I’m putting together a gaming system for the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input. Obviously I’m committing myself to providing a certain amount of tech support no matter what, but I’m wondering if any of these modern Linux distros can provide a user experience at least on par with Windows in terms of ease of use and reliability for someone who doesn’t know how to do much more than check their email and log in to Steam.

So far, I’ve looked at Bazzite, Cachy, Nobara, and PopOS based on what I commonly see recommended here. I’m leaning toward Bazzite based on its stated goal of being friendly to Linux newcomers, and the quality and amount of available documentation. Are there any other distros I’ve missed, or other considerations that might sway my preference?

I’d also like to hear about your subjective experiences with Linux gaming:

  1. What distro are you using for gaming?
  2. How long have you used it?
  3. How often have you had issues that require Linux knowledge and/or searching the web to solve?
  4. Have you had any other minor/annoying complaints?
  • grueling_spool@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I’m disappointed to hear that Mint doesn’t have Plasma 6 yet - I use Plasma 5 daily, so I’m familiar with its issues.

    I’m unfamiliar with btrfs, but I feel like I remember it being a bit controversial at some point. AFAIK ext4 is still standard. Seems like btrfs has gained some popularity though, so I’ll have to give that a look.

    Fedora is probably my next choice after Ubuntu in terms of mainstream non-gaming distros, so I’m happy to see a vote for it.

    Thanks for your insight!

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I recommend BTRFS with snapper for anyone who isn’t an expert, which includes myself.

      With BTRFS with Snapper, should something break your install short of breaking your bootloader, it makes recovery completely idiot proof.

      It is literally a matter of scrolling through a menu that appears for 3 seconds at startup to select an option in the lines of “boot from snapshot”, pick a snapshot in the list that is time stamped to a time/date when your install still worked, let it boot up, make sure it booted up fine, go in the console and type “sudo snapper rollback”, enter your password and then reboot. Bam, you’ve just rolled back your OS to before it got broken.

      It saved my ass a few times and I don’t even know where to begin should I ever try to fix a broken kernel manually without that.