What are your favorite Linux distributions to use for gaming and as a daily driver, and why?
I'm curious what experiences people who game on linux have had, what your favorite distros are, and why. Mind sharing them in this thread? I'm in the market.
My old GTX770 just bit the dust. I picked up a Radeon 6600 to replace it, only to discover after installing it that while the 6600XT has Windows 7 drivers, the 6600 itself does not. The desktop works, but that's it. A little strange, but not entirely unexpected.
My ancient frankenstein Win 7 Enterprise has got to go (into a VM, already on its way) and there is simply no way in hell I will ever use any version of the spyware/bloatware mess that Windows has become today. They lost me forever the second they put a marketplace and ads into my start menu. Ain't nobody got time for that, or at least, I don't.
That means it's finally Linux time, for real - no going back. I'm rather excited. :D
Side note: My original install date for Windows 7 Enterprise was 11-12-2011, it's lasted nearly eleven years without a BSOD or the need to reinstall. They really did fix windows decay syndrome in v7. That's the longest I've ever had a desktop OS last. Can any desktop linux distro manage to go that long, I wonder?
The last time I ran a linux daily driver was Ubuntu for two years around '08, until I got sick of the pulseaudio issues. I'm not worried about that anymore, linux is ready for primetime now. That begs the question of which distro to use. I've toyed with or supported just about all of them at work (mint, redhat, suse, ubuntu, arch, deb, slack just to name a few). I'm a sysadmin by trade so I'm not phased by the learning curve, I know linux cold already.
It's more a question of which distro is going to bother me the least acting as my daily driver. I like to tinker at work, but if I have to do it all the time at home I get cranky. I prefer the 'it just works' experience. The primary requirement is linux gaming, as this is my main gaming rig. That means lots of Skyrim Special Edition, Stellaris, Rimworld, emulators, etc.
There's so many choices out there I'm not sure how to tell which one is the best and I don't particularly feel like putting a dozen of them through their paces over a month to find out - so I'm asking Tildes. ;) I don't mind trying a couple. Steam is required. Good support for WINE is a bonus. Ditto virtual desktop support - is Compiz still a thing or is there something better?
Here are the system specs. I'm sure it's all fully linux compatible.
- Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z
- Intel i7 2600K (3.2GHz, OC'ed to 4.2GHz with a Noctua air cooler, never breaks 60'C)
- Sapphire RX6600 GPU w 8GB of DDR6
- 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 2400MHz memory
- 500GB Samsung SSD, 4x4TB WD Red NAS drives
Yeah, it's long in the tooth, and I'm glad I went for the Z/K combo so the new GPU isn't entirely gimped plugged into a much older PCIe 2.0 mainboard. I'll pick up a Ryzen sometime to replace it, but not until after the chip shortage shakes out. It was hard enough getting that 6600 in this market without getting scalped.
I use Ubuntu exclusively. I used to distro hop a lot, as a hobby, but I now use Ubuntu for work and home use and servers and gaming, and have essentially zero issues that aren't caused by me messing with stuff that shouldn't be messed with.
I've picked kubuntu 20.04 lts as my first experiment. So far I'm impressed, I haven't even needed to touch the command line and I'm near done setting up everything. Easier setup than Windows for sure, especially the updates. My logitech g13 gamepad and lvm/raid for the rotational disks are the only things that weren't auto-configured perfectly. Even Steam was a one-click affair. Ubuntu has come a long long way from where it was in '08.
Edit: Turns out the G13 was no trouble thanks to this g13 driver. In fact I think it's working more reliably than it did under Windows with that crummy logitech driver - though I did have to shoehorn it into startup using rc.local (meh). My Brother network printer was the trickiest bit to set up... at least until I remembered they support linux natively (duh). I just downloaded and ran their installer bash script. It even got the scanner working over the network. The security on the flatpaks (Spotify etc) threw me a bit, since they can't access files outside of home. Had to rejigger some mount points to compensate for that but it's all groovy now. I don't like my massive spotify cache wasting ssd space. :P
The whole setup was stupid easy compared to what I was expecting. It's fast, too - much faster than Windows was on the same hardware. Less memory used, 60% less disk used for the OS.
