The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2025

Ah, but with Gentoo it's easier to manage the compilation flags of the software you install so you can squeeze out more performance, so that's better for the 1337 g@mers with the custom built PCs with water cooling and all that nonsense. Joking aside, I think Tumbleweed might also be good for someone who just wants to play games as you get up-to-date drivers and everything without having to do the scary big update dance every couple of months (plus it makes it easy to set up automatic backups).

Haha, let me just say as a Gentoo user with a custom built PC, it's not about being '1337' it's about having control over how things are setup. Some of us just want the simplicity of doing it yourself. Quick applying of patches, able to modify the software easily, etc, etc.

It's just convenient.

What you're meaning to refer to, is arch users. We don't get time to post how 1337 we are, we're too busy compiling our software.


Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 3 December 2024 at 11:39 pm UTC

I've tried probably two dozen distros for gaming but I think I've had the best luck with Fedora 41 on an all AMD system. Everything just works and works extremely well. After some testing and minor tweaking I'm actually getting better gaming performance and stability on Fedora 41 than I do in either Ubuntu 24.04, 24.10, or even Windows 11 24H2. I had weird quirks with Ubuntu ranging from some weird issues with Steam refusing to reopen after closing the main window, to simply noticing less overall performance while in a game. In some games I was seeing 5-10% performance differences and in others significantly more performance. I install World of Warcraft inside of Steam using Proton on Fedora 41 and see some absolutely wild FPS at max quality settings. I try the same thing, same settings, etc on Ubuntu 24.10 and I see 15-20% less FPS at all times. Not sure what's going on there, but that's just my experience. So for now, I'm happily running Fedora 41.

On another note, I had some weird issues in Ubuntu after waking from sleep mode sometimes. In some cases when the computer would go to sleep the backlight on my monitor wouldn't dim. I also had weird issues in Ubuntu trying to alt+tab out of certain games and then switching back to the game. I don't have any of these issues running Fedora. I don't think these issues are specific to Ubuntu either, because I had similar quirks when trying out other Debian-based distros, except Pop! OS. I always seem to have a great experience in Pop whether playing games or just using it. So it's like System76 works out some of the quirks left in Ubuntu. I will say I do love the look of Ubuntu 24.10 and the new wallpapers, but the gaming quirks were just too much for me so I went back to Fedora 41.


Last edited by solarisguru on 4 December 2024 at 12:48 am UTC

Some of us just want the simplicity of doing it yourself. (snip)

It's just convenient.

Doing everything yourself . . . ah, this must be some new meaning of the word "convenient" that I hadn't heard before.

I've used lots of distros, including Slackware back in the early days, the simplest is by far Arch. It just works. Updating it is simple, it's up to date, AUR always contains the package I need and there is no added configuration layer. I love how close it is to upstream.

Not encouraging or arguing with you, was just legit curious and felt like playing with it.

On my current setup where this is happening I am using 2 monitors not 3. One monitor, to my left, is a portrait mode monitor, and the other is my main laptop screen. Warframe spawns in the middle of these, and while I can maximize it on my main monitor, the actual silver in-game cursor only has access to 40% of my screen so I can't click certain menu options. I would record it and show you but I'm on nobara project KDE and that doesn't have an X11 session installed.

I have a 3 monitor setup on my main desktop PC, but this bug with X11 is happening on my laptop. I also never play warframe full screen, I always have it windowed so I can tab away to music players and warframe.market


Last edited by WMan22 on 4 December 2024 at 6:33 am UTC

Some of us just want the simplicity of doing it yourself. (snip)

It's just convenient.

Doing everything yourself . . . ah, this must be some new meaning of the word "convenient" that I hadn't heard before.

Think of it like buying a car. It's far more convenient and simple if when you go to the dealer they deliver your car as the source components. You just get the metal pieces, then weld the chassis together, start building the engine, bolt the parts onto the chassis, etc. followed by the rest of the cars parts. It's just far more convenient than simply going out and buying a car that's already built and having to then modify it to suit your needs.

That's the convenience of gentoo, you're basically given a toolbox, and the parts and you've got to put it together.

As a Nobara user, KDE plasma is definitely the way to go these days. It runs excellently in Wayland and has a very intuitive default layout with a lot of customization potential.

Just because this thread is not nearly long enough... :D
I used Manjaro KDE for about two years. It was mostly good, but dependencies trouble and such made me move again. I like KDE, but some things never really worked on that Lenovo Legion of mine. So, now back again to Linux Mint. I can absolutely confirm that gaming, even FPS do work fine for me. Wayland seems to be trouble with my AMD/nVidia-Combo on every platform. At the end, its not important on which OS i get my back kicked in Valheim again.


Last edited by Chrisznix on 4 December 2024 at 10:15 am UTC

Haha, let me just say as a Gentoo user with a custom built PC, it's not about being '1337' it's about having control over how things are setup. Some of us just want the simplicity of doing it yourself. Quick applying of patches, able to modify the software easily, etc, etc.

It's just convenient.

What you're meaning to refer to, is arch users. We don't get time to post how 1337 we are, we're too busy compiling our software.

A couple of months ago I decided to try and give Gentoo another spin (in the past I bounced off kernel configuration because I couldn't manage to get a working kernel), and this time I got a working system installed... and then I bounced off before I got X set up because I got sick and tired of waiting for the compilation times. Maybe some day I'll give it another shot (although I've actually kinda got my eyes on Guix), but for the moment I'll keep flipping between Arch and Tumbleweed.

It sounds like this article is trying to say "what is the best desktop oriented distribution for gaming". The best distribution for gaming is SteamOS. I use ChimeraOS myself. I also don't quite get the affinity for snaps, given Valve's response on this too.

