I have a home built PC that I want to get off Windows 11.
Specs:
- Ryzen 3700X, upgrading to a 5800X3D soon
- RTX 2080 Super
- 500GB NVME for OS, 2TB SATA SSD for files, programs, etc.
- 1440p Ultrawide monitor
- an 8bitdo Ultimate controller
Usage:
- I usually play indie games, emulators, and occasional AAA games. Most of my library is on Steam, with some games on GOG, e.g. Cyberpunk.
- I have an original Steam Link in my living room, and I use it to play games from my PC on the couch. Does Steam on Linux even support this?
- I also write game mods, so I need a distro that is a good fit for software development (C++, Python, and Lisp).
- Random miscellany: I use mullvad VPN, stream movies from a friend’s plex server, and use an SFTP client to back up photos and videos from my phone.
I’ve been an on/off Linux user in the past, so I know my way around basic/intermediate terminal usage and configuration. Buuuut every previous attempt to move to Linux ended in disaster, so I have little patience for asterisks, strings attached, etc. If you’re offering a distro I’ve never heard of before, you’re probably gonna be hard pressed to convince me.
Thanks for the help!
Having read through some of the comments I just wanted to add one thing. If you find that one distro doesn’t quite do what you need, don’t be afraid to wipe it again and install a different distro. I migrated from windows 10 to Linux mint, I found it frustrating for gaming, and then from mint I switched to cachyOS, which is built from the same OS that the steam deck uses. I haven’t had any similar issues since. Find what works for you, and don’t be afraid to try something else
I’m currently on Linux Mint, works pretty well out of the box. Steam games and indie games and even old windows game work (with lutris and/or bottles).
However I should warn, I also have a Steam Link. It does stream, but depending on the game the framerate can get very laggy. I’m running on a RTX 2070 tho. Not sure I can recommend steam link on Linux yet.
Everything else works great.
Fedora KDE.
upvoting the bazzite. if you want to play steam games its the obvious go to. I went to it from zorin and enjoying it.
I’d recommend a glibc edition of Void. Dev tools and libraries aregenerally up to date; there are exceptions like some zig related stuff but you can generally work around such issues with anyzig. Also has a framework for custom builds via xbps-src in the package repo. Packagw management is very easy via xbps, and purging obsolete packages is trivial.
That was adorably fun.
Narrowed down to the one I chose, and now I have my next choice if to test run.
I’m curious what the attach rate of these suggestions are. For anyone who already knows what they want, its just fun. But for anyone who really tries to find a suggestion, I wonder how good it works. Also the stats https://distrofighter.com/stats are fun to look at.
First time I’ve seen this! Tried it out and it was entertaining to root for my favorites, and a lot of fun reading the various jabs they make at each other!
My winners were exactly the ones I use, so I’m happy (Fedora + KDE Plasma)I just learned about it from Brodies channel (a Linux YouTuber). As you say, its entertaining. It may or may not get a good recommendation. Some questions aren’t really suited to ask beiginners, but that’s okay. And some questions like what the use case is, would need 3 answers to me: Gaming, Development and the regular Daily stuff. But I love the idea how its presented and the audiovisual style. Pretty cool.
Pick one, that is the one
Yeah I feel like you can game on anything these days. I’m on Arch, which is what SteamOS is based on afaik. Works great. Gaming on Steam and Heroic launcher for Epic games. No complaints.
I heard CachyOS is quite popular these days. Other dedicated gaming distros are Bazzite, Nobara, Garuda Linux …
I’ve been running Garuda with KDE (dr4g0nized gaming spin) for over a year and have had a great experience. Arch gets a bad rep for breaking updates, but I’ve never experienced any. My Steam Link in the living room has mostly functioned fine, but it has been a bit finicky lately. As for the AUR, I think I have maybe a dozen packages from there in my machine, partially because Garuda ships with Chaotic-AUR, which has a more robust (read: existant) review process for submissions. I have used both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and both have worked flawlessly. I don’t game as much as I used to, but I’ve been nothing but happy with my Arch gaming experience.
+1 for CachyOS
My PC has an AMD CPU / Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU which was fine when I originally set it up with Kubuntu but had some unrelated issues. So I took the opportunity to try it with Arch and had an absolute bastard of a time getting the Nvidia drivers to work. Cut my losses and tried CachyOS instead and pretty much everything just worked from the off.
