So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means...
Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.
https://bazzite.gg/ if you're interested.
As other people noted, Bazzite/Fedora Silverblue can absolutely bite you in the foot if you leave the "normal use cases" — and if you're not just gaming on the device, you sooner or later will. All of this is solvable and IMO worth it, but probably not great for a beginner trying to become more knowledgeable.
Tldr good for absolute beginners, good for "experts" (in both cases because it very rarely gets in your way/breaks)
Always seeing the Bazzite recommendation. Just converted my kid over, 2 weeks ago. 0 complaints which is pretty amazing.
I loved bazzite, it was my first out of the box success with Linux gaming, but if you plan to do anything outside of gaming installing stuff can get a little difficult. It was invaluable for teaching moments, but I've moved on to cachyOS and it has been just as seamless and less difficulty installing things after installing yay
My 2c
I switched to bazzite a couple of months ago and read so much about catchyOS so I tried that too about 2 weeks ago. I couldn't install shit. Never had any problem installing anything I needed except one thing on bazzite but catchyOS just had me give up. I am not sure what I did wrong but after 2 hours of reading and trying to figure out AUR or whatever I just gave up and booted bazzite again. I just want to play my games with the little time I have but maybe I boot it up again sometime in the future.
Were you installing stuff with pacman or yay?
No clue to be honest. First I used the cachyOS guide installer then I found something else when I didn't find what I wanted and not sure what that was.
Install cachy, install yay, learn how to use yay, profit. It'll handle regular pacman installs too
Someone more educated than I may step in and correct me but that's what I've done and its going pretty well.
This is why I personally think Bazzite should only be installed on devices you intend to only game on, especially if you have any intention of learning any more about Linux than the absolute basics. It'll be fine for a while for beginners, but you're bound to bump into some things that are a hassle to install and/or keep updated. Perfect examples being for consolafying a PC for playing on a living room TV, or installing it on a handheld PC (Steam Deck etc.)
Agreed - bazzite being immutable (which I only recently learned) means its perfect for gaming only devices. Not even your kid could screw it up.
Yeah, it forced me to figure out why, which was a net positive, but definitely just not feasible in the long run outside of gaming, at least not yet.
Cachy. So hot right now.
My selling point was being able to use the arch documentation.
You can kind of do that with bazzite/fedora, but to a way more limited extent because fedora package installers are disabled.
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I second Bazzite