I'm so glad you're enjoying Kubuntu - I refrained from recommending it, because KDE is very Windows 7 and that puts some people off, but it's the best of the bunch in my opinion. And I'm glad Steam and all that are working well for you!
The similarities to Win7 are a good thing for me. That's my usual workflow, makes sliding into a linux gui mindset easier. I expect in a couple years I may end up on Arch or something a bit more home-brew, but this will do wonderfully for the immediate future.
I'm on arch sice years and years. i started using it to learn some more linux and started liking it more and more. it runs on my desktop for 5 years now without a new install and nearly maintenance free. but there i just play my games and do work. on my notebook on the other hand where i play around with the system more and try new stuff an install never lasted more than 2 years.
I really like how customisable it is, no bloat no nothing just exactly the stuff you want and need, there is no standard userspace, you just build it up from scratch to your liking. and the AUR is a big plus, i can even load and build my obscure tax program from there.
overall if you dont fuck it up yourself a really stable, fast, customizable and very well suported distribution
I second Arch. It was more of a hassle to get set up on my laptop than other distros I've used, but after setup, it has run incredibly well since. The only big issues I've run into have been when a critical package slipped through an update with a flaw -- e.g. when network manager broke and I then didn't have network access to figure out how to fix it. But generally it has been rock solid and fast. And, the Arch Wiki is an incredibly useful resource.
There's also a fairly-reliable guided installer now, I've only ran into issues using it once or twice (and they were fixed soon after). Aside from the occasional third-party package breakage, Arch has been very stable.
The big draw of Arch for me is the AUR. Arch builds its packages with PKGBUILDs (simple shell scripts) which makes packaging a breeze - and with anyone being able to submit them to the AUR, you can very reasonably find any program that runs on Linux.
Yea I've been using Arch for a while as well. No bloat and volunteer packagers are mostly great at keeping everything up to date so you can use the newest releases without having to build them yourself. There's a couple of notable exceptions, e.g. there has been no maintainer for gcc/glibc for the last 6 months so hopefully that gets sorted soon.
Still, I don't think I could opt for a non rolling release at this point in time. It's just too convenient. I don't think I've ever had an update break anything serious on my system in all my time with Arch, unless you count Gnome breaking itself on every other major release which is more self-inflicted on my part than anything else.
I'm using Manjaro these days. I'm reasonably happy: Was quite simple to set up, is relatively easy to maintain and it hasn't held me back yet(at least I don't think another distro would have helped). I'm using this for 2-3 years now. Before that I used arch, by the way. Which I never bothered to set up for gaming.
In general I think you can't really go wrong with any of the big distros. Any ubuntu variant will probably work just fine.
I'm itching to try out NixOS soon. With that, supposedly, you can just copy over a few config files, one command, boom, fresh reinstall. Or you can probably just tell the OS to make sure everything is in spec with the config. Might be interesting wrt. "durability" if the effort to reset is basically 0.
That said, I do use a dualboot setup to play those pesky few games that linux just doesn't really like. But it's definitely a daily-driver kind of setup. I do all my browsing, work and almost all my gaming on here. I basically moan at my friends everytime they want to play a game that requires windows, that's how far it's come. Not even mad.
Interesting side note, some games have genuinely better linux versions. Factorio for example has an extra little feature: non-blocking autosaves. On Windows, factorio pauses while it auto saves. On linux, you flick a setting and it doesn't pause. It just saves in the background. Neat. Some kind of black magic about forking the process, no worky on windows.
Also, what the hell is on your HDDs? Haven't seen a rig with that much HDD in a while.
VMs, and I do some video stuff. I didn't need that much space. There was a 20-pack of WD Reds on sale when I built my NAS. I needed 12 drives for that and a couple more for other things, so I grabbed them in bulk. I still have two on the parts shelf unopened. All pushing 10 years old, no failures and not a single bad sector. Damn good drives.
Nixos is my 2nd most used distro, after Arch. It definitely has a lot of cool unique features. I really hope [Nix GUI] (https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui) takes off, since it could really make Linux easy for a noob to use. I've switched over my laptop to Nixos to try out Ephemeral Root. In short, it rebuilds your system from "scratch" (its more like composes a new system) at every boot. You mark a few files and directories as permanent, but other than that your running a clean system after every boot. So far, its really nice clean and also makes for very snappy performance. I like that it makes me very intentional on where I store stuff, because I have a bad habit just putting files in random places. I will say I don't get Nix the language. I can't parse it as either a config language or a programming language, probably because it is kinda both.
