"gaming distros" are just redditor bait for retards. It's easier and better to start with a minimum featureset and install what you need.
Honestly, I wouldn't have much thought for those if they were literally just collections of preinstalled packages, configs and maybe a tuned kernel. But something like CachyOS also recompiles the entire repo with -O3 and LTO, and introduces its own patches, potentially incompatible with upstream, which is especially dangerous for Arch (see fucking manjaro and its problems over the years). And when your idea is to be a le gaming distro accessible to normies that really seems off.
If you think the Arch variants are bad, Bazzite and Nobara are basically the two most common recommendations I see nowadays for GAMING(tm) Linux distros that literally
all normie tech channels from Level1Techs to Gamers Nexus to friggin DankPods showcased at one point or another. I'm sorry, but have we collectively forgotten that "hyperfocus on one niche paradigm that's vaguely appealing to normies" is a recipe for failure, or at least fated to obscurity in perpetuity? I've said it countless times in the past and I'll continue saying it until the heat death of the universe: people tend to use their computers for more than just vidya! The moment you deviate from that narrowly defined gaming scope, you're on your fucking own. That's, of course, ignoring how many downstream changes projects like Bazzite and Nobara make to Fedora in the first goddamn place.
I have more distaste for Bazzite because it's a bonehurt SteamOS wannabe that fails to understand that SteamOS works because normies don't need to speedrun amateur distro maintainer any% whenever the time comes to upgrade to a newer version and rebase. I can certainly understand the intent; what I take issue with is the fact that they're going full-tilt into the Fedora Atomic ecosystem
despite its flaws. If you're willing to pigeonhole an entire computer into being a bonehurt DIY Steam machine that never quite works as well as Valve's hardware/software stack, sure, it has its purpose and does an adequate (if substandard) job.
DankPods even did a bogan octopus PC parts setup in his warehouse that was deliberately made to look like a fire hazard to showcase Bazzite as a DIY PS5.
Nobara is a project I remain hideously ambivalent on. I can appreciate the work that GloriousEggRoll does with GE-Proton, he does include tons of genuinely useful stuff like Easy Effects for sound mixing, RPM Fusion is enabled right out the gate, he actually properly documents all the modifications he made to the Fedora base, and all that stuff which makes Fedora far more tolerable for a Windows refugee. So far so good, right?
Wrong because Nobara ain't a Linux Mint equivalent in the Fedora ecosystem; it's basically GloriousEggRoll's highly customised configuration that he makes available to people interested in gaming, streaming, content creation, and so on. It's far from a general purpose desktop operating system that focuses on being a jack-of-all-trades and allows the user to be a master. The fucking
Nobara Project website even says as much.
GloriousEggRoll on the Nobara Project home page said:
The Nobara Project, to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. Fedora is a very good workstation OS, however, anything involving any kind of 3rd party or proprietary packages is usually absent from a fresh install. A typical point and click user can often struggle with how to get a lot of things working beyond the basic browser and office documents that come with the OS without having to take extra time to search documentation. Some of the important things that are missing from Fedora, especially with regards to gaming include WINE dependencies, obs-studio, 3rd party codec packages such as those for gstreamer, 3rd party drivers such as NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes here and there.
This project aims to fix most of those issues and offer a better gaming, streaming, and content creation experience out of the box. More importantly, we want to be more point and click friendly, and avoid the basic user from having to open the terminal. It’s not that the terminal and/or terminal usage are a bad thing by any means, power users are more than welcome to continue with using the terminal, but for new users, point and click ease of use is usually expected.
This is what I take massive umbrage with: he says that Nobara's meant to be user-friendly, it has all the third-party codecs that Fedora doesn't ship with by default, it has NVIDIA drivers baked in... but then he immediately contradicts himself by saying that Nobara aims to "fix most of those issues and offer a
better gaming, streaming, and content creation experience out of the box. You ain't focusing on the broadest possible normie demographic, GloriousEggRoll; your actual target demographic is the well-to-do tech influencer like Wendell from Level1Techs or Linus and Luke from LTT. That's ignoring how Nobara (and Bazzite) both ship with fucking
Wayland instead of Xorg. I'm sorry, but Wayland is hardly adequate despite 15+ years of continuous development funded by the Red Hat project and promulgated into the wider Linux ecosystem. "Oh but SteamOS on the Steam Deck uses Wayland. Surely, it's good outside of Valve's hardware/software stack?" Again:
wrong. Some games are genuinely fucking
borked under Wayland, and there ain't no amount of patches or dirty fixes that GloriousEggRoll, Valve, or the Bazzite team can do to solve the problem, absent abandoning Wayland entirely and focusing exclusively on X11.