On other comments and what you’ve said in your other comment, I think you’d be just interested in Nobara or CachyOS. At least, if you want an out of box working experience but still have the ability to tinker and develop relatively easy.
You might prefer Nobara because it’s Fedora based rather than Arch, and your hardware specs aren’t bleeding edge anyway. If you want a bit more stability than that though, and don’t mind doing the set up yourself, plan vanilla Fedora could also work and you just add what you want / need.
I’d avoid any recommendations for immutable distros like Bazzite because they’re best for beginners that aren’t too tech savvy, or people very familiar with Linux and have no issues mucking about with OS-tree or running a distrobox. Really no in-between.
I also have 8 bitdo controllers and I do recommend updating them on Windows before you get rid of it, depending which you have - some can be updated via a Chrome based browser but others only through Windows really.
Bazzite. Fedora based, “atomic”, has nvidia drivers and windows compatibility utilities preinstalled. Atomic means easy rollback after update in case if something breaks, and it probably doesn’t expect you to use command line much. It is expecting users to install apps with flatpak so make sure flathub has the software you need (I think it does).
I have never personally used Bazzite, but atomic distros and namely Bazzite are known to be very user friendly and breakproof.
Steam Link is available for Linux. I suppose that most Steam-things are.
Not sure why you got downvoted. Bazzite is great.
Plot twist: it was I, OP, all along! Let me explain why.
Whenever I see these distro recommendation threads, all kinds of people come out to make a comment. Many if not most are well-intentioned, but the kind of person that bothers me the most is the evangelist. The kind of person who’s blind to the limitations and drawbacks of the thing they are espousing.
If you’re gonna recommend a distro, I sure hope you’d have some personal experience with it. Otherwise, how do you know what it’s limitations are? So to admit you’ve never used Bazzite even though you’re recommending it, it just seems irresponsible. “You have a peanut allergy? Try this Pad Thai restaurant! I’ve never been there but I hear it’s great!”
After discussing with a few more developer friends of mine, they advised me not to use an atomic/immutable distro, because setting it up for development is a chore. I’d apparently have to learn how to use distrobox, set up containers, and learn an entire other flavor of linux to set up a development environment. As a reminder, I did say in the OP that I needed something I could program on as well, and Bazzite sounds like a poor fit for that use case.
I can understand and respect your points here.
To be totally fair, Bazzite can be used to do anything any other Linux distro can do, it’s the beauty of Linux. I’ve set mine to run .NET, PHP, and node. Had to use containers for SQL server, but got that going too.
Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but it’s been my favorite Linux experience so far.
Maybe some haters of atomic distros. Never imagined people hating them more than me. But what if not this…
What is there to hate? I understand if you don’t prefer how it works, or if you’re used to doing things a certain way which doesn’t work on atomic… But hate seems a little extreme
Atomic distros are not my cup of tea. They are perfect for certain cases, but, you know, I kind of feel irritated by how often I see people overpraising them. It’s like, this is just an option, that is useful in some cases, and useless in other. Why am I sometimes seeing people making a holy grail out of atomics?
I suspect it’s the recommendation from someone who hasn’t used the product.
Bazzite is my first one. Was a kubuntu user before it, and sabayon way back in the day.
I’ll say this one thing: bazzite is super great if you’re keeping it simple. If you want something “weird”, you’ll need to be ok following directions and editing config files.
The immutability means some things are a few steps harder to setup. For example, today I was installing a service that will let my bazzite machine always be available as a Spotify Connect target so anyone in the house can play music through the living room speakers. The Spotify connect server will be always running in the background, even after reboot. Installing it took 3 extra steps than doing it on Ubuntu, Arch, or Fedora. Not impossible, just a few extra steps to make a distrobox and connect into it, and then connect that into a service on the bazzite side.
I will say though, Kagi Assistant has been a lifesaver for me for getting all my Linux machines setup. I’ve done more in the last year with Linux than the 20 years before of using it as my home OS.
