Operating Systems

I'm currently on Pop! OS 22.04 LTS. For me it worked out of the box. That installer with the NVidia drivers already included was a dream, so I didn't have to set up anything special. I did end up preferring the KDE desktop over Gnome, so I just went screw it and installed KDE plasma on top of it. It's been my daily driver like this for years.

Though, honesty requires me to mention that over the 4-ish years I've been using it they pushed a kernel update twice which killed the nvidia drivers, causing you to be unable to boot to the desktop. Solution was as simple as just rebooting into the previous kernel for a while and waiting for an update which fixes it, but still...

Other than that, pretty happy with it and I'm unlikely to change anytime soon.

@nlm CachyOS. It's Arch based with a bucketload of performance tweaks & bespoke patches, including a kernel scheduler developed by distro maintainers. It also has a small but super-responsive community that tends to resolve issues quite rapidly

I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.

I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.

My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn't want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don't need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.

This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.

Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.

I've been using PopOS for about 3 years now. I found it easier to get Steam to work compared to Linux Mint (can't remember why though). I've never tried Ubuntu or non-Debian based systems.

Pop!_OS ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ

Ubuntu 20.04lts

Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.

Now I am on fedora. Before I used debian stable and before that I tried some other distros, like some flavors of ubuntu, endeavor, mint, manjaro and so on.

Pop!_OS. It just works, it's easy, and it makes me enjoy using my computer.

In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.

It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.

I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.

I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.

PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it

I am on Mint, but I have a GPU accelerated VM running Windows 10 for gaming. It performs very well, but you run into the occasional game that detects VMs and will refuse to run.

Zorin OS 16.2

Arch/EndeavourOS. Updates for the recent hardware come pretty fast and they are stable. Most of the time I use gamescope from Valve to get better latency.

garuda, it's just a fancy arch install with the ugliest, bloatiest, default theming you can imagine, but once you get rid of it it's pretty solid.

Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.

I've been using Mint without any issues for a while now. I only play Steam games, though.

I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.

Linux mint gaming

I’ve been running Arco Linux just up till now and have switched to the new Debian 12 release. It have not been to much trouble to get my Nvidia card and Steam running. I mainly switch because of all the updates and “maintenance” that I feel is associated with a Arch system, so kinda like you said.

Currently on Artix, but planning on changing to Gentoo soon.

I use Void Linux. I like how much more up to date the libraries and apllications tend to be, it's quite similar to Arch in that regard, as it's a true rolling release just like Arch.

It also tends to be very stable as well, with couple minor issues I had ever experienced got fixes within 48-ish hours. One was hugin not launching, and the other a transition issue between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber being the default.

Void uses runit for service management, and is still multithreaded despite taking a more similar approach to just plain shell scripts, and constantly monitors services. What I like about this is more much simpler services are to write compared to SystemD, and then you just put a simlink to them from /etc/sv/ to /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/ to enable or disable.

Void also uses their own XBPS package system, which operates similar to pacman, and is equally fast. Void is basically a rolling release like Arch, with the latest updates, but instead has a more "classic" system management style, which I for one greatly appreciate.

After nearly a decade of distro hopping, Void is where I landed for at least the past several years, and I see no reason to leave. Just sharing incase someone else out there thinks this sounds like the system for them, and if so, Take a Step Into the Void, it might be what you're looking for. That's what I like about there being so many distros, there's choice to match each one's needs.