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.
I’m still not sure what he’s trying to achieve by switching. Is he having issues with pop OS? Or does he just want to try something different?
I would say anything Ubuntu based will be so similar as to not be interesting, so maybe pick something different. Nobara and Garuda are different, but I honestly don’t know what they offer to someone looking to try something new since they essentially do all the config for you. So my recommendation is one of the following:
- Fedora - most nobara guides should be compatible, but it does require a little effort to get set up (not a ton, just need to install stuff)
- Tumbleweed - rolling like Arch, but without the upgrade issues; it’s what I use and I think it’s solid
- Mint Debian edition - should be pretty similar to pop OS since Ubuntu/pop OS is based on Debian, but perhaps different enough to be interesting
Those are all major distros and thus should have lots of help available online.
I think he wants to try something different. He was frustrated that gaming on Linux requires “so much fiddling” (the kids today truly have no idea). So he tried installing windows, and that went about as well as you could expect (I did try to warn him, but he had to see for himself). So, he’s ready to reinstall Linux, and I suggested trying a gaming distro just so he doesn’t feel like it was a total waste of time.
He can also dual boot it between two distros. I have both Linux Mint Debian for stability and Garuda for current updates that benefit gaming. I recommend installing Linux Mint first and then Garuda, and use Garuda’s boot manager, which can also be customized pretty well from the setup assistant.
edit: by setup assistant I meant a program that’s available after initial install, not during install.
Oh yeah, the setup assistant from garuda sounds like it might be helpful for him.
Yeah, there’s a few layers to the assistant programs. I should clarify there’s a “Garuda Welcome” program that contains “Garuda Assistant”, “Gamer”, “Settings Manager”, “Network Assistant”, “Boot Options”, etc, where you’ll find various parts of setup, but the main unintuitive part is that there’s a “Setup Assistant” button at the bottom separate from all that, where it does a system update, then provides a tabbed interface for installing non-gaming related programs. You see it when it first installs, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get back to that dialog because I was looking in all the other places, and thought “Setup Assistant” was just for initial setup.
Thanks!!!
Should also clarify that not all programs are available from the welcome/assistant. There’s also Octopi which is the standard package manager, and you can install other package managers from the assistant program.
Should also add a tip that sometimes on a reboot the system may not display anything until you turn the whole thing off and on again. To fix that you go to the boot manager settings in the welcome program and add “nomodeset” to the end of kernel parameters for each linux distro. May need to repeat this after a major update that updates grub, but the param is usually still there in the boot settings program, you just have to select the distro option and click “Apply” to reenable it.
Oh, haha, that’s a weird bug; thanks for the tip.
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.
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.
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.
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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