It’s so easy now just to ask a chat prompt how to do something and then get help if it doesn’t work perfectly on the first try. Taters gonna tate, but I absolutely love AI tools for learning how Linux works, especially the trickey immutable ones like bazzite. Even though I’ve been using Linux for twenty years, I’d have dropped bazzite in the first week if it wasn’t for AI chat tools helping me bend it to my designs. I just can’t be bothered spending a lot of time learning an immutable OS when I’m happy with Arch and Ubuntu. However, now with chat tools, I’m loving bazzite and have no plans to switch off it as my daily driver.
editing config files
I’ve got no aversion to it, but this isn’t something you really need to do in Bazzite.
I wouldn’t say things are harder with immutable, per se, just different. If you don’t already have years of Linux workflow programmed into your brain, then it’s just as easy as learning a regular distro.
And no, you don’t need to use ChatGPT, just search google. If you’re not finding help for your question, replace “Bazzite” in your query with “Universal Blue” or “Silverblue” as they will almost always have identical solutions.
It’s definitely not needed for the average person trying to install and play games and watch Netflix.
I wanted services for Spotify, Hone Assistant, ssh access, syncthing, jellyfin. Those were just slightly more effort than in Arch, but I am extremely happy with bazzite and plan to stick with it (or other immutable OSes) going forward.
Linux Mint!
It’s based on Ubuntu, which means broad support for basically everything, including niche things like the Mullvad VPN client.
Mint has been around for a long time and they have had plenty of time to prove their place as a stable and reliable alternative.
Their software center includes well integrated support for Flatpaks, which is a a must have for things like Steam.
Mint is polished both visually and technically speaking. It’s a great general purpose option for both beginners and experienced users.
However. I might not be as ‘cool’ as some other new shiny players, which seems to be important for some, but I don’t feel comfortable recommending something that most likely last for a few years.
Mint is not something that I use myself, but it’s what I generally recommend to most users. I hope that excludes me me as some Mint fanboy.
I use Mint for gaming (Steam), some light development and AI work and all everyday computing tasks. It works really well and with minimal hassle. The cool kids will scoff, but for people who just want to get stuff done it’s great.
Second that, ubuntu sucked, but mint is great so far.
My go-to advise for people new to linux or just wanting something that works is Linux Mint (Or Ubuntu if you don’t mind the commercial aftertaste). End of discussion.
It is based on Ubuntu packages which are well maintained (things just work), it has been around and popular for a very long time, has a big and active community, and it prioritises ease of use.
The only downsides are support for brand new hardware (<6-12 months) which takes a while to be supported. But that doesn’t seem to apply to you.
If you want bleeding edge, extensive customizations, or a cool unconventional desktop you can check out any kind of desktop.
I like discussing distros as much as the next person. But in my long distrohopping career I realised that with new or novice linux users it’s best to stick to the easiest, most out of the box experience. I would argue this is linux mint.
I’ve seen too many times that people send new linux users to the most wild distro’s and then be suprised that the user gives up on linux completely after a week.
If you want to get some terminal/technical experience or like to make your hands dirty feel free to experiment.
But make your feet wet in the shallow well known puddles.Can second this - My PC is Arch BTW but my partner, on my recommendation, installed Mint. Smooth af install and I almost never taught them a terminal command because it has this easy enough repo library app, and prompts for updates. Things just work.
Thank you for understanding where I’m coming from lol. Mint supposedly, with enough tinkering, can handle all my use cases?
Don’t end up in the Ubuntu train, just avoid from the start. If you want Mint, go with the debian based Mint. Ubuntu was good 15 years ago. Don’t get yourself involved if you’re starting out. Mint DE is good. I think Fedora with KDE is honestly the best place to start. Then just turn on Flatpaks in Discover settings if they are not on by default.
I love how there are already 38 replies. Linux distro questions are like Lemmy catnip, heh.
Fort what its worth:
-
I have very similar hardware: 7800, 3090, 1440p ultrawide, NVMe+SATA
-
Similar needs (GoG, game modding, python, Plex, photo backup)
-
Problems with linux before.
CachyOS has been my “end boss” distro.
Ive had the same stable partition for like ~3 years now, which Ive never had on linux so long. Its just perfect in so many ways, like development libs being optimized, and every gaming/optimization package you could ever want being packaged by the distro. It saved me from getting hacked or screwing up my own system in a few ways.
