Basically the title. Loving PopOS as my daily, but I understand that PopOS uses their own process and makes sure that only a checked driver gets wide release. Great for stability, less great for playing games that just came out. Is there a distro that this community generally recommends for gaming?
Nobara is pretty good for a “just works” gaming-centric distro. The issue that you’re coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated. Most of System76’s dev team are likely working on COSMIC.
If you want the absolute most, contiuously up-to-date packages, then I can’t recommend anything other than Arch. I’ve used it as my daily driver for a little over 2 years now and I’ve always come crawling back if I try something else. Gaming on it isn’t a hassle, most of the time it just works, not to be a stereotypical Arch user but do read the Wiki. Arch was also my first ever distro, a friend got me into it.
If Arch is a bit dawnting for you then something Arch-based is just as good, from experience I recommend EndeavourOS. Do not use Manjaro.
I use Manjaro, and can confirm.
Do not use Manjaro.
Friends don’t let friends use Manjaro
I did my personal yearly “year of the linux distro” litmus test with Nobara and I had many problems tbh, two of the most notable ones were fullscreen video stuttering and shader cache stutters.
So I was like, we are getting close, but I am not sold.
Then I decided to try arch and shit just works tbh, basically no issues with stuff I play usually, the biggest struggle was getting Battle.net up and all it took was changing proton version on steam to get it installing.
The more I read the more I think I should switch from Linux mint to arch. Never tried it before.
My server is running Ubuntu but I want to switch to NixOS. So switching Linux mint to arch sounds right.
Garuda is great
“severly outdated”? You mean updated kernel, mesa, NVIDIA and other important packages?
https://github.com/pop-os/linux/pull/282 https://github.com/pop-os/nvidia-graphics-drivers/pull/191 https://github.com/pop-os/mesa/pull/18