As an example: Witcher 3 is a fantastic game that runs under both Xorg and Wayland without much (if any) issue using GE-Proton or Valve Proton. That said, the biggest reason why anyone would wanna play Witcher 3 on PC instead of console in the first place is so that they can import their save files from older Witcher games. You wanna start with Witcher Enhanced Edition, or maybe skip it and start with Witcher 2? Good fucking luck actually trying to
start the damn games.
The launchers for both Witcher 1 and Witcher 2 won't actually let you click on the "Launch Game" button under Wayland, but they do under Xorg. The proper "fix" under Wayland is to manually select the Witcher.exe/Witcher2.exe in Steam or Heroic so that you bypass the launcher entirely... but then you miss out on configuring graphical presets entirely unless you wanna fire up a text editor and muck around in the INI files. I'm not making a word of this up: I've tested this extensively on Fedora 43 Workstation
and Fedora 43 Cinnamon, and only in Fedora Cinnamon where Xorg ships by default, do the W1/W2 launchers actually function as expected, no mucking about with INI files or manually selecting EXEs.
Does Wayland work fine for the latest and greatest games that use DX12, maybe even slightly older games that use DX11 and DX10? Sure; all the more so for games that are Steam Deck certified. Is it a fucking nightmarish hellscape for any DX9 games or older that any given jack-off can have in their GOG or Steam libraries? Also yes. Of course, none of this fucking matters because you're genuinely better off installing vanilla Fedora outright and manually setting shit up yourself if you've got the wherewithal to muck about with INI files, set launcher options in Steam or Heroic, stuff along those lines... or buying a Steam Deck or the upcoming Steam Machine refresh whenever it launches next year, but that's beside the point.
Fedora, especially the
spins that ship with Xorg like Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE, is a perfectly valid starting point. Don't believe me? The "For Dummies" people used to ship install discs for Fedora Core and Knoppix back in the mid-to-late 2000s in their
Linux for Dummies books. These books are ancient, they usually focus on broad strokes, and some recommendations are genuinely fucking baffling with hindsight. That said, these books did a remarkable job of demystifying how a Linux distro actually functions under the hood. these books even went through the trouble of telling you how to enable Dribble, Livna, and FreshRPMs (a pre-RPM Fusion time, terrifying) to download the NVIDIA or ATI binary drivers, using
init 3 in the terminal to go to a TTY text console, and then the exact commands to enable those binary drivers before rebooting and having your hardware work at full power. It
is a fiddly process, but these books were written in a time where the target demographic were people who were already familiar with DOS commands on Windows 9x to fire up games like Commander Keen or Duke Nukem. My, oh my, have the times changed for the worse when obfuscating system internals is extolled as a virtue, but I digress.
Linux Mint remains the de-facto standard for "Normie's First Linux Distro" because it's a general purpose operating system, has plenty of in-house graphical tools to smooth the transition from Windows, all the consumer goodies like Spotify, DaVinci Resolve, Steam, etc primarily ship for Ubuntu variants and are available in the repositories, you have one-click driver installs for NVIDIA cards,
and the LTS release cycle means it's fairly low maintenance on all but the most bleeding edge of hardware. Best of all? It ships with
Xorg by default instead of inflicting Wayland and its infinitely many regressions (inshallah XLibre makes the cut, but I'm not holding my breath for that). If you have bleeding edge hardware that isn't yet integrated into the current Ubuntu LTS release (i.e. an RTX 50xx series card, maybe the latest Ryzen X3D CPU, etc), then yeah: Linux Mint ain't quite ready for you.
If you fall into that camp where you built your PC with the latest and greatest parts, odds are you'll probably need a Linux distribution that ships with the latest kernel anyway. That's where Fedora outshines Ubuntu and variants, but you
need to have the wherewithal to actually grit your teeth, open up a terminal, and copy-paste what
RPM Fusion explicitly and unambiguously tells you to do in the plainest possible English. Distros like Bazzite, Nobara, or whatever other Fedora variant that's making the rounds nowadays are useful insofar as getting you up and running with minimal friction. Where they will
always fail is in those obscure situations that a GNOME or KDE or Wayland developer will tell you UHMUSECASESOYJAK.jpg before WONTFIXing, NOTABUGing, or outright deleting your report, your request for assistance, or whatever else.
I dunno man... I'm glad Linux is making the rounds again in normie-adjacent spaces but I'm so fucking tired of seeing niggas reinvent the wheel but instead of rubber and metal, we have wooden wheels with wooden axles that shatter and splinter the moment you hit the tiniest goddamn pebble. EmpireOfDustItsAllSoTiresome.jpg
