90
Like, why Valve? I was so close to clearing out all the games I was partway through, now I need to add some demos to my backlog (not many, this Next Fest is kinda weak).
Probably could've made it but I haven't picked a distro. I'm planning on turning my desktop into a dedicated gaming computer and not daily driver, because of the malware risk. I wanted something not finicky, something devs would test on as a known quantity, and preferably something Arch-based like SteamOS.
- Garuda (Arch-based)
- Bazzite (Known quantity, immutable, Fedora-based, I don't trust it for some reason)
- Nobara (Proton-adjacent distro, Fedora-based)
- CachyOS (Super fast, Arch-based, presumably finicky?)
- Windows 7 (Based, unsupported by steam, insecure)
Try Bazzite first. It really is the best beginner Linux distro, especially for gaming.
If you decide you want more control, switch to Fedora KDE.
Bazzite and Fedora, in my experience, are the two distros that “just work” best for new users on the widest variety of hardware.
Cachy is fantastic, but I wouldn’t recommend switching to it unless you need even more control and have become very comfortable on the command line. It’s not a distro I would recommend anyone start with.
You will also see Mint recommended often, but I’ve had problems with hardware support — usually on newer builds — and I absolutely hate Cinnamon, its default desktop environment. I would honestly only look at distros that include KDE Plasma out of the box, and Mint does not.
I tried mint and Ubuntu on a jail broken Chromebook and it had no audio, fedora worked out of the box