this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I’m dangerously close to moving my gaming pc to Linux. What’s the consensus for the best distro for gaming?
I’m comfortable enough with *nix, as my daily is MacOS and I have a home lab/server.
I use Bazzite. I like it a lot.
As an avid CachyOS user, yes, Bazzite is amazing and every new Linux user (who games) should use it.
What’s the story on integrated amd gpu support? I know it’s technically supported, but would love to hear from others on how it actually feels.
AMD graphics hardware is extremely well supported on every distro out of the box. The Steam Deck, for instance, uses an AMD iGPU.
Supported by the Linux kernel, so it works out of the box.
If you have an AMD GPU then you're in for a great time. I built my PC last year and went all AMD. Ever heard of "plug-n-play"? That's the definition of it. All I had to do on Cachy is click a button called "install gaming packages". On Bazzite, you don't even click a button, it is all there out of the box.
No issues whatsoever if you have AMD
Can I use bazzite as my main distro for regular use and coding besides just gaming or it’s more focused on gaming alone and I should dual boot another distro for my non gaming needs?
You can use Bazzite to code just fine. The great thing about OS like Bazzite is it's so easy to switch to many other atomic/immutable distros. You're not locked in. You can just 'rebase' it to Aurora with a command, which is the development focused version by the same team.
Yes, especially if it's your first distro and you haven't learned habits from non immutable distros. Distrobox and flatpak cover most, and technically, you can install other stuff with rpm-ostree, at the cost of some space and longer update times the more you layer on.
I personally had some trouble wrapping my head around distrobox while using bazzite and trying to install coding dependencies, but I've been having a great time gaming and programming on Nobara! The nice thing with Bazzite is the integrated distrobox which lets you run something under any linux OS (and even windows, I think?), and should theoretically be good for coding, so if you spend more time than me you should be able to program just fine. Maybe VSCode with remote ssh addon or something.
I think they even have a developer version of Bazzite. Not sure what the differences are though.
Bazzite for gaming no question, thing just works, I can use Linux fine, and very competent in windows also, but with gaming I just want a system I turn on and play, not faff with, I have been using Bazzite almost since it's beginnings, and am legitimately shocked at how turn key they have that distro for its use case.
There is no "dedicated" one for gaming. Ubuntu Mint, Debian are solid ones. I run Mint MATE personally
I would only hazard against Debian for gaming because of it's slower update cycle (yes yes you could use unstable or sid..), so performance improvements or fixes will take longer to get to you.
Otherwise I completely second your comment; OOP, just pick anything mainstream like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Bazzite, Pop!_OS, you'll be fine on any of those. Once you're comfortable with whatever you chose, then you'll be more informed on picking a distro more suitable for your liking.
As an experienced Linux user, I just migrated my last windows machine to Debian sid, my gaming PC. And it's great. But I started on stable, and moved to sid after a few weeks, and it really wasn't an issue for gaming or general use. My partner's gaming computer is still on stable.
But yeah for someone less familiar, Bazzite and Mint are great choices. Pop! OS if you like the look of it, or Zorin OS if you like its look. You can always try something new if you're interested in its features.
https://bazzite.gg/
PopOS in my opinion. It (mostly) solves the issue of getting the drivers needed to run GPUs.
i tried monjaro and garuda, seem to have had the best luck so far with pop_os out of the box. running an AMD ryzen 7 9800x3d and RTX 5070-- other distros apparently hated these things
Which driver does it install? Does it choose or do you? I’m curious how the installation process compares to Ubuntu. My install is a little borked because I started with Xorg and AMD and 22.04 and switched to Wayland and Nvidia and 24.04 all around the same time. It works but was a PITA to reconfigure everything.
It will choose for you, but you can select specific drivers if you’d like. I’ve only had to mess with installing specific drivers on edge cases.
Did you notice if GPU video decoding works in the browser? Eg VP9, h.264? I’d been struggling to get it to work with Wayland and suspect it isn’t possible.
Nvidia doesn't support vaapi, so when I still had an nvidia card I needed to install a compatibility layer like this. You might have more problems if you want to use a Chromium based browser though
I tried I installing that already but I think it just won’t work with the snap version of Firefox.
Yea, as the other person mentioned, to my knowledge (which is limited) the video decoding in the browser on Linux tends to be browser and hardware specific. I know it’s gotten easier over the past couple years tho.
Bazzite is great!
I’ll take a risk and say Fedora KDE Plasma flavor. Rolling release so highly current drivers, and it’s done a great job with my games.
It’s what I run on my laptop and gaming mini-pc’s and everything runs great.
Thats what I use. No real complaints.
I second this. I use GNOME with extensions instead of KDE, but that's just personal preference.
I used Pop_OS! for about a year before moving to Fedora. I got a new AMD video card and needed the latest kernel drivers. Fedora has the rolling release model that got me what I needed, and since it's one of the "big 3" upstream distros, I know it's reliable.
Cachyos seems like the general recommendation. Haven't used it myself, but I've used its kernel so I guess that counts for something.
I run CachyOS, it works great for me. It's not the easiest one, but I like the rolling release style and it's by far the fastest distro I've used (cold boots to gnome desktop in maybe 10 seconds).
I have never heard of Cachyos until this comment.
It's very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It's very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.
Their proton ran BL4 about 10% faster than Valves for my specific hardware. IDK what they are doing but it might as well be magic.
Cachy is the most popular distro on distrowatch. Has been for a month or more. That’s a good place to get the list of current distros.
I love CachyOS but you need to be a certain kind of nerd who can handle updates breaking stuff. Or more importantly, willing to RTFM and prevent a lot of it.
Basically I need to read these two sites before I update:
https://archlinux.org/news/
https://cachyos.org/blog/
Rule of thumb is to not update constantly/daily. Nor should you update too seldomly. Weekly or monthly is the usual. If that sounds like a PITA then yeah, that's why it's not recommended.
my 'arch based' system is a cinnamon-flavoured manjaro. manjaro gets shit on for reasons, one of them being they hold back updated packages for a bit.. which is basically what you recommend, and it's what i usually do anyway--defer updates for awhile (even on windows), unless it's a super critical issue that could actually be a problem.
that manjaro desktop has been solid, never once messed-up an update even with the aur packages i have installed, and even if it's been a month or two since it last updated.
The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.
I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don't believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn't get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.
This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren't into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.
Yeah, Bazzite has the best word in town for a gaming distro.
I use Fedora after trying Bazzite and Pop-OS. Pop had some quirks I wasn't a fan of and Bazzite was too locked down but I'll admit, it worked out of the box with no fuss at all.
The general consensus is that you shouldn't be selecting your distro based on gaming, all of the modern well maintained distros will be relatively the same performance. In my opinion you should select your distro first on how well maintained it is, then on stability, & then how well you know how to fix issues. Although I don't follow my own advice since I use arch but that is because I am far more accostumed to that ecosystem.
Pop_os works well.
Bazzite if you're expecting it to work without any required reading
I'll probably be going fedora aurora, it seems more solid but would require more setup
I'm running OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Works great.
I'm installing Nobara right now. Will check in.
I use Garuda for gaming, but most would likely recommend Bazzite.
My issue is around video card. From what I’ve seen Linux drivers for the Arc B580 are minimal at best.
I've tried them all. CachyOS is the best by a mile, IMHO. Been daily driving on my RTX 4080 rig (and my Lenovo laptop) for almost 2yrs. Haven't found a game I can't run.