Hey folks!
Thinking of switching back to Linux. I was running PopOS about 1.5 years ago and was pretty happy with the gaming aspect of things, but I was playing a lot of VALORANT back then, and I got sick of dual booting. That is less the case now, so I would like to try going back to Linux for the majority of my gaming / streaming setup, and just use Windows for the handful of games like Destiny 2 that won’t run on Linux.
I am fairly new to Linux. Don’t mind learning some terminal stuff, but I am basically a noob so it does need to be pretty easy to start with. Got a NVIDIA 3080 and AMD CPU if that matters at all.
Recommend me a distro please fellow penguin gamers.
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I was using Linux Mint when I made the switch and it was great cause everything was just working, no tinkering needed. I want to mention https://nobaraproject.org/ though, cause it’s a modified Fedora version that works very well for gaming too.
I’ve had Nobara running on my gaming PC for over a year and it’s worked fantastic. I was using Fedora previously but was having some issues figuring out how to get Blender to properly utilize the GPU for rendering. It worked seamlessly once I made the switch to Nobara.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not install SteamOS?
There’s no official installer for steamos, only a recovery image for the steam deck. Then, some people in their free time hacked that image to allow installing on other hardware (except Nvidia GPUs) but imho not very easy
Huh? the first thing that comes up when I google SteamOS is DIY install instructions.
Is that perhaps HoloISO? A community made version of SteamOS
Nope, first party SteamOS
This is an old version which was for SteamOS devices, the Steamdeck has a completely revamped OS which has not that much in common with the old one.
That SteamOS used Debian as base, the new SteamOS 3 Arch with countless of adjustments to make the usage of the Steamdeck a joy.
I really wouldn’t install the old SteamOS as of now, there won’t be an upgradepath because they use different bases, there are countless of better alternatives out there and maybe they will release SteamOS 3 for custom devices in the future.
Got it, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the information!
Put simply, currently Steam OS doesn’t have the hardware support of your average distro
The posted install instructions say its just Debian. I would assume it would have Debian’s hardware support?
Ahhhhh, so not SteamOS 3, an older version
Modern SteamOS is based on Arch
PopOS is shit. Use anything else.
I use Endeavour. It’s not necessarily easy and not necessarily hard but there’s a Calamares installer and the website has really good instructional articles and forums. Comes with Dracut now which is super fast compared to mkinitcpio. Everything runs great for me and I have similar hardware (same GPU, AMD 7800X3D proc). Tbh I would just recommend rolling release for gaming.
endeavourOS! It’s pretty much Archlinux with a gui installer and some helpful things for new users. I recently installed it on a spare drive on my gaming PC with AMD/nvidia and everything just worked after installing steam.
I will have to check this on out too! Thank you.
If you’re newer to Linux I recommend Garuda as a beginner distro. It’s very similar to Endeavor as an Arch base, but has some friendly GUI options like Snapper bootable backups for easily undoing bad updates and an update script that takes care of mirror list and orphan notifications. People complain about bloat in Garuda and while there is some it’s also helpful bloat, still less than Windows, and has negligible impact on modern hardware