THAT BEING SAID,
I still dual boot to (heavily neutered) Windows. Some games, like Cyberpunk, just seem to perform slightly (but measurably) better on Windows when I A/B benchmark them, even when I try to make linux the best case scenario.
And some things I do (like HDR content wheb hooked up to a TV, or rendering HEIF files) still have some quirks on linux.
You dont have to choose. You can keep a tiny Windows partition, and/or a shared NTFS partition that both linux and Windows can access.
You dont have to choose. You can keep a tiny Windows partition, and/or a shared NTFS partition that both linux and Windows can access.
How is support for NTFS these days? Any degradation in performance or stability if I run games off a separate NTFS drive?
In my experience it works with some games but doesn’t with others. And if it breaks, the game just stops without any error message/information (you can get some info on the terminal). I would avoid it if at all possible. NTFS support is also overall still rather poor (e.g. my Mint install recently stopped working with NTFS drive until I ran chkdsk on Windows).
deleted by creator
I haven’t benchmarked NTFS vs Linux partitions in games, but it’s fine. No stability issues. You can absolutely install GoG games there, and run the same files in Linux or Windows.
I have run benchmarks for more extreme workloads (like writing tens of thousands of image files for a dataset), and Linux F2FS and XFS tends to handle it waaay better than NTFS. But this isn’t really applicable to gaming.
The issue, as always, is the classic Linux thing if “you have to configure it right.”
It’s best to edit the NTFS drive’s mounting options, in /etc/fstab, and put it in a special “compatibility” mode to work better with Windows. I am away from my PC, but I can find the documentation later if you wish.
Reading Bazzite’s website, it seems very strict that NTFS is unsupported and outright catastrophic.
NTF
If you are coming from Windows and plan to game on a secondary drive with games already installed on it, then we regret to inform you that the NTFS filesystem is unsupported for PC gaming on Bazzite.
Playing games off of NTFS causes various issues, including but not limited to games not launching at all, and will eventually result in data corruption and permanent data loss!
Well it’s been no issue for me, for various workloads.
Come to think of it, I’ve had fewer issues with NTFS than ext4 (which freaks out when writing of a bunch of files for some reason). I’d still pick XFS or F2FS if you don’t need any Windows access to the data, but still.
Like I said, most of the issues are from not using the mount options above. It’s possible that Bazzite just doest know to default to those, as they are pretty obscure.
I’d appreciate that thank you
Another plus of CachyOS: the Arch wiki, suppemented by their own.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS#Prevent_creation_of_names_not_allowed_by_Windows
(linked from there): https://man.archlinux.org/man/mount.8
https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/automount_with_fstab/
Here’s how my /etc/fstab file (which controls how drive partitions are mounted at boot) looks:
UUID=30F6DF29F6DEEDDA /home/alpha/Windows ntfs3 defaults,lazytime,sys_immutable,uid=1000,gid=1000,exec,windows_names,discard,ro,iocharset=utf8 0 0 UUID=1496470F9646F132 /home/alpha/Storage ntfs3 defaults,lazytime,sys_immutable,uid=1000,gid=1000,exec,windows_names,discard,rw,iocharset=utf8 0 0-
lazytimeanddiscardare performance things for SSDs. -
sys_immutablemarks files with the “system file” attribute in Windows (like stuff in the Windows folder) as unchangable on linux, as you don’t want to mess with these. -
uuid/gid explicity sets the owner as me, as Windows does not handle granular file ownership like linux does, hence its best to default to a user explicitly.
-
iocharset=utf8andexecare probably redundant, but makes sure it doesn’t use an ancient linux defaut. -
I will quote the
windows_namesdescription from the link above:
Prevents the creation of files and directories with a name not allowed by Windows, either because it contains some not allowed character (which are the characters “ * / : < > ? \ | and those whose code is less than 0x20), because the name (with or without extension) is a reserved file name (CON, AUX, NUL, PRN, LPT1-9, COM1-9) or because the last character is a space or a dot. Existing such files can still be read and renamed.
Note I have the Windows partition set as
ro. Read-only. So linux can read files of the windows partition, but can’t write or change anything, just in case./Storage is my SATA drive, which I have set as
rwso linux can write files too.
