My teenage son wants to try a new distro for gaming. Our family has been using pop os for years, but he wants to try something new. The main three I see are
- nobara (fedora based)
- garuda (arch based)
- drauger (ubuntu based)
The machine he’s using is a 2018 Intel nuc. It has a strong processor (core i7) but no discrete graphics. I can’t tell which (if any) of the distros above would be better or worse for his case.
Reading around, it seems like Garuda might be slightly more fiddly. And, Drauger I only saw mentioned in a couple of articles, but not on this forum. Are these impressions correct? Do you have any other advice for us?!
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Gaming? Nobara. It is created and optimized for gaming by Glorious Eggroll, creator of Proton-GE. He is the most knowledgable Person I knpw about Linux gaming and therefore Nobara is the right choice for me.
Lol, that was my first thought too, but I was surprised to find that a lot of people are using other stuff, so it got me curious.
I’ve been using Fedora and honestly I’m impressed. Especially since version 39. It’s solid, stable, gaming just works. It requires some initial setup with COPR and installation might not be as straight forward but it’s definitely not hard.
I may get downvoted but make sure you’re using X11 for now because Xwayland latency is real. Wine on Wayland is around the corner but not there yet. And use Steam from COPR not flatpak. Besides that, in my opinion, it’s a dream setup.
Thanks, yeah my impression of Wayland was similar. Curious why not flatpak steam; that’s what he was using before, and it seemed fine.
Honestly it actually may be just fine, I had some trouble from before when I was trying distros and re-learning the current state of Linux (after a 3 years break) and looking back, they may have been related to Wayland or something else entirely instead of flatpak itself.
I may be wrong too but I think game detection on Discord won’t work for flatpak Steam (and flatpak Discord). I may be wrong though.
For me it would be nobara or endevour os. Garuda is too messy imo. I run endeavour, but I don’t know how much gaming is possible on a nuc.
Oh thanks for the endeavor recommendation. It might be a bit too much of a change for us, but I’ll let him take a look.
I’d advice against using EOS. If it breaks and you don’t have the skills to fix it you can prepare yourself for a fresh installation already.
Bazzite has the most buzz recently.
I would also recommend Bazzite, or any Ublue image, but Bazzite is the gaming one.
If you have lower expectations, even a potato able to run (just) a web browser can be a "gaming PC"thanks to cloud gaming. Still, theres no such thing as a “best” distro for (something) – all distros are equally good and able to do any sort of task.
But garuda is hassle free. Just install and game away.
Garuda is perfect for me. I love it.
The biggest danger you’re going to run into is that those distros all lie downstream of the real changes, so non-gaming (and potentially security related) fixes might be slow or incompatible.
If you go with something like Fedora or Ubuntu, there is going to be full support on all the core things, and you can build the gaming experience you want on top. Any changes that Nobara or Drauger are making to their distros you could probably make yourself.
(I’ve never used any of those distros, but I’ve found winehq and other tools on Fedora more than sufficient)
I know that any distro can be a gaming distro in principle, but we don’t really know what changes we should be making to improve his experience, so that’s what we’re hoping one of the gaming distros can help with. I’m fairly comfortable with what I need to do for my daily use, but not so much for games.
The biggest danger you’re going to run into is that those distros all lie downstream of the real changes, so non-gaming (and potentially security related) fixes might be slow or incompatible.
From what I’ve read about Brazzite, their release process seems fairly automated and given that it’s an Universal Blue project, I have faith that this won’t suffer from such problems for the foreseeable future.
They rebuild their images once a day iirc, which should be fast enough even for security related issues. And because of automated updates, systems will probably receive updates more timely than on regular distros (by default, it’s always configurable).
And Brazzite as being a flavor of Universal Blue is already part of a bigger project. As much as I respect the Glorious Eggroll fella, Nobara is basically a one man project.
I’m using Garuda and it’s great. Get the gaming edition distro and it installs most everything you need. Most anything that’s not installed by default is easy to add any time from the setup assistant. It’s simple enough to change the default theme or switch to a different desktop manager.
Garuda is amazing ngl
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