In a few previous years (#1, #2), I decided to do a fresh take each time on what the best Linux distribution was for gaming - so I'm back for a 2025 edition of the article that will cause you to tell me how wrong and terrible I am.
What's changed? Well, quite a lot actually. Both previous times I firmly suggested going with plain Ubuntu. However, time moves on, and the software world evolves rather quickly. So I have a new recommendation for you! Why am I even writing this? Sadly, there's still articles out there pushing for tiny completely random fringe distributions and plenty with stupidly outdated and republished information to get to the top of Google.
My current home for a while now, and what I'll recommend you pick up, is Kubuntu. It has all the goodies and support of plain Ubuntu, but with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the same one used on the Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. It has an interface that will be much more familiar to people coming over from Windows, it's more customizable (if you want it) but with a sane default setup that just gets you going quickly.
The latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Kubuntu, Kubuntu 24.04.1, is supported with security and maintenance updates until April 2027. So you can install it and basically forget about it and keep it running and secure for years to come. However, you're likely better off with Kubuntu 24.10 which is more up to date, if you're okay upgrading again when the next version of Kubuntu comes out (Kubuntu 25.04) which is around April 17, 2025. Either way, both work well.
I've been through Fedora, Manjaro, Linux Mint, plain Ubuntu, Arch and many others over the years. No Linux distributions is perfect and they all come with their own set of quirks and problems, just as Windows has its own set of unique issues. To me, Kubuntu just offers the best all around middle-ground of everything you need to get going.
People will argue about Snaps, but for the majority of normal users — it just doesn't matter in the slightest. I use the Spotify, Thunderbird, Telegram and other Snaps and they work great and are kept nicely up to date without me even needing to do anything.
I will suggest though, that you enable Flatpaks from Flathub, so you get the best of all worlds and access to even more easily installable packages. It's incredibly easy to do as well.
You can download Kubuntu from their website.
If you need help and support for Linux and Steam Deck gaming, you can try asking in our Forum and Discord. Don't forget to follow me on Bluesky and Mastodon too while you're at it.
Don't agree with me? That's fine! The benefit of Linux is that there's truly no one-size-fits-all. Leave a comment to tell me how wrong I am. You're still wrong if you disagree though.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
I use Mint, but I probably wouldn't want to say it's the best gaming Linux. It's the best desktop Linux. For the kind of gaming I do, it's good enough . . . but I do mostly turn-based, or strategy kinds of games; if there are things moving around in real time it's probably 2d kind of stuff, like a Survivors-like or some such. So I don't play games that require bleeding edge high performance, so I don't need to worry about the latest software or Gamescope or what have you. If I did, I might not be using Mint because I'd want the latest and greatest and Mint wouldn't give it to me. But it's fine for the stuff I do; any shortcomings from a gaming standpoint are not, for my use-case, nearly important enough to give up the very comfortable desktop experience.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: JarmerQuoting: RaabenQuoting: JarmerQuoting: RaabenI just moved back to Fedora (from Tumbleweed). Still feels like my comfortable home after all these years - stays up to date, no big issues with upgrades, fast. I do think Anaconda blows as an installer but after it's done and I check a few boxes for repos I have just about anything I would ever need.
I'm doing the same right now. I'm just ready to get off of rolling releases. I've had so many problems within the past year that have resulted in non booting systems, booting but with no GUI at all, and more. I've had to do so many snapper rollbacks I can't even count them.
Alot of my annoyance was using Packman and having it become out of sync and stay that way for days (or weeks) at a time. Heck, half the time without Packman, the updatews would fail with incompatible dependencies. Worst I had a few months back was the firmware package that completely broke the GUI and I had to manually get inm find and reinstall an old version. Most of my time with it was "boring" enough that I never felt the need out of my way to start over and I ran it for the better part of two years now. I just had free time not long after 41 came out and thought, why not?