And FYI, I have my linux partition (and a secondary NVMe drive) set as f2fs. I’ve been happy with that filesystem for a long time:
UUID=787e85c8-5a65-4265-ad91-de756ac2a8d3 / f2fs defaults,gc_merge,lazytime 0 1
A lot of issues you see surrounding NTFS (like games not working or reported corruption) are because people and distros don’t set these options.
But CachyOS may default to some of this by now. I set this up explicitly a long time ago.
-
-
Love Linux Mint for the easy transition away from Windows.
Fun story about why I’m such a curmudgeon about this:
Long before Proton even existed, I once researched how to run a Windows VM for gaming on a Linux host machine, with GPU passthrough. At the time I had an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia discrete GPU, so I figured the iGPU could run the host, while the discrete GPU could run the guest.
I asked around reddit and some of my tech savvy friends on what the best distro would be to accomplish this. A few people steered me toward Debian, because I expressed concern that the system wouldn’t be stable or would be difficult to work with.
Well, turns out Debian was a fucking terrible choice. First I had graphics driver problems, naturally. Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian. So I had to learn to add those. Then I had to learn how to stop Debian from recognizing the nvidia GPU during boot, so that the PCI device could be reserved for the passthrough. That was a monumental headache to figure out. And finally, once everything was set up, I learned that nvidia had more or less disabled their consumer-grade cards from being used in a virtual machine. I spent over a month trying to get that working, and eventually just said fuck it and stayed on Windows. And I caught a ton of flak for that, because obviously I should have known that nvidia was a bad choice of GPU, and I should have just purchased an AMD GPU instead… in the middle of GPU mining bubble, when cards were going for $500 a pop.
I’m really hoping to not have a repeat of that experience.
Yeah, some people are really bad at recommending a Distro for specific usage.
When I started with Linux, quite a while back, I was recommended gentoo.
It’s now my least favorite choice 😁
When I started with Linux, quite a while back, I was recommended gentoo.
Are you sure that wasn’t just a cruel joke? Lol
Actually, I’m not really sure. I mean I was sure at that time that it was a recommendation but as I am an autist (unbeknownst to me at that time) it could’ve been one of those ‘obviously’ not serious recommendations.
Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian.
Debian has a non-free repo containing non-open-source software that it hasn’t historically enabled by default, but I don’t think that that’d apply to qemu. I’m pretty sure that’s all open-source.
goes looking.
qemu’s been in the Debian repos since…checks sarge, which was released as a stable release in 2005.
And it was in main, not non-free, so it should have been there as an out-of-the-box enabled repo:
https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20050312T000000Z/pool/main/q/qemu/
QEMU only came out in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
QEMU is free software originally developed by Fabrice Bellard; the first preview release was in 2003.
It looks like it was packaged in Debian unstable since 2004, though I wouldn’t recommend jumping right on unstable to a new user.
$ apt changelog qemu-system 2>/dev/null|tail -n 15 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org> Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:56:25 +0100 qemu (0.5.2-2) unstable; urgency=low * Fix build problem so bios.bin etc. can be found. (Closes: #237553) -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org> Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:43:00 +0100 qemu (0.5.2-1) unstable; urgency=low * Initial Release. (Closes: #187407) -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org> Wed, 3 Mar 2004 02:18:54 +0100 Fetched 314 kB in 0s (1,431 kB/s) $I don’t know, maybe I’m misremembering a detail, it was 10 years ago. I think I needed KVM as well, maybe that’s what was missing. Either way, I had to add newer repos to an older version. I think the codenames were Jessie and Wheezy.
I’m currently running qemu in trixie because one of my bosses demanded me to run office. It was pretty straight forward, but for some reason i had to create a group and do some permissions tinkering for it to work… nothing too complicated. I dont really remember what issues i had with it.
Currently i managed to set a share folder, keys to give orders to the host (mainly to switch back to civilization quickly) and also i convinced my boss that internet isnt working (it’s working from day 0) so she cant force me to use one drive.
I will say it was a good decision to just separate my work PC from my home PC. I didn’t want to end up like that guy who got his company hacked just because he was running a vulnerable version of Plex Media Server. So I have a Windows laptop just for remoting into work and nothing else.
bazzite is really great and user friendly
highly recommend and run it myself for years
