Hello, gorgeous community!
My friend, a generally non-technical person is looking for a good gaming distro. He has been daily driving Windows and OS X before, his main motivation for switching Linux is to streamline his contributions to a game development project we have, that is largely Linux-based (we use Nix for dev environments and build automation).
The only Linux distro I’ve ever used for gaming is SteamOS, and all my other experience is in the Nix/Arch domain, so I am not sure what to recommend to my friend.
As I mentioned, the only hard requirement we have is a possibility to sustainably use Nix package manager with experimental functions (command, flakes), - and I am willing to help my friend setting it all up. But I also would like him to be able to use the OS for gaming whilst experiencing only the expected and acceptable amounts of pain.
So far we have Nobara and Chimera on our radar. Is there something you can recommend? Any advice in general would be helpful, thanks in advance!
Fedora or Fedora KDE Spin. Nice and user friendly, good support.
Plain devuan or debian is fine, assuming you do a bit of configuring of kde or whatever before handing it over to the user. No need to use a super obscure fork, as those compound trust issues, and you have to wait for your downstream distro to sync with upstream, even if upstream is already up to date.
If you want an Arch-based gaming distro there is Garuda (also a non heavily-themed version). I used Garuda before switching to plain Arch. It ran pretty well and I really liked the btrfs filesystem and the snapshots. It meant I could easily restore a backup of my system if I manage to break it. Which I did a few times.
Just regular Fedora with KDE will do.
Just make sure they install the rpmfusion repos, activate flathub and replace ffmpeg-free with regular ffmpeg for media playback.
TLDR: You don’t need a rolling release distro like Arch or its derivatives or any “gaming” distro for gaming anymore.
Many experiments have shown that these distros specifically “made for gaming” have no real advantages. If your friend is a beginner, I would absolutely not recommend Arch Linux, but rather Linux Mint. I have recently found this experiment: https://youtu.be/UtXw9on6qs4 (table at the end of the video) that supports this recommendation.
