this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I’m dangerously close to moving my gaming pc to Linux. What’s the consensus for the best distro for gaming?
I’m comfortable enough with *nix, as my daily is MacOS and I have a home lab/server.
I've tried them all. CachyOS is the best by a mile, IMHO. Been daily driving on my RTX 4080 rig (and my Lenovo laptop) for almost 2yrs. Haven't found a game I can't run.
I use Bazzite. I like it a lot.
As an avid CachyOS user, yes, Bazzite is amazing and every new Linux user (who games) should use it.
What’s the story on integrated amd gpu support? I know it’s technically supported, but would love to hear from others on how it actually feels.
If you have an AMD GPU then you're in for a great time. I built my PC last year and went all AMD. Ever heard of "plug-n-play"? That's the definition of it. All I had to do on Cachy is click a button called "install gaming packages". On Bazzite, you don't even click a button, it is all there out of the box.
No issues whatsoever if you have AMD
AMD graphics hardware is extremely well supported on every distro out of the box. The Steam Deck, for instance, uses an AMD iGPU.
Supported by the Linux kernel, so it works out of the box.
Can I use bazzite as my main distro for regular use and coding besides just gaming or it’s more focused on gaming alone and I should dual boot another distro for my non gaming needs?
I think they even have a developer version of Bazzite. Not sure what the differences are though.
You can use Bazzite to code just fine. The great thing about OS like Bazzite is it's so easy to switch to many other atomic/immutable distros. You're not locked in. You can just 'rebase' it to Aurora with a command, which is the development focused version by the same team.
Yes, especially if it's your first distro and you haven't learned habits from non immutable distros. Distrobox and flatpak cover most, and technically, you can install other stuff with rpm-ostree, at the cost of some space and longer update times the more you layer on.
I personally had some trouble wrapping my head around distrobox while using bazzite and trying to install coding dependencies, but I've been having a great time gaming and programming on Nobara! The nice thing with Bazzite is the integrated distrobox which lets you run something under any linux OS (and even windows, I think?), and should theoretically be good for coding, so if you spend more time than me you should be able to program just fine. Maybe VSCode with remote ssh addon or something.
Bazzite for gaming no question, thing just works, I can use Linux fine, and very competent in windows also, but with gaming I just want a system I turn on and play, not faff with, I have been using Bazzite almost since it's beginnings, and am legitimately shocked at how turn key they have that distro for its use case.
Do you have an AMD gpu? I'm running Nvidia GPU using windows 11 and I'm hesitant because I've heard people say that Nvidia poses problems.
Nvidia finally made official linux drivers, so you should be good unless you have a really weird setup.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/
Is it a newer Nvidia GPU? If so I believe it pretty much works the same these days. It was mostly the older Nvidia GPUs that seemed to have a lot of problems.
Yeah, it's a 40 series GPU, so pretty new. That's encouraging. Maybe I will try dual booting first.
Yeah that should be completely fine then. Try dual boot, if you don't have any issues you can always go 100% Linux at some point in the future and in the meantime the old Windows partition can provide some amount of reassurance if something does go wrong.
I run NVIDIA for work related reasons, and it all just works in Bazzite,
There is no "dedicated" one for gaming. Ubuntu Mint, Debian are solid ones. I run Mint MATE personally
I would only hazard against Debian for gaming because of it's slower update cycle (yes yes you could use unstable or sid..), so performance improvements or fixes will take longer to get to you.
Otherwise I completely second your comment; OOP, just pick anything mainstream like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Bazzite, Pop!_OS, you'll be fine on any of those. Once you're comfortable with whatever you chose, then you'll be more informed on picking a distro more suitable for your liking.
As an experienced Linux user, I just migrated my last windows machine to Debian sid, my gaming PC. And it's great. But I started on stable, and moved to sid after a few weeks, and it really wasn't an issue for gaming or general use. My partner's gaming computer is still on stable.
But yeah for someone less familiar, Bazzite and Mint are great choices. Pop! OS if you like the look of it, or Zorin OS if you like its look. You can always try something new if you're interested in its features.
https://bazzite.gg/
PopOS in my opinion. It (mostly) solves the issue of getting the drivers needed to run GPUs.
Bazzite is great!
I’ll take a risk and say Fedora KDE Plasma flavor. Rolling release so highly current drivers, and it’s done a great job with my games.
I second this. I use GNOME with extensions instead of KDE, but that's just personal preference.
I used Pop_OS! for about a year before moving to Fedora. I got a new AMD video card and needed the latest kernel drivers. Fedora has the rolling release model that got me what I needed, and since it's one of the "big 3" upstream distros, I know it's reliable.
It’s what I run on my laptop and gaming mini-pc’s and everything runs great.
Yeah, Bazzite has the best word in town for a gaming distro.
Cachyos seems like the general recommendation. Haven't used it myself, but I've used its kernel so I guess that counts for something.
I run CachyOS, it works great for me. It's not the easiest one, but I like the rolling release style and it's by far the fastest distro I've used (cold boots to gnome desktop in maybe 10 seconds).
I love CachyOS but you need to be a certain kind of nerd who can handle updates breaking stuff. Or more importantly, willing to RTFM and prevent a lot of it.
Basically I need to read these two sites before I update:
https://archlinux.org/news/
https://cachyos.org/blog/
Rule of thumb is to not update constantly/daily. Nor should you update too seldomly. Weekly or monthly is the usual. If that sounds like a PITA then yeah, that's why it's not recommended.
Monthly might be too long to not fuck an Arch update, from my previous experience.
If you enjoy Nix, then so you know NixOS works just as well for gaming. Been using it for 2 years now.
I use Fedora after trying Bazzite and Pop-OS. Pop had some quirks I wasn't a fan of and Bazzite was too locked down but I'll admit, it worked out of the box with no fuss at all.
Bazzite might seem "locked down," but you can do pretty much anything you can do on any other distro, it's just sometimes a different process.
Pop_os works well.
The general consensus is that you shouldn't be selecting your distro based on gaming, all of the modern well maintained distros will be relatively the same performance. In my opinion you should select your distro first on how well maintained it is, then on stability, & then how well you know how to fix issues. Although I don't follow my own advice since I use arch but that is because I am far more accostumed to that ecosystem.
I use Garuda for gaming, but most would likely recommend Bazzite.
I'm running OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Works great.