Operating Systems

NixOS. If you played around with Arch you'll be fine. My only gripe (although it's kind of important) is NVIDIA doesn't work. Call me lazy but I haven't felt like switching to an other distro, plus I'm not much of a hardcore gamer.

Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.

Without actually installing anything.

This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.

Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.

Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!

When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.

Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.

I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.

I'm on Slackware - it's a bit of a pain because Steam is 32 bit so you have to install the compat libs.

For me Fedora is my go-to, but I'm looking at moving to Nobara