But yes, I understand it's meant to imply a traditional desktop OS that best supports gaming. It depends on your bias for Fedora, Debian, and core variants.


Last edited by ProfessorKaos64 on 5 December 2024 at 2:39 am UTC

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. 🍻

The only thing that I'd try too, indeed, is the Cosmic DE. I saw some videos on YouTube and I liked what I saw! I'll comfortably wait the first beta-ready version from S76 and try it out when releases. Good times to be on Linux!

I'm surprised nobody mentioned (K)Ubuntu lowlatency kernel. It made a big difference for me compared to default kernel.

For me Kubuntu 24.10 + lowlatency kernel + Nvidia DKMS combo works ok.

I use Kubuntu for my gaming machine. Highly recommended.

I'm all in on CachyOS for gaming but not tryed Kubunto though.

CachyOS is by far the best I've ever used and I'll happily recommend it to anyone

Never Manjaro for any reason, ever, at all. Do not. Ever.

The distaste for Manjaro on this site knows no bounds. I'm indifferent towards it, but I can appreciate the passion against it. 🔥

What's exactly the fuzz around that? I left Manjaro because they were slow in delivering new Plasma, Frameworks and driver updates, and jumped to Endeavour, just only for that issue, I don't have anything against Manjaro.

Talking about the OP: I wouldn't recommed anything *buntu, let alone a LTS to any hardcore gamer, games are a different kind of beast and ofter if not all times, require the latest and greatest™ not only in hardware but in software as well.

You need a rolling-release to keep in pace with gaming fast evolution, anything of this should suffice: Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda, Nobara. I get it, arch-based and fedora-based (mostly the former) can be daunting for some people, but it's the best way to enjoy Linux gaming.

I don't think I'd argue against Kubuntu for a general audience, but for gamers I know, I'd recommend the KDE version of Fedora. I've been using it on my laptop for a couple weeks and a VM for a long time before that. For the more technical gamer folks, I'd say Manjaro. I think Arch is the real king, but only for the person who enjoys micro managing a few things (like me).

This "bloat" is not something normies care about, only pedantic people who like to watch a few extra MBs get used up. The reality is: only a few people really care.

Liam, like many people here, you have a monster of a PC, of course you don't care about snaps in performance aspects.
But in reality, not only your reality, when your low-end computer slow down because of snaps (it worked perfectly fine before), I assure you: you care.
And when because of that, you think about buying new hardware, I assure you: you care.
In the end it's just more waste (we surely don't need that) for zero benefit of using snaps for normies (as you say).
Microsoft do this kind of shit to force people to buy new hardware, people complain about that and some did installed Linux, we don't need Linux distribution doing the same as Microsoft for "reasons" that only make sense (globally) for Canonical.
It's just crazy to pretend there is no problem about that, and worse: that it only concern pedantic people...
I hope there are people who understands me, as it seems nobody in the comments mentioned that until now.

This "bloat" is not something normies care about, only pedantic people who like to watch a few extra MBs get used up. The reality is: only a few people really care.

Liam, like many people here, you have a monster of a PC, of course you don't care about snaps in performance aspects.
But in reality, not only your reality, when your low-end computer slow down because of snaps (it worked perfectly fine before), I assure you: you care.
And when because of that, you think about buying new hardware, I assure you: you care.
In the end it's just more waste (we surely don't need that) for zero benefit of using snaps for normies (as you say).
Microsoft do this kind of shit to force people to buy new hardware, people complain about that and some did installed Linux, we don't need Linux distribution doing the same as Microsoft for "reasons" that only make sense (globally) for Canonical.
It's just crazy to pretend there is no problem about that, and worse: that it only concern pedantic people...
I hope there are people who understands me, as it seems nobody in the comments mentioned that until now.

Computers don't slow down from snaps, that's an odd thing to claim.

As for storage space, that's only really an issue on truly low-end stuff, which you're not going to be using a whole lot of anything on anyway.

Big storage has been cheap for a long time now. It's a small price to pay for a one-package-fits-all approach that both Snaps and Flatpaks do and both package types are being improved all the time.

This "bloat" is not something normies care about, only pedantic people who like to watch a few extra MBs get used up. The reality is: only a few people really care.

Liam, like many people here, you have a monster of a PC, of course you don't care about snaps in performance aspects.
But in reality, not only your reality, when your low-end computer slow down because of snaps (it worked perfectly fine before), I assure you: you care.
And when because of that, you think about buying new hardware, I assure you: you care.
In the end it's just more waste (we surely don't need that) for zero benefit of using snaps for normies (as you say).
Microsoft do this kind of shit to force people to buy new hardware, people complain about that and some did installed Linux, we don't need Linux distribution doing the same as Microsoft for "reasons" that only make sense (globally) for Canonical.
It's just crazy to pretend there is no problem about that, and worse: that it only concern pedantic people...
I hope there are people who understands me, as it seems nobody in the comments mentioned that until now.

Computers don't slow down from snaps, that's an odd thing to claim.

As for storage space, that's only really an issue on truly low-end stuff, which you're not going to be using a whole lot of anything on anyway.

Big storage has been cheap for a long time now. It's a small price to pay for a one-package-fits-all approach that both Snaps and Flatpaks do and both package types are being improved all the time.

I see both sides here. I remember a time in my life when a small price was a big price, when just a few bucks could break the budget. Never quite got to that place where the question was heating bill or food, but I definitely put off a bill for a month a few times because there was zero in the kitty. At that time, more storage would not have been on the agenda, because "cheap" just wasn't cheap enough.

KDE/GNOME Arch Linux all the way!!!