I'm sure there are issues to be pointed out but I've had nothing but smooth sailing on Fedora except when I've gone in poking things and breaking them myself. I haven't compared how up to date it stays with a full rolling release, but the bigger things to me (kernel, Mesa) seem to be reasonably close in update time.
ha! I'm almost entirely the same! I got sooooo annoyed with Packman over time. I'm a little worried that using rpmfusion on Fedora (what I'm on now) will be the same annoyance since it's a 3rd party repo, but time will tell. I am hoping that since Fedora is a much larger distro in terms of usage it'll have better support/maintainers for rpmfusion compared to packman in tumbleweed.
I don't recall any issues from RPMFusion over the years I've used it. It's technically 3rd party but almost in name only, as I understand alot of Fedora maintainers work on that too. Alot of it is essentially being the opt in repo for technically non-free things they don't want to risk shipping under the corporate brand (drivers, codecs).
3 Likes, Who?
Kubuntu is a fine distro but nothing beats Hannah Montana Linux those glittery pink wallpapers and those shiny pink icons, so cute UwU
j/k
¡¡Happy Year of the linux Desktop 2025 everybody!!
j/k
¡¡Happy Year of the linux Desktop 2025 everybody!!
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: WMan22I'm on Nvidia, so I basically have to use a rolling release distro if I want a good experience. Hence why I'm almost always using either CachyOS or Nobara Project. I'm sure Kubuntu is a great experience for AMD users though. Snaps are a problem though, Valve themselves say not to use the steam snap for example.
Are you just using Wayland based distros or something? There is no reason to use a rolling release distro for a good nvidia experience. This belief is typically propagated by users of those distributions.
In Mint it should work out of the box with Nouveu drivers to get you into the OS, at which point you open Driver Manager and click to use the official binary drivers. They install, you reboot, you're done. In Ubuntu I believe the process is similar, and they even use the same things under the hood, but you get to the menu different with the process being the same for Kubuntu. Oddly, none of this information/the process is even remotely new.
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Quoting: dibzQuoting: WMan22I'm on Nvidia, so I basically have to use a rolling release distro if I want a good experience. Hence why I'm almost always using either CachyOS or Nobara Project. I'm sure Kubuntu is a great experience for AMD users though. Snaps are a problem though, Valve themselves say not to use the steam snap for example.
Are you just using Wayland based distros or something? There is no reason to use a rolling release distro for a good nvidia experience. This belief is typically propagated by users of those distributions.
I know this is kind of a controversial thing to say but like, I have legitimate reasons to kinda need wayland, due to every one of my computer setups having mixed refresh rate multi monitor setups, something that X11 hates.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that Wayland needs a lot more work, it needs screen reader capabilities, it needs color management, it needs multi-window management for stuff like PCSX2, etc. but at its core, even with all the annoying missing stuff, the upside of having multiple monitor setups with different screen refresh rates that simply work with barely any issues negates the downsides of Wayland right now for me.
I play a lot of Warframe, and on X11, it spawns the game window in the middle of my main monitor and my portrait mode monitor no matter what desktop environment I am using, and dragging the window to my main monitor technically works but then the in game cursor can only access 40% of my screen before acting like it's hit my right primary monitor's screen bezel. Wayland does not have this issue. Gamescope fixes this issue in X11, but then I can't open the steam overlay which I make heavy use of for tracking my ducat farming in the notes function and chatting with friends.
tl;dr I understand where you are coming from, however, X11 is not suiting my needs at the moment.
Last edited by WMan22 on 3 December 2024 at 9:48 pm UTC
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I ve been through most big and samll linux distros for gaming on real hardware with amd and nvidia cards,i havent encounter no better distro than pop os
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Just a reminder to all to follow the rules. New users coming along to talk crap at me or other users will not be tolerated, and will be removed. Already had to ban one user who couldn't behave. GamingOnLinux is moderated.
4 Likes, Who?
Quoting: WMan22Quoting: dibzQuoting: WMan22I'm on Nvidia, so I basically have to use a rolling release distro if I want a good experience. Hence why I'm almost always using either CachyOS or Nobara Project. I'm sure Kubuntu is a great experience for AMD users though. Snaps are a problem though, Valve themselves say not to use the steam snap for example.
Are you just using Wayland based distros or something? There is no reason to use a rolling release distro for a good nvidia experience. This belief is typically propagated by users of those distributions.
