I’ve got an old win10 laptop. It’s nothing fancy in 2025, but I use it now and then while traveling, just to have a proper computer on hand. It’s time to move it over to Linux, and I have A LITTLE Linux experience. I work in software dev, so I know my way around CLI, but I don’t have much firsthard experience, other than occasionally using Kali for offsec tools. What are the distros I should be considering for a personal gaming laptop for occasional use for both gaming and occasional general use? Why?

  • Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    I ended up writing for a while on this haha sorry 😅

    A misconception that many people who are new to linux have is that certain distros ate better for certain kinds of use cases. While this is definitely true to an extent, hardware support is pretty good all around for most popular distros, so all that really matters for a mixed use cases like this is differences in how the distro sets up the desktop experience. What one distro offers out of the box is probably available with some tweaking in another distro. What is most important in having a good gaming and general experience is the apps, so make sure that all the apps you want to use have support on Linux, or alternatives are available. For specific game compatibility you can look at https://www.protondb.com/

    In terms of distros, I’ll list a bunch. You can look into them more.

    Bazzite

    • Bazzite is probably the most popular distro with a specific gaming focus. It comes pre-installed and configured with steam and launchers for other games, and has tweaks for gaming out of the box. It is immutable, which means that apps are stored in containers and can’t directly modify the base system, which makes it a lot more secure from accidental breakage, and any changes can be easily reverted.

    CachyOS

    • CachyOS is a distro based on Arch, pre- configured with a variety of themes and desktop environments for whatever desktop style you may want. The handheld version comes with gaming tools pre-installed. Arch generally requires a bit more tinkering than other distros, but CachyOS seems to be pre-configured pretty well so I don’t think it should require much of that.

    General use distros

    These won’t have steam or other launchers installed by default but you can download them with one command so it’s no problem at all. Any distro should work, I use Fedora as I find it to be stable and reliable with my gaming laptop. Mint and Pop!OS are also popular options for new users, although I personally find mint to be not customisable for my tastes. Ubuntu and its derivatives are ubiquitous, but are also at times controversial among linux users. Arch and NixOS are great if you want to customise everything about your OS. CachyOS offers a bit of that without as much hassle.

    • BurntWits@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      I’m not super tech savvy but have used both Bazzite and CachyOS and find them both pretty straightforward. I personally prefer Cachy and it’s what I’m currently running, but both are great for gaming. Bazzite comes with gaming stuff out of the box, and Cachy has it all in one package you can download with a single command, so they’re pretty comparable on that front. I just prefer arch as a base. Hope this helps OP as I was recently in a very similar situation.

    • _cryptagion [he/him]@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      be advised that if you’re doing dev work on Bazzite, you might have to make use of a distrobox depending on the software you use. for example, VSCode is available as a Flatpak, but if you want to use other things with it like NPM, you’ll have much less headache trying to get it to work by installing it in a distrobox.

      https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/integrate_vscode_distrobox.md

      • Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        That’s true, I forgot to mention that, thanks

        Edit: Bazzite has tools for this preinstalled as well so it would be very simple to set up if needed.