I'm going to start by saying the distro doesn't matter beyond what they package. Think about what you want to do, and check if the packages are maintained by the distro to do it easily. This has actually led me to Arch, Debian and Ubuntu as my distros of choice because they package the vast majority of the software I'll want (the rest is better run as a flatpak, or can be found as an appimage or upstream repo). For you, and your history, I'd recommend Arch or Ubuntu and will briefly explain why. Because of your graphics hardware, for example, you'll want something that can use relatively recent kernel releases.
Arch: The install is a little fiddly, but the work is all done up front. We don't have the AIF like you would've used back in 2008, but the process is simple: Make your partitions, format them, mount to /mnt, install via pacstrap (base + kernel packages), chroot (via the nifty arch-chroot), configure locale and networking, add users, add additional packages, install bootloader. If you do the last step right you can boot right into your system almost fully configured. I make some tweaks like using Pipewire (truly awesome, especially if you do any audio work). You may have to fix things a bit down the road as upstream changes, but it's usually upstream's fault, not Arch's. Using Arch+KDE I can get my install with the base packages I need done in 45 minutes, mostly because I take my time to be sure I don't miss a step. This is about as long as Kubuntu + updates takes. The only serious issue I can think of is Celeste freaking out with the Steam overlay, but that's the only game I've seen that with.
I'm a fan of KDE so I will recommend Kubuntu, but the variant decision is down to which desktop appeals to you. I'd also recommend Mint in equal measure. You can use the Mint or an Ubuntu LTS if you only want to worry about upgrading every two years, but it'll keep some important packages, like your browser, up to date. Ubuntu is switching Firefox to a snap at Mozilla's request, but it's actually not so bad but you could use Mint if you just want to avoid it entirely.
Compiz still exists, but has died and come back, and is nowhere near what it was. The new big thing is GNOME 3 or KDE's desktop effects. KDE unfortunately recently dropped the desktop cube, but if you want fancy effects, and a solid desktop, KDE's Kwin compositor is pretty slick. I love me some wobbly windows.
Steam is available for every distro and works pretty much the same.
Thanks for this recommendation, I never knew it existed! Looking through the wiki, it looks like it might solve an issue I have been having with JACK + my studio monitors, which I'm pretty excited about.
You'll probably still want some sort of graphing software like Helvum, or even qjackctl. Some applications need to be manually connected to the outputs as a warning, but it's a minor tradeoff to not be juggling JACK and Pulse anymore.
Woah, I've been looking for this for a while!
Normally, when people ask me for Linux recommendations, I just tell them to go with something popular, so that they have the best chance of finding help on the Internet when they need it. However, you said you're a sysadmin by trade, so allow me to recommend something slightly different to you:
I have used Gentoo Linux for ... I can't even remember, but probably well over a decade. As a sysadmin, I think you'll appreciate the package manager, Portage. The main thing I like about it is that it lets you tweak which parts or features are built into the package, so you can avoid package bloat if you want to. For example, you can choose to build a certain app with only GTK support, or only QT support -- you don't need to just be force fed a build from the distro maintainers which is bloated with support for both. You can also set the system up to compile for just your specific CPU brand, or CPU type, as opposed to accepting an upstream build which is made to run on many different processors.
I've been gaming with Steam on Gentoo for, I dunno, maybe a year and a half now. Fully satisfied with the experience. Most of the time, things Just Work, and we have https://www.protondb.com/ to check compatibility before you spend money. I can't speak to how well non-Steam games work, though.
If you had pulseaudio woes in the past, well... in my experience, audio is one of Linux's warts, but I think it's because I stress the system a little more than the typical user, because I do semi-professional audio and video work on it. I would expect, though, that for normal people who do normal things on their computer, pulseaudio should be relatively problem-free.
I just run Debian because it tends to be rock solid. For any proprietary software (ie steam, games etc) I usually use a Flatpak version.
I'd suggest Fedora. Fedora is semi-rolling: most packages roll while many are frozen. It also has frequent releases (every 6mo) so frozen packages don't get too out-of-date.
