Optimized gaming distros often have stuff pre-installed, such as nvidia drivers, steam, heroic launcher… But you can pretty much install whatever you want and replicate that behavior.

Bazzite in particular provides a fantastic gaming experience but, in my personal opinion, a bad desktop experience. It’s great for devices used almost exclusively to gaming, not so great if you have to work every day.

If you’ve already installed vanilla arch on your laptop then you’re good to go, that’s the hard part. EndeavourOS has a very user friendly installer but still uses Arch’s official repos. I like to think of it as a quickstart installation, but still feels pretty much like arch. I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to a main computer, especially since I believe their gaming stack is optimized for AMD.

Gaming on arch/endeavour is pretty straight forward

• Install your nvidia drivers
• Install steam
• Go to Steam > Settings > Compatibility and enable “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
• Play your games

Boot up a VM and install vanilla Arch Linux using the wiki instead of archinstall. Notice that Arch Linux isn’t very pretty out of the box and take the time to set some “sane defaults”. Imagine having a person who is new to Linux to jump through all those hoops when they’re not even sure if Linux is for them. Imagine all the little things that could have gone wrong in this process and how a clueless person would react to them.

EndeavourOS is extremely easy to install. Next next next and it’s done. It looks pretty out of the box and has sane defaults. The only reason I don’t recommend Endeavour to newbies is because it lacks a software manager/store, which REALLY help newbies out. The very frequent updates are also not for everyone.

I love EndeavourOS but it’s certainly not for everyone.

Isn’t Pop OS super outdated right now, tho?

Unfortunately this is one of the cases where you’re going to have to do some research.

Check ProtonDB to see how a game plays on Linux. I’m assuming the flight simulator would be problematic.

Usually the periferal drivers are built into the Linux kernel. Your keyboard and mice will just work, gamepads as well. Niche stuff like wheels and flight controllers will likely not work out of the box and you’ll have to find a community based software to support it. Sucks.

If I were you I’d boot a virtual machine or a live USB drive and try it out. If you’re not comfortable with the amount of compatibility just don’t install it. Nothing lost

If you have the exact hardware supported by the SteamOS then you’ll be fine. However, I don’t even know of they support nvidia video cards yet, I believe most of their stack is optimized for AMD cards.

In that sense, installing a more generalist linux distribution will net you a better driver compatibility.

Linux gaming is at a fantastic state right now, you install steam and games work. 20 years ago I would have never believed it to be possible.

Trying from a USB or virtual machine is just a good idea in general. Use Ventoy to put several distros into a single USB stick and try them out. Try your hardware, check which UI you like the most.

If you are tech savvy enough to install Windows, you can easily install Linux as well. If you install any of the big distros you will have a good time.

Linux not supporting kernel level anti-cheats is an amazing feature, in my honest opinion.

It’s not going to happen in this iteration of SteamOS. It remains mostly a gaming “only” distribution.

In C++? I’d rather be shot, thanks :P