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.
The Bazzite KDE version is a great option, 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.