Fedora's also ahead of most distros on the security front. Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite have immutable root filesystems whose changes can be tracked using ostree. Fedora's working on supplementing this with FS-Verity (coming around Fedora 37) and dm-verity (WIP). If you combine that with some form of user-controlled verified boot, you can achieve a reasonable level of confidence in your system's integrity. On top of that, Fedora has SELinux support by default (though the default policies are admittedly lax).
I don't like GNOME though; I use Fedora with Sway.
I'm pretty firmly in the OpenSUSE camp right now, so I recommend Gecko Linux KDE rolling. OpenSUSE has the nicest KDE initial setup I've ever used.
With an AMD card, you'll get driver updates faster on a rolling distro without needing to futz with it.
Gecko Linux paves over a lot of the initial irratants of regular OpenSUSE. I honestly should install fresh with that to continue recommending, because if they're not doing BTRFS root with snapperd it complicates system recovery.
That said, LTS Ubuntu is rarely a bad choice. Its got broad enough adoption most bad problems get sorted out. OpenSUSE can be harder to troubleshoot when things go wrong, given its lower marketshare and different heiritage (Slackware).
Good luck on your journey. I also recommend having a few different partitions to try different distros and share your /home with them.
I second Manjaro. I would argue that the most important factor is the support community, especially if you are kinda new. Manjaro has a great, very helpful, positive, well-moderated forum. I started there as a newbie 4 or so years ago and I would really hate to ever have to leave.
I'm firmly in the "distro barely matters" camp, and so I use Void Linux. It's everything that Arch fans tend to claim Arch's dominion over, but with more granular packaging policies, a simpler init system and service manager, and a generally smaller base system. XBPS has the best dependency conflict handling outside of APT, and while the available package list is shorter than many other distros, it does support PKGBUILD-like build manifests. The documentation is a bit lacking, but you really only need to know how XBPS and runit work, and then it's very easy to apply most written for Arch, Debian, etc.
If I had to use something else, I'd probably go for Debian, Fun/Gentoo, or NixOS. Debian because I know how its fiddly details work and everything's written for it, but stable's too stable, unstable breaks more than Arch, and they patch too many packages for my taste. Funtoo I might already be using, but it requires grokking portage/Gentoo, and I only have access to low-RAM laptops at the moment. I suppose I could set up distcc on a VPS... I'll probably get there eventually, but it's a decent amount to learn exclusively from text.
NixOS, I have used fairly recently. It still feels very young as a desktop distro, and its documentation is still in that middle ground where everything you would want to learn about the gory details of the system and language is right there, and there are some good quick start guides, but since it's such an... unconventional distribution, if you don't really understand all those implementation details, and the one-size doesn't fit, you're SOL. I have hope though, it was a fairly comfortable daily driver for a year or so before I got tired of my bad configurations.
I second Void. Fast, light, great community and xbps (package manager) and runit (init system) are great.
Sometimes i get the itch to try another distro, but after you use runit it is hard to deal with systemd little annoyances like "waiting for process"
Wait until Steam OS 3 comes out before you commit to another one. You may also want to try Chimera OS for an easy out of the box consolified experience. I have a background in Debian and Ubuntu, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend you start there unless you're getting into Linux as opposed to needing a box to play your games on.
But if you want to do it anyway, Pop_OS is supposed to be a pretty good balance of novice friendly with power gaming options. And they fixed the issue Linus ran into if you've been following those events.
I doubt OP would gain anything waiting for SteamOS.
SteamOS isn't going to be much more than a console UI with a desktop "as a bonus".
If there are any gaming improvements on SteamOS that's not in "Generic" Linux just yet, they will probably get ported over (I don't see Valve keeping any to themselves, assuming no proprietary licensing happens¹), without the need to re-install anything (as you would do when switching between distros)
¹: Even if a proprietary licensed or Valve-special improvement exists, someone will attempt to unofficially port it over anyway.
No. The SteamOS versions are appliance operating systems designed specifically for Valve's hardware and use case. You'll then have to enable upstream repositories, which could break the entire system.
