this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Linux Gaming

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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?
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[–] FrodoSpark@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm using ChimeraOS after using Bazzite and running into crashes a lot. It's been about 2 months but no issues so far. I still search the web for stuff fairly often just because there's so much you can do, like set up Emudeck, modding games (I've been playing FF7 after setting up Seventh Heaven and it's been pretty fun), and I've also added a YouTube TV shortcut that runs in Firefox with uBlock for no ads. At this point I don't have any complaints about it and it really does feel like a console-like experience.

I haven't heard of ChimeraOS before. This looks like a solid contender as far as Arch-based distros go. I don't know if booting into Steam Big Picture is desirable, but I see it ships with Gnome so I assume you can choose to boot to desktop. I'll look into this one too. Thanks for the recommendation!