The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2025

This article is just not true at all what so ever.

Thanks for the laugh. But this type of over-the-top comment is exactly why such an article exists. Suggesting a small distro, with a small team, that builds on top of a rolling distro...just, no. This is not what should ever be suggested to normal users.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 3 December 2024 at 7:12 pm UTC

This is your personal preference, just because you don't agree doesn't make any of what you said true or what was said in article false, its fine to have your own opinion on the matter, but to state unequivocally that the article is false is not only wrong, but a really dumb take. I use Kubuntu and there are no outdated packages and I think i might have 2 or 3 snaps installed. I have never even heard of CachyOS so I can't speak to if its good or not. Here at GamingOnLinux we try not to promote niche distros to new users, people should really try out multiple distros until you find one that suits your needs and feels comfortable to you personally. Toxic responses like this are what turn people away from Linux in general, so just stop it and use whatever the hell you want.

This article is just not true at all what so ever.

Ubuntu is one of the worst distro right now due to snaps and mostly outdated packages and kernel and drivers.

The best right now is cachyos which is the most optimized distro to date and it's the most user friendly!

Optimized Performance: CachyOS is designed with performance optimization in mind, making it ideal for gaming. It includes various kernels and desktop environments tailored for gaming, ensuring smooth and responsive gameplay.

Easy Installation: Setting up CachyOS is straightforward. It comes with a meta package that includes all the necessary gaming-related packages, making the installation process quick and hassle-free.

Wide Range of Software: CachyOS provides access to a vast array of gaming software and tools, including emulators, game launchers, and performance monitoring tools.

Active Community: The CachyOS community is active and supportive, offering help and advice to users. This makes troubleshooting and getting the most out of the distro easier.

Regular Updates: CachyOS receives regular updates, ensuring that users have access to the latest software and security patches. This keeps the system stable and up-to-date.

Customizability: Users can customize their CachyOS experience to suit their specific needs. Whether you prefer a minimalistic setup or a feature-rich environment, CachyOS allows for extensive customization.

Focus on Gaming: Unlike other distros that cater to a broad audience, CachyOS is specifically designed for gamers. This focus ensures that gaming performance is prioritized and optimized.

User-Friendly Interface: Despite its powerful capabilities, CachyOS maintains a user-friendly interface, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced users.

Support for Multiple Desktop Environments: CachyOS supports various desktop environments, allowing users to choose the one that best fits their workflow and preferences.

Community-Driven Development: The development of CachyOS is community-driven, meaning that user feedback and contributions play a significant role in shaping the distro. This ensures that the distro evolves to meet the needs of its users.

Might wanna do better when comparing distros

also the second best distro is pikeos4 and 3rd nobara 40

This article is just not true at all what so ever.

Ubuntu is one of the worst distro right now due to snaps and mostly outdated packages and kernel and drivers.

The best right now is cachyos which is the most optimized distro to date and it's the most user friendly!

-- SNIP --

Focus on Gaming: Unlike other distros that cater to a broad audience, CachyOS is specifically designed for gamers. This focus ensures that gaming performance is prioritized and optimized.

-- SNIP --

I removed the parts that also apply to every mainstream distro over the past 14 years. I debated about the claim for specific optimizations, but then I realized that there aren't any hard numbers that I am aware of that make indicate they make much of a difference and that they can be applied at will on top of mainstream distros if they matter.

I am sure CachyOS is a good OS and all, but maybe let's not claim it's some kind of a panacea? The aggressive distro-warring is very passé, we have moved on as a community and become more civilized after we realized we can just mock Manjaro instead.

Hi !
CachyOS
PikaOS
Nobara
:-)

Right 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).

This article is just not true at all what so ever.

Ubuntu is one of the worst distro right now due to snaps and mostly outdated packages and kernel and drivers.

The best right now is cachyos which is the most optimized distro to date and it's the most user friendly!

-- SNIP --

Focus on Gaming: Unlike other distros that cater to a broad audience, CachyOS is specifically designed for gamers. This focus ensures that gaming performance is prioritized and optimized.

-- SNIP --

I removed the parts that also apply to every mainstream distro over the past 14 years. I debated about the claim for specific optimizations, but then I realized that there aren't any hard numbers that I am aware of that make indicate they make much of a difference and that they can be applied at will on top of mainstream distros if they matter.

I am sure CachyOS is a good OS and all, but maybe let's not claim it's some kind of a panacea? The aggressive distro-warring is very passé, we have moved on as a community and become more civilized after we realized we can just mock Manjaro instead.

I sincerely concur with this opinion. There's, indeed, no catch-it-all in the Gnu/Linux ecosystem. Heck, not even in the Microsoft ecosystem regarding old as stone age programs compatibility. The UX friendliness is, IMHO, very, very subjective, as it should be! After all, "de gustibus..."

I'm surprised that anything else other than an Arch-based distro is being recommended, after trying everything personally I find the Aur to be insanely valuable for making everything you could need easily installable and *available* and having up to date on the edge software has big advantages too.. Been rolling with EndeavourOS for a long time now without any issues, also I have it set up on BTRFS with snapshots now and never have to worry. It's just - better - in my opinion.


Last edited by Slayer5934 on 3 December 2024 at 8:27 pm UTC

I am not a "noob" (been doing Linux for over 10 years and working with personal computers since the early eighties) but I would not classify myself as a "tech-head" either. I get by and I don't mind a little tinkering.

Linux Mint remains my daily driver. My go-to platform because it is rock-solid, stable and the devs care about their users. At this point, I have tried all the flavours and liked them all. Mint is a great starter distro for a new user.

Don't get me wrong, I like KDE Plasma but I have never had a stable experience with it. I tried Kubuntu but it just kept crashing on me (although, I didn't know about Kubuntu Minimal -- that's cool). I gave up and went to Pop!_OS with its custom Gnome desktop for gaming.

I've tried Manjaro KDE, as well. Runs well on single GPUs but terribly unstable on my laptop with a hybrid (Optimus) GPU. The rolling release schedule became aggravating and, while it didn't kill the OS itself, it constantly destabilized my game installations. The telemetry issue was the final straw. None of my systems run Manjaro now.

I've tried but I can't get Tuxedo OS to install on any of my systems. In VM, it seems as unstable as Kubuntu.

Clearly, KDE Plasma is not for me.

On my old "gaming" laptop I use Pop!_OS. On my current "gaming" laptop, I use Mint XFCE. I am happy with both configurations.

I do not understand this obsession with needing to have the latest and freshest of everything. To me, that is just asking for instability. I prefer a setup that is stable and reliable. Linux Mint and Pop!_OS give me that. I don't much care for the recent games anyway, especially the AAA stuff.

But, as another comment said, to each his/her own.

I'm surprised to read this. For a while I thought you've been using Arch, or an Arch based distro.

I'm just using plain Ubuntu. Not the most shiny distro out there, but it's the one with the least amount of compatibility/driver issues. I may switch to something else in the future when I buy an nVidia-free laptop, and as more and more devs move to Snap or Flatpak instead of deb packages.

I 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 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.

I 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).

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!!

I'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.

I'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

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

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.

I'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.

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.

Right 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. 🍻