this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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The real hard part of linux is decision. I'm indecisive af so deciding a distro and then a de took forever. I'm still going back and forth on gnome and plasma. My only issue with gnome is I cant seem to get my top bar centered (cant find extensions) and only in the middle which was easy on plasma.
I bounced between them both. Decided on Mint with Cinnamon because it just works without fuss.
cinnamon is like the perfect middle ground. it's not as painful to use as gnome, not as buggy as kde, but it still has a ton of customization.
Yeah. I had a perfect gnome setup for myself, but then arc menu stopped working with dock to panel randomly and now wont turn on. No idea how to uninstall it.
I've been fighting kde on Kubuntu
fighting is a good way to describe it. i see why people like it, i just don't know how they can stand it. i would love it if it was as stable as the others. btw kubuntu lts uses a very old plasma version, it's probably going to be better if they ever finish updating it to 6.
Go for opensuse tw with plasma 😇then you have always the newest tested snapshot
I like Arch because I love minimalist stuff and love having the latest software available. However, I always had small niggles where my Linux experience would fail me and end up spending time trying to fix it. In the end I booted more into Windows to just avoid it. I wiped and installed Mint at the weekend as I wanted to spend less time tinkering and just using it instead. I'm happy with the decision so far.
If you are indecisive, and want to game, get Nobara.
Its pretty much ready to go out of the box, regularly updates, and has tools to make updating things like SteamTinkerLaunch and GEProton easy and effortless.
Went with cachy, works well.
I have no idea how people keep recommending that distro to beginners and regular end users only based on what the experience is like right after installing it.
It was such a pain daily driving it for couple of months even for experienced user. updates breaking stuff every now and then, packages reverting versions oddly, causing conflicts in plasma packages, when using SteamDeck mode it would auto-install updates on boot without asking and bootlooping for no reason until I disconnect it from the network, plymouth theme changing randomly. Usually to troubleshoot I had to go to their Discord to see what broke this time. I mean, fine, but this is an unstable tinkerer purely community-driven distro, not meant for those who just want easy time dealing with their PCs. Besides, none of that shit happens on just regular plain Arch btw, once setup properly it updates just fine.
EDIT: maybe it's any better in Nobara 41?
I've used Nobara since..38? I think? and not encountered any of those issues. Its been stable, easy to use, user friendly, and most importantly.. absolutely flawless for gaming, without having to do any annoying shit like compiling my own version of STL to install it and stuff like that.
Honestly, in my experience its easier and more friendly than Ubuntu. . Which is saying a lot, since Ubuntu is basically the linux for new people.
Honestly, I only have one complaint slash negative thing to say about the my entire Nobara experience, and that is I wish the upgrading (Like going from 40 to 41) was more automatic, like it is with ubuntu where you just click yes and it gets to work.. But that isnt to say upgrading is hard or obnoxious, GE puts out an almost idiotproof guide on how to do it each time a new iteration releases that you can copy the commands from and do it without issue.
Yeah the amount of choices is overwhelming. Luckily desktop environment shouldn't make or break the experience for anyone. KDE is kind of buggy, but there are so many customization choices. Ultimately I still ended up preferring cinnamon.
yeah we tend to distrohop a bit before settling with something, and maybe something will change down the line that makes you wanna hop again.
its part of the process for some people.