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!
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.
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.
Fedora or Fedora KDE Spin. Nice and user friendly, good support.
I game on Linux mint and have had very little issues out of the box. Worth noting its super easy to game on and steam is seamless. Not a hard distro to learn with tons of forums and updates. Lightweight and overall no major complaints as I only broke my system myself tinkering with things I wanted to tweak. I’ve always fixed it relatively easily and I don’t know much about terminal commands. Tons of info online, mostly copy and paste. Cheers.
None of the desktop environments included with Linux Mint (really) support Wayland. X11 allows any app to keylog easily. X11 is quite bad for Security. Cinnamon has experimental support.
X11 allows any app to keylog easily.
Yeah, any app that runs on your computer… at which point you have bigger problems than keylogging.
When’s the last time you’ve heard of keylogging being a common problem on Linux btw?
Just because a malicious application is installed on your computer doesn’t mean it should be allowed to freely exfiltrate data. It does not require root to perform this attack, a malicious script or AppImage could just as easily steal your keypresses. Or an extension in your browser, or a mod for your favorite game. You shouldn’t need to read all the code for every application (including each subsequent patch and update) just to be sure it isn’t stealing your data. Plus, why not use Wayland?
My point was that X11 is insecure. Security through obscurity is not security. Wayland does not send every keypress to every application, which protects against this attack vector. Wayland is both significantly smaller and more secure than X11. X11 was designed in a time when software was built to simply trust anything that runs on the computer. We need to move past just putting our trust in the software we run. At the very least raise the barrier to perform such an attack.
