Linux Gaming

Plain arch is great for gaming, no need for a gaming specific distro

You enjoy Arch but you're thinking of getting another distro based on Arch for gaming?

Nobara is a great gaming focused distro, it's a fork of Fedora by a well-known Red Hat employee.

I found the distro really doesn't matter much anymore for gaming specifically. You'll install the same or similar tools for gaming no matter if using Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc.

For gaming it sometimes can be useful to have more current Software especially if playing new games since issues might only be fixed on the latest version.

But aside from that one part I think you should go with the distro you generally prefer and game on that.

I prefer Linux Mint, but I don't believe there is a "best" for gaming; simply select the one with which you are most familiar.

I've used arch for 7-8 years. I'm currently using Garuda for gaming, on year 2 or 3.

My recommendation is that if arch is working for you just fine, then don't bother switching. I only switched because I had a breakage and it seemed time to switch (only 2 significant breakages in those 7or 8 years)

If you hadn't started with arch I would in fact recommend Garuda first because the initial setup is much more hands free, start it and install stuff and it just works. Also Garuda comes preconfigured with an AUR setup and installers for that and for the glorious egg roll proton.

That is all crap you can simply set up yourself on arch, so there's no need for you to switch, if you're fine with the arch and slightly more manual configuration then you're all set with arch and have no real reason to change that.

Regular Fedora Workstation is a good compromise between stability and new kernels etc.

Personally I like the KDE spin best: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/

I use Mint for my main gaming PC. Most things worked out of the box.

On my previous laptop everything worked out of the box, I jus had to install the nvidia driver. On my newest one the GPU required a newer driver than what was available for my kernel, so I had to experiment with various combinations of kernel and driver combinations before I found something that worked well.

I settled for kernel 6.0.0-1018 + nvidia 535.40.03 for my rtx4060.

Gamed for years on Arch, few problems diminishing over time. Currently gaming on Kinoite immutable (with Arch in a distrobox) with even less problems and a (touch wood) virtually unbreakable system. Then again, I never went chasing those last few percent...

I've had really good luck with Pop!_OS. AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU, so having the NVIDIA drivers bundled is nice.

Most games in my Steam library work out of the box with no tinkering of Proton. I've lucked out in that the games that do require tinkering work with Proton Experimental or Glorious Eggroll's releases. Lutris is the same, though I just default to the latest Glorious Eggroll release.

debian testing go brrrrr

I've been using Garuda since the beginning of the year, and I'm enjoying it. Having BTFS by default really helped allay my concerns about going to a rolling release; it's been pretty easy to just roll back changes when I needed to. Even that one time where I rolled back too far and corrupted my GRUB didn't take too long to get squared away; the forums have been super helpful.

The only thing you really need for a good gaming distro is to be relatively up-to-date.

If you want the optimisations garuda provides you can just install them yourself on whatever distro, though they will probably be rather negligible.

I use endeavourOS with a nvidia GPU. Its basically arch - it works for me as flawless as it could with nvidia and x11 /xorg. Wayland might work but not as good as x11 - but this is another topic :D

I've been using opensuse tumbleweed for the past couple of weeks and it's working pretty well for me. KDE, AMD cpu/gpu, Wayland, etc

Any of them. I've gamed on Debian, Pop, Arch, Nix, Fedora, etc. Pick a DE you like, a package manager you like, a release cycle you like, an init system you like, etc and find the distro that matches. If you like Arch then use Arch. It's perfectly suitable for gaming.

I found Garuda to be bloated when I tried it out, but I didn't try it on a beefy gaming rig, so maybe my system was just underpowered? I use Pop!_OS on my gaming rig and have had very few problems with it (most problems I've had are because I use a(n?) Nvidia GPU) and those problems have been easily solved.

I'm sure u only wanted to tell us, u are using arch linux. You wouldn't switch OS only for gaming. Jokes aside, I would rather switch from nvidia to AMD instead of using another Distro. I use arch btw, for gaming and music production.

doesnt matter at all

Arch is quite good for this. Even though things can break when Arch is too new, it works quite well from experience. I guess Arch is often well supported even though not official because many archers open issues early on and devs try to fix that stuff before the updates hit the slower distros.

~2017-2019 I used Ubuntu. It was fine, and I had no complaints. All the games I bothered to try including VR worked great. It was my work machine and a Windows update imploded everything. I tried Pop OS on a whim when reinstalling, and I had no complaints about that either. I barely noticed it was different to be honest. When upgrading the SSD last year I installed Fedora on a whim. It works fine and I have no complaints. I type dnf instead of apt now... that's the biggest difference. I haven't tried VR on it though. (I do VR for work and rarely want to use it during non-work hours nowadays)