If you want to game, then picking a "gaming distro" probably is the right choice.

Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.

It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.

So easy it requires a 140 lines of howto: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-se...

It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/gaming/proton/ would be the relevant set of instructions that a user would find upon typing "fedora steam". And it's maybe ten lines of instruction or a couple pages of GUI, because they're including such steps as “scroll down” and “close the window”.

Launch the terminal as first step. Yeah. That's why no good.

Or read the other instructions that don't involve a terminal at all.

This is part of the installer now. New users will select this when setting the distro up

That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).

The new installer isn't as good as Ubuntu's IMHO, but holy moly it's so much better than the old one. I recently tried installing Fedora Silverblue (which still has the old installer), and besides being terribly confusing, it also errored out consistently This led me to install regular Fedora and then convert it to Silverblue, so I got to compare the two installers. It's not even funny how much better it is.

I've used the official nVidia drivers, they definitely don't work well compared to AMD/Intel on Linux. They're usable and more or less stable, but on my computer I was seeing stuff like window contents freezing, graphics stuttering, screen tearing on video playback, the mouse cursor lagging when there was high CPU usage, etc. and it all went away when I switched to an AMD card. Everyone I've talked to has has the same experience: weird performance hiccups or glitches that go away as soon as you stop using nVidia.

I've used the official Nvidia drivers on Linux for 5 years now and had excellent performance and few or no graphical glitches, with most issues coming early on. None within the last 2 years. Never experienced high CPU or freezing.

My cards have been a 2080, 3070 Ti, 4070M, and 4090. I could barely get an AMD card (6600 or something?) to work.

Now you have talked to someone who has not had that experience. And everyone I have talked to says they have had an experience either like mine, or like mine minus issues with AMD.

Performance is good but there are a few caveats. Namely dx12 perf (identified and being worked on), vram limit stutter (doesn't page to system memory well), HDR enabling requiring basically a hack because Nvidia doesn't want to implement color managent wayland uses, and some other annoyances.

Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...

The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.

Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.

I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.

GP wasn't making a point about hand-editing configuration files, or rather, was obliquely making an obsolete point; he might as well have been complaining about modelines in xorg.conf.

Itemized bill:

Chalk mark $1

Knowing where to put it $999

Tell me you don’t understand how gaming devices work.

Repeatedly after me: you boot, you buy a game, you play. That’s it.

“Repeat after me”, and then describes the normal flow after steam is installed, in a thread about choosing an operating system to install on bare hardware…

NobaraOS is Fedora based and has solved a lot of these issues. They have a separate ISO to use if you have an Nvidia card that will handle all the akmods drivers for you for example.

It's also maintained by one guy. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the long term viability of the project.

My advice to anyone looking to make the switch is to just use Ubuntu until you're comfortable with the way a linux desktop works. The "gaming optimizations" for these enthusiast distros are marginal at best, usually just margin of error type stuff. Frankly, in my own tests gaming performance is just as good if not BETTER on Ubuntu in the general case than most other distros even the ones that market themselves as "optimized for gaming".

If you install something like Bazzite all of a sudden you're in the deep end of needing to learn how immutable distros work. It will turn people off that don't give a damn about this stuff.

Ubuntu is simple, easy to configure from the GUI, works with most things out of the box - including Steam - and is supported like a first-class citizen by the vast vast VAST majority of application developers.

Thats what Bazzite is for. (oci/bootc-based fedora for gaming)

Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.

It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.

Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.

Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.

Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.

i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.

Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

What do you mean "PC Gamers"?

It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".

So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.

Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.

I remember what got me to reinstall Windows after running Ubuntu for a week or two several years ago was they switched from Xorg to Wayland and I literally couldn’t watch movies because they switched over without Wayland supporting this?

It was absolutely bonkers to me and soured me from Linux for years.

I’ve administered thousands of Linux boxes but it’s a totally different ball game.

Its JUST gnome thats blocking that protocol.

They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.

[1]: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/

There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.

Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?

Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?

It's an entire login session, steam game mode runs BPM via the game scope compositor, no desktop is loaded in the background, etc. The Steam client also enables hardware controls not available in traditional BPM.

You can look up gamescope-session for more info.

Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.

That’d still come with the limits brought by the old kernels Ubuntu ships.

Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.

Ideally, this would be the best solution, but what happens when the upstream distro packagers disagree with the vision of one of these downstream distro maintainers?

Why don’t you do it?

To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.

Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal.

But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.

I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.

I found it incredibly stupidly easy to break bazzite trying to change something relatively simple that isn’t even a required step most of the time (automatically mount my second internal ssd).

Copy and pasted some change in some file, save, restart, fully totally bricked.

Switching from and to desktop mode works exactly the same as on SteamOS, but if you are not setting up a handheld or HTPC, Bazzite also has regular KDE/GNOME desktop images, and even -dx images like Bluefin. I've been pretty happy with my various Bazzite installations.

> You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.

That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).

I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release.

Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.

I absolute love KDE Plasma but I finally gave up for Mint Cinnamon LTS.

It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.

I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.

Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.

Right, I wanted to add that the journalist will be fine if they immediately update all packages but OTOH this is not what Windows users usually do.

Have you tried updating everything using "sudo pacman -Syu" ?

I just had to update my CachyOS install last night, as some software I wanted to install was just getting 404 responses from the repos. Turns out they don't keep round old packages? I dunno, but the update command above fixed it.

No, I didn't, after the third freeze and reboot I just thought "why am I wasting my time on this crap?", wiped it and installed regular Arch Linux instead. That one was stable out of the box.

I also recently got my FD, also switching to Linux, also chose CachyOS.

Worked great for a day or two but now updates aren't working because of some signing issue or something :|

Maybe I should switch to Fedora or Bazzite before getting too setup...

I concur. I use Linux Mint and I have no problems with gaming.

I couldn't get Rocksmith 2014 running on Mint, which was a real PITA for me

actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.

Is it bad? SteamOS is an Arch based and extremely user friendly gaming-focused distro.

If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.

Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.

It certainly can be for newer printers. I guess my point was that, at some point, you will run into a problem. It might not be connecting a printer but, with an Arch based distro, there is a high likelihood you will need to do some cmdline stuff at some point. In a Mint etc that likelihood is smaller.

New printers implement the print server themselves, which I assume is why CUPS driver support is being deprecated. Basically, they're all HTTP* servers so no driver/etc support is needed.

New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.

I've stopped recommending ubuntu for beginners by default, as the now only-wayland mode is beyond the level I can support

Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it.

The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.

It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.

CachyOS is not an immutable distro.