Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
I am still very happy with CachyOS. That'd be my recommendation. Nobara / Bazzite are good options, too, but I never tested them.
Just use Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Mint if you want a hassle free, secure, and stable Linux distro that supports everything and works out of the box.
Don't use those gaming centric distros like Bazzite. It's not worth it. Don't use Arch or other bleeding edge distros unless you want to keep troubleshooting your system because of problems or vulnerabilities.
Take it from me. I've been using Linux since 2001 and Ubuntu based distros have always been the best choice for a secure stable OS.
I would actually recommend the nvidia image of bazzite since it takes the potential driver module and kernel mismatch problem out of the equation which IMO is one of the most annoying problems an nvidia user can face, and if it somehow bugs out anyway rollback is one or two keypresses away depending on if you hide grub or not.
Virtualization is possible with the boot flags and vfio if needed setup using the "ujust setup-virtualization" script. qemu/kvm, probably not virtualbox which also requires kernel modules iirc.
Dunno how nvidia drivers are for manually installing these days, know there was som jank before.
Im running Nobara and they got ez driver setup for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Either way I think you'll be fine no matter what distro you use.
Personally I like Nobara because it comes with a bunch of kernel patches, fixes and gaming utilities pre-installed.
Also Nobara is built on fedora, so OP doesn't have to adjust to something new
linux mint.
I'm a simple man who use Mint on my gaming PC. No issues. Everything worked out of the box.
I have a very similar build as yours, just with a RTX 3090 instead. I switched to Pop!_OS about a year and a half ago, and it's been running like a charm ever since.
I use Nobara on my laptop which has rtx 3060 6gb with ryzen 7 5800h. Sure Nvidia sucks on every linux distro, but you will get many quality of life improvements when using linux instead of windows.
Btw, Nobara is just Fedora with some good gaming related chages.
CachyOS since you're using fedora for 3 years
Nobara is good, it's fedora but with better nvidia driver stuff out of the box.
The amount of these posts make me happy.
Oh you have Nvidia ? Try out PopOS, they have a special ISO file with Nvidia drivers
nvidia shenanigans aside this should be fine for linux gaming.
It's more personal preference and use case than anything.
Gaming dedicated versions are nice if you really only plan to game. Bazzite, ChimeraOS, Garuda, along others are available. ChimeraOS is what I installed on my stepson's pc and outside of a network issue it has worked pretty well. He is happy and since he mainly uses his android tablet for web browsing and whatnot, it's perfect for me to not need to do a bunch of troubleshooting issues. I've tinkered with Garuda but I'm not convinced it's for me and I dislike anything with a Mac feel.
I use an Ubuntu based system (Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS) with a 5800X and GTX1080TI because I want stability and the ability to edit video, game, manage websites, manage our home services, along other things.
Instead of asking which one you should use go out and try some demos and look at your intended use case.