Operating Systems

My main distro for years has been Mint, but I play around with a several others frequently. For me, it comes down to the package managers I feel most comfortable in (I know apt the best, but I know zypper and pacman ok enough to get by) and the window manager integration. Personally, I prefer Cinnamon and I think Mint has the best integration for it. My only complaint with Mint lately is the difficulty of getting nvidia drivers to work properly. It should be as simple as selecting the driver you want in the driver manager, but secureboot complicates things a bit.

I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.

PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it

Im running good old Ubuntu with gnome. I mostly play terraria, minecraft I and Bethesda rpgs these days so it does everything I need.

I am on Mint, but I have a GPU accelerated VM running Windows 10 for gaming.Its performs very well, but you run into the occasional game that detects VMs and will refuse to run.

NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.

In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.

It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.

I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.

Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.

I'm on Arch right now, migrated to it after almost 2 years on Fedora. I'll probably still go back and forth between the two.

Zorin OS 16.2

Like several others here I am using pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop though so they kind of go hand in hand.

I’ve been running Arco Linux just up till now and have switched to the new Debian 12 release. It have not been to much trouble to get my Nvidia card and Steam running. I mainly switch because of all the updates and “maintenance” that I feel is associated with a Arch system, so kinda like you said.

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

Currently running Fedora on my laptop and Arch on my desktop, though I’ll probably migrate from Fedora to openSUSE next month.

I've been using PopOS for about 3 years now. I found it easier to get Steam to work compared to Linux Mint (can't remember why though). I've never tried Ubuntu or non-Debian based systems.

Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.

@nlm CachyOS. It's Arch based with a bucketload of performance tweaks & bespoke patches, including a kernel scheduler developed by distro maintainers. It also has a small but super-responsive community that tends to resolve issues quite rapidly

Arch/EndeavourOS. Updates for the recent hardware come pretty fast and they are stable. Most of the time I use gamescope from Valve to get better latency.

Not at all an expert, but I'm doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.

Fedora, KDE spin. Been working great, and I'm kinda liking DNF

I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn't even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it's not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I've used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.

I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don't know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn't game.

I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.

Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.

Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.

Without actually installing anything.

This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)