A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
You must log in or register to comment.
Fedora or Ubuntu. No need to overthink it. They are the two biggest distros in popularity by far (except Arch, which probably beats Fedora), so you have access to maximum mindshare and previous troubleshooting.
Including Arch, these three distros are among the most polished, stable, and well-documented. Arch takes quite a bit more effort, so a beginner without much time on their hands should start with Ubuntu or Fedora.
Anyone in these comments claiming there is a big difference between “gaming distros” and any other is flat wrong.
Any distro works. It’s about the initial experience they want without having to fuss about changes. You can switch Desktop Environment on any distro easily, none of them offer massive gaming performance differences over the others. It’s subjective. For a beginner, don’t recommend immutable. That’s pretty much it.
LMDE 7 and send it. Regular mint has Ubuntu nonsense baked in, lmde is basically the same end user experience and smooth Debian jazz underneath.
Like someone else said, steam, heroic.
I’d avoid any of the gamer distros.
Dual booting is fine. Microsoft destroying bootloaders is mostly a meme off a few bugs. Any distro that ships an up to date kernel and drivers is good. Fedora/Ubuntu. Bazzite is kinda weird for gamers because it just makes every problem harder to solve. If you never tinker then its fine but Bazzite feels more restrictive than windows without knowing how it works.
Mint (LMDE). It might actually be easier to use than windows. My dead dad could use it and he was a moron. I held out for quite a while to try out ‘cooler’ distros but yeah, Mint is what I’m telling anyone moving from windows to use now.
Just install Mint. Honestly, “gamer” Linux is a pretty silly concept. You can install Steam and Lutris on any distro which gets you access to basically all modern PC gaming. Even something as slow to embrace change as Debian has recent enough drivers and kernels available.
I would recommend installing Heroic Launcher too. It works good for GoG, Epic & Amazon games.
Side question: his job is asking him to run work programs on his personal machine? If they are not willing to provide a work laptop or if it is something that does not require powerful hardware to run, I feel like in that situation I would buy a burner laptop off ebay to run the work thing on.
That’s just my personal preference, but I do not mix work and personal things on the same computer.
So I can address this from my experience, their mileage may vary: sometimes it’s about saving yourself time. Say if your normal daily driver is a desktop for some reason, but you’re on call to do a task. You can (in theory) do that task from your home PC or you can drive in to the office for (arbitrary round trip time) to do it ‘properly’. Even when I used windows at home /and/ had a work laptop I still maintained a VM (an ersatz air gap) for work shit on my personal PC for convince sake.
The Bazzite KDE version is a great option if you want an easy-to-use Linux system. As long as you install apps from the built-in Bazaar store, it’s hard to mess anything up, and it already includes most of the software you’ll need so it usually works well out of the box.
If your friend has to troubleshoot issues on bazzite, it’s better not to install extra system packages on top of the core OS (“layering”), because that can sometimes cause problems and make things harder to fix.
You can also set up a tool called Winboat, which lets you run Windows inside Bazzite; it integrates nicely and isn’t too difficult to configure.
Bazzite is the first recommendation if the apps your friend needs are available on Flathub. If they need more complex software that only comes as Debian (.deb) packages, Linux Mint is probably a better choice because installing non‑Flatpak apps there is much easier, although the trade‑off is that installing a lot of extra packages can potentially break the system if you are not careful. If they mostly stick to the Mint software store, it should stay stable and they are unlikely to run into problems.
Honestly, my recommendation for new users who are into gaming is Bazzite. Just install everything through the software store and it just works. Well, everything that’s available as a flatpak at least. Steam comes preinstalled, as do all the drivers (among some other various gaming-oriented things like kernel optimizations and Lutris), so it’s basically just install and done. The software store, Bazaar, will find basically anything a normal user needs. The nice thing about atonic distros is that you generally don’t need to do anything through the command line,as installs are perfectly consistent across all computers (so no random things breaking in the background without someone else noticing and either filing a bug report for you in the beta, or fixing the issue outright). After over a decade of Linux use, I’ve never found an easier distro. I honestly have switched to it as my main distro because I love Fedora, and the atomic features are nice (and Bazzite is just a little nicer for my use case than Kinoite).
When I set someone up with Bazzite, I just tell them to install everything through the software store, and I rarely get questions other than “how do I install this software that isn’t available on Linux”, which I usually meet with a recommendation for an alternative, or if it’s really critical, I’ll have them install through Bottles or something. I always mention the “no Adobe or Autodesk” caveot before they install, so I never really get questions about that except for “well, what would you recommend I use instead?”
As to answer your questions directly:
- It is very common, so you can find Bazzite specific answers,
- As far as I’ve used it (which is a couple years now) things never break, so finding solutions that work in other distros doesn’t tend to apply for me (except for when I want to make custom scripts like when I bound a mouse button to hard mute and unmute my mic, though I just had to look up generic Pipewire stuff)
- Everything installs as a flatpak, so selinux is essentially completely unnoticed. I’ve never had a single issue with selinux and I’m a power user. I’ve used Fedora-based distros for many years and only ever encountered selinux issues on my server, and that was for low-level processes that aren’t relevant to desktop use (for instance, setting up NUT to automatically power off all devices on my network during a power outage when the UPS battery is low)
Kubuntu is fine. I’ve been running that without issues for months now.
Bazzite is good too. But do push for the KDE version.
I have bazzite, it also includes graphics drivers ready to go which is nice. If you’re going to use steam for gaming i find it great. But this distro is not needed for gaming, one can install and game on any of the popular distros. You’re friend needs to try a few and see what feel best for them.