I use arch, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't already comfortable with the Linux command line/willing to put a lot of work in to getting comfortable. The basic install isnt so bad, if you just follow the wiki, (hardest part is knowing beforehand that you have to install a bootloader before rebooting), its much of the stuff after. Nothing hard, per se, but lots of stuff where you have to know where to go to get things working. Once you get used to it, its easier than messing around in GUIs endless menus and submenus, but (mostly for new games) I have had to muck about with launch options and config files. However, once you get something working in arch, it stays working. I have only had to redo things when ive installed arch on a new computer.
If you want the experience to be as slick as possible, Id recommend mint. It stays away from ubuntus snap store BS, but is by far the most user friendly distro out there. Then, if you want to, you can use mint to start getting comfortable with linuxes internals. (I only made the jump to arch after a few years of using mint, though there are just as many who stay, its a good system.)
I'm wondering if anyone has experiences they want to share from running Linux on old Macs?
Also curious. Especially with regard to wifi and Bluetooth.
I have a few macs that I don’t use right now since they got slow when stuff like iCloud and iMessages went haywire. I might end up going back and just disabling those, but Linux would be a nice option.
Not a mac user myself, but I've heard much praise for elementaryOS if you're still talking x86 Macs.
Sadly PPC is falling by the wayside these days, but there are still active projects.
I use Funtoo, a derivative of Gentoo (I prefer it to Gentoo because it has some nicer tools for managing the system, but otherwise it's similar). I use it cos:
I run steam through flatpak which is generally rock solid. Unfortunately gog games don't work because they target Ubuntu; I don't really use gog though. I do also keep a Windows machine around for the handful of steam games that don't work on Linux/proton
Caveats:
I would probably recommend the Nobara Project: Fedora Linux with some tweaks. Previously on Tildes!
Fedora is easy to install and get running, well-supported and stable, and the Nobara Project version appears to be run by a Proton developer (Proton is Valve's compatibility layer for Linux, and far and away the best way to run Windows games). When I've installed Fedora in the past, activating third-party repositories and the like was kind of a pain, but it looks like the Nobara Project does that for you. It also appears to provide custom builds of some packages to keep them more up-to-date.
I don't necessarily recommend Ubuntu, Mint, or any Debian-based distro because of the package manager (I can't stand apt) but that's just my personal bias. You can't really go wrong with those.
I personally use Arch but have broken it a couple of times from my urge to tinker. Although it hasn't ever needed tinkering, you might find yourself unhappy if you try and change something and end up breaking it.
What desktop environment were you thinking about using?
TL;DR
I like Arch and Fedora. Mint and Ubuntu / Pop OS also work.I'm an Arch user personally, but I quite like the tinkering experience it offers. It's a bit faffy for initial setup, but once you have your environment working the way you want it, it's excellent, and extremely stable. I appreciate the endless configurability with it, and (as has been said) the wiki is a fantastic resource, even for non-Arch systems. The forums are also excellent, although there is a lot of rtfm syndrome there.
As it's not been recommended yet, and I like to evangelise for it whenever possible, I do recommend elementary OS. It's a very opinionated DE, so your mileage may vary, but it's pretty, and works very well. It's Ubuntu based, so you get all of the benefits that entails, but also they're rolling their own app store which aims to give developers a way to earn money from open source software. I threw it onto a laptop just the other night to see how it ran on significantly older hardware, and it's still extremely good.
Speaking as an AMDer, you’ll probably get the most mileage out the 6600 driver on UB 20.04. I swear, like 99% of Linux users internally are on it, and thus it ends up being best tested. Maybe the gaming driver guys are better about compatibility (🙃), and you do have the option to use the upstream driver, which opens up almost any distro, but I’d still bet on UB getting the most love from us.
Plus, if you ever want to fool around with ROCm, UB will be the easiest on-ramp.
I use UB on my work computer. I don’t love it (I vastly prefer yum to apt), but it just works for all my gaming and compute needs and almost never causes issues.
My go to is ubuntu in a lightweight configuration, ie lubuntu or xubuntu. This should work well for your needs as well, as things like steam and proton work pretty well, and it has first class binary support as a platform target for many pieces of software, because of its huge community and cloud prevalence.
I've been running Pop!_OS for a year and half now and I'm very happy with it.
Recently got a Valve Index and had no issues running it (playing Half-Life: Alyx).