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 having a great time with games on NixOS. Steam just works when you enable it. I believe you can specify extra libraries for the filesystem hierarchy hackery, but I haven’t needed to yet. One thing you should know about (if you don’t already) is steam-run which is a simple command line tool that automatically wraps things in a normal FHS. Super convenient for the occasional binary :).

Good to know, thanks! Do you find steam-run to be helpful even for non-steam binaries that need an FHS? Or do you use it mainly for games?

Yeah, exactly! For steam itself on NixOS you don't have to manually use steam-run, but steam-run is a handy little tool to wrap / run other commands with the FHS that NixOS sets up for steam. I've mostly used it to run a few Linux games that I have binaries for, but don't have on steam... I'm pretty sure I used it for another Linux program too, but I can't remember what right now.