I know this is kind of a controversial thing to say but like, I have legitimate reasons to kinda need wayland, due to every one of my computer setups having mixed refresh rate multi monitor setups, something that X11 hates.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that Wayland needs a lot more work, it needs screen reader capabilities, it needs color management, it needs multi-window management for stuff like PCSX2, etc. but at its core, even with all the annoying missing stuff, the upside of having multiple monitor setups with different screen refresh rates that simply work with barely any issues negates the downsides of Wayland right now for me.
I play a lot of Warframe, and on X11, it spawns the game window in the middle of my main monitor and my portrait mode monitor no matter what desktop environment I am using, and dragging the window to my main monitor technically works but then the in game cursor can only access 40% of my screen before acting like it's hit my right primary monitor's screen bezel. Wayland does not have this issue. Gamescope fixes this issue in X11, but then I can't open the steam overlay which I make heavy use of for tracking my ducat farming in the notes function and chatting with friends.
tl;dr I understand where you are coming from, however, X11 is not suiting my needs at the moment.
I feel the mixed refresh rates. In more recent drivers, nvidia-settings has an option under display configuration (advanced) for "Force Full Composition Pipeline" which helps quite a bit. Although while it helps (substantially) the only issue-free screen is going to be your Primary, which you can also select in nvidia settings. I too have triple monitors. The full comp thing is relatively newer (last couple/few years?).
Your Warframe issue sounds downright bizarre. For giggles'n's**ts I went ahead and installed Warframe for the first time via Steam, and gave it a shot. It did initially start in a window, but setting it to full screen was no problem and it stuck. I had no issues with it displaying on my main monitor, and only there. Perhaps your main screen wasn't set as the primary in nvidia settings? Played it for a few minutes, changed gfx settings, seemed fun and had no issues. For the record, I run Mint XFCE and have an older Geforce 1070 Ti, with 32GB ram, and triple monitors, with the center monitor set as the primary for the X Screen in nvidia-settings.
Not encouraging or arguing with you, was just legit curious and felt like playing with it.
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I was distro hopping for a couple of years until I've found CachyOS.
All the issues from previous distros were solved out of the box. Gaming performance is awesome and the packages optimizations are great. No need for flatpaks anymore and I feel like there's no reason to leave this polished and brilliant distro.
All the issues from previous distros were solved out of the box. Gaming performance is awesome and the packages optimizations are great. No need for flatpaks anymore and I feel like there's no reason to leave this polished and brilliant distro.
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NerdNoiseRadio about 11 hours ago
Quoting: PaulAlastorRight now, I'm still in a dual boot kinda mode between the "Innominabile OS" version 11 and the great, updated, little know, Debian-based gaming distro PikaOS: the last one is pretty good and very performant for my 5 year old build with an Amd Cpu and Nvidia Gpu. I'm staying put with Kde on it and, at least till now, has been a breeze. Then again, always IMHO, it is one of the trinity of next generation gaming desktop I personally love!(the other two being the Arch-based CachyOS and the Fedora-based Nobara Linux. Through the two YouTube channels I follow that talk, principally, about Linux gaming stuff, I also know these three distros have some collaboration among them).
Okay, first, I simply -LOVE- that you used the word "innominable" here! That's fantastic, friend!!! ❤️🍻
Second, I briefly had Nobara (Gnome) installed on my old gaming PC before I gave it to the Mrs when I got the new laptop (which also originally came with "Innominable OS 11"....which I did not enjoy at all)! I have a reasonably high opinion of Nobara! It's a distro that does an awful lot of the work for you....kinda like PopOS, but different...and Fedora-based to boot. Before that, I had Geruda. It was gorgeous in its
KDE "Dr4gonized" iteration, but this was also around the time that I was finding my allegiances shifting away from KDE and towards Gnome, and I was not particularly crazy about its very inconsistent Gnome implementation. It was also around the same time that I was beginning to cool on Arch and waerm to Fedora -Which is how I found myself on the sunny shores of Nobara.
But I do thing that Pop, Garuda, and Nobara are all very solid candidates for anyone who's not brand new to Linux. 🍻
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