution of incidents for Windows and MacOS we were getting was VERY close to 50-50... So, it seems to me that "Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly" mostly among people who don't use Windows.
Yeah, "linuxism", that must be it... That or it's possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
Linux dominates on servers because of that yes. Also because of its licensing costs, being open source, stable, secure (please don't try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please), better performance and lesser response time. Because a Debian stable will never break with simple security updates. I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn't surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
As in: between today and six months ago, when I moved my personal PC to Linux and encountered various weird shit that just doesn't happen on Windows?
Wait, are you one of those weird people who believe that there are no viruses on Linux and no security tools are needed?
Windows servers are under constant attack... Just like Linux devices are at all times.
I didn't say "it's coming back". WS is still losing market share, but the losses slowed down pretty significantly in recent years. Sorry, I can't find the source again because Google is shite. Feel free to disregard this point.
Fuck off with this tone, mate.
I mentioned MacOS as an example that Windows is not as buggy as you seem to believe. I guess that went over your head and I should denigrate you now?