Best Desktop Distro for Gaming?

Honestly anything with a non LTS release schedule will be fine. So long as you keep a relatively recent kernel and GPU drivers it pretty much doesn't matter. You can go for a rolling release like Arch or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or a staged release like Fedora. Even Ubuntu or it's derivatives are fine so long as you stick to the yearly versions and don't have a particularly bleeding-edge hardware.
My only advice is stick to the popular stuff. This applies to both distros and desktop environments. Much easier to troubleshoot things and find help and they have more people using them, which usually means the experience is more polished and bugs get fixed faster.

Whichever one you enjoy using.

Unless you have some special hardware need, all the desktop distros perform about the same. (Even long-term support releases, which offer newer kernels in case you need them.)

Fedora!

But wait.

Actually Bazzite, as a way to consume/deploy Fedora on your host desktop.

Even works great on non 64GB Steam Decks. With gnome available as an option as well.

• https://universal-blue.org/images/bazzite/
• https://universal-blue.org/blog/2023/10/05/bazzite-buzz-no-5/

Also builds for Nvidia users

Bazzite/Universal Blue is Not a "distro", it's a project. It's not "immutable", it's Atomic OCI cloud based image deployment for your host OS.

It's Chromebook easy, it's Fedora "with batteries included/extra steps."

Nobara OS or Linux Mint if you're converting from Windows. Flip a coin to pick one.

If you have an AMD GPU: Pretty much any distro that would come up in any "best linux distro of 2023" video.

If you have an nVidia GPU: Ubuntu or Linux Mint (or probably any debian based distro?). You are going to want to make sure you use the proprietary drivers from nVidia, not the nouveau drivers. I suggest Ubuntu and Mint because they have a nice GUI to handle this and you don't have to run any extra steps. If you don't mind a bit more work, Fedora and its derivatives is really seamless and, honestly, seems less likely to break whenever you do update those drivers.

If you have an Intel GPU: I am so sorry.

In all cases? You are probably playing most of your games through Steam and Proton. So Steam itself handles almost all issues outside of drivers. There are ideological (and, to a limited degree, technical) reasons to prefer one distro over another. But Steam/Proton really makes most of that irrelevant for gaming use. If you have other uses (beyond browsing the internet and whatever) then you may need to do more research. But, for gaming, your big issue is the proprietary drivers (if you need them).

I'm using pop os Linux for some years now and like it a lot.

Nobara if you want to "install-and-forget".

Any non-Ubuntu-based distro, minimal install if you don't mind tweaking.

but why not Ubuntu

For some reason it likes to slip some unsolicited bloatware in -- no idea why.

Nobara or Bazzite are gaming ready and easy to use.

As a new Linux user coming from Windows I'd recommend Mint. If you have very new hardware and want better support go for something like Endeavor, openSUSE tumbleweed, or Nobara/Fedora KDE. Almost any distro with exceptions like Alpine and Qubes will probably be more or less OK.

Mint works fine for me.

I use Arch through EndeavourOS. It takes a bit of setup but it'll do what you need. It can get complicated and it easily breaks, but that's what you get when you go cutting edge with Arch.

Alternatively you can look at pre-configured gaming distros like Nobara which I believe is based on Fedora, which is a very well supported distro in general. Nobara's stated goal is to be a streamlined distro for point-and-click users that includes 3rd party drivers off the rip.

This question gets asked every week on every Linux community. We should have a pinned thread for this.

Most regular distros are good enough for gaming. The only issue you're likely to run into is with graphics drivers (I recommend going for AMD graphics on that build), and the availability of certain software in certain formats (gaming software is more likely to be available for Debian or Ubuntu based distros).

If you like the Steam Deck's desktop mode, you might enjoy another distro with the same desktop environment (KDE Plasma). I'm partial to KDE Neon, a snappy Ubuntu LTS spin with all of the latest KDE software.

I'd go with nobara, it's stable, yet not too old and has a lot of gaming oriented optimizations and should work well with Nvidia graphics cards.

Probably anyone that keeps updating a little to get mesa and nvidia updates frequently, even if you use testing or unstable should be great if you install steam from flatpak.

You only have to jump into arch or steamOS if you want to use literally the latest features of mesa driver (but you don't have to for 99.9999% of the games) so just pick the one that you like and if it is more stable distro, install steam via flatpak.

I use endevourOS cause I'm maniac with updates, I like to use latest stuff everywhere, but uou should not have any issue with Mint, PopOS. Debian stable could stay on older graphics driver for longer andcan be a problem, but you can just switch to testing or unstable branches.

Little something from me: I'm using Arch Linux (linux-zen) with KDE and AMD GPU and for now it's the best experience i had with linux distributions. Everything works so good, with obviously some configurations and etc. Already played Minecraft or Red Dead Redemption 2 with no problems and also i felt in love with pacman.

I was using Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint but finally ended up on Arch. Maybe i will give a shot to Fedora or openSUSE in a future :D

Garuda ftw

I love to use cachyos for gaming because it is based on arch linux which is light, it is not a bloated distro and because of the BORE enhanced kernel which boosts performance.

I've used a couple different distros in my time on Linux (Debian, fedora, arch, artix, gentoo) and I could never tell the difference between the performance.

I think if you're coming from Windows, the closest thing to a Windows experience imo is Ubuntu. You can opt in to pre-release updates which is good for gaming as others have said. Also, basically everything can be done via GUI in Ubuntu while you learn to get comfortable with the terminal.

Have SteamOS 3.0 released yet?