Linux gamers, what distro are you currently on?

nlm@beehaw.org to Operating Systems@beehaw.org – 89 points –

I'm currently on Win11 but I'm getting that familiar Linux itch and want to dual boot a while again. I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it's so big and well supported by most things.

I've run Arch in the past but I've gotten too old and lazy for that if I'd be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though.. and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.

Not sure what I'd try out first this time so I figured I'd get some inspiration from you guys!

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I've been using base Debian with KDE Plasma for the past month or two and gaming on it, and it's worked really well, about as good as any other distro I've used. I always eventually end up back on Debian regardless of what I try using. I could technically get a better experience on rolling release because of mesa and kernel updates, but I've never noticed much of a difference, ymmv depending on hardware though.

They recently started supporting closed-source firmware officially so there's no longer that notorious hunt to find the right .iso just to get your wifi and nvidia GPUs to work.

That's really the nice thing about linux, as long as you know what you're doing you can probably get any distribution to work pretty much just as well for your own needs.

Interesting that they've started supporting closed source firmware.. I thought they were very much against that?

They're still very focused on having a primarily open source system, but they held a vote and it was decided that it's best for the computer to actually work and then try to be as open source as possible after that.

They did offer the firmware before, but you had to go out of your way to enable it and they didn't provide security updates, was considered unofficially supported. With this, they're considered officially supported, on by default if needed, and get security updates.

If you're curious about the vote they did, it was this one and Proposal E is what won. https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote\_003#proposere