Any distro with recent kernel versions like fedora or arch.

Personally I wouldn't bother with "gaming" distros since they're usually run by small teams and lack the polish and QA of larger distros and you can usually install whatever tools they come with manually anyways.

I use fedora but any large distro works, I would just recommend somehing with the latest kernel versions by default so you get the latest feature and performance without having to mess with custom kernels.

The answer will be largely subjective, but in most cases, any distribution that gives you access to the latest GPU drivers, and to a lesser extent kernels.

You mentioned that you have a 10 series Nvidia GPU which will suffer from poorer performance in Direct X 12 games due to a hardware limitation.

But regardless of whether you install Ubuntu or Arch Linux, assuming that things are equal, performance will be the same.

Just choose what you like.

I'm on Ubuntu and everything just works, rock solid distro. I see these kids recommending obscure distributions run by a handful of people or bleeding edge distros like Arch Linux, you're not only getting the most up to date packages, you're also getting the most bugs. They remind me of people recommending Kali Linux as a daily driver. Ubuntu is also the distro that most games are tested for, so yeah, go for it.

openSUSE tumbleweed. If you have old hardware then either that or openSuse leap

He make Proton GE and Nobara.

Popos or nobora both simple and easy to install. Nobora comes preimstalled with everything to start gaming out of the box, steam lutris etc and is built by glorious egg roll himself and tweaked for gaming. Popos is a good all rounder and only need to download the launchers you need to start gaming steam etc.

The „best“ distro depends on your personal taste.

Some love debian, others arch, some swear everything they have on ubuntu.

Its depends on your workflow, your willing to learn new stuff and your daily doings.

I love EndeavourOS (basically arch with some additions) -but I don‘t know if this will fit for you m8.

Debian (MX, Mint)
Arch (EndeavourOS/Garuda)
openSUSE
Void

proprietary distros is trash.

Nobara is good for everyone but bugged as hell for me. so i cant really recommend or disrecomment this disto

When it comes to gaming, for me it's Pop OS. I wouldn't go Ubuntu for shoving snap down your throat

Can you play smooth games on Debian?

There is no "best distro" it's a huge misconception. Mostly everything is the same just what desktop environment you like, how easy or hard you want to install things.

Nobara is good for gaming, editing but every other distro is good for editing and gaming lmao since most apps you install are Flatpak anyways unless you love fucking around with dependencies on system packages

I use opensuse as I like zypper, and it has fast updates for things like kde plasma desktop and they test packages before they release them

Vanilla fedora works well too

Arch if you wanna be a power user and have everything at your leisure but risk some things conflicting or breaking sometimes but rarely, also the aur

For me I like KDE plasma as they are I would say working harder in the gaming space and improving Wayland faster then gnome as gnome takes things at a different pace which is fine. Kde plasma is more desktop orientated while gnome is more like Mac OS but you can easily change that with gnome extensions to make it behave similar to something like windows.

I also have a YouTube channel with plenty of tutorials and distro installs for new users or users that want to familiarise themselves in Linux

https://youtube.com/@linuxbenchmarks?si=FDqN9Ar2QPjZYnEH

Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro.
openSUSE is actually proprietary distro too, but it's good as far as i know.

Most proprietary distros (distors made by company) are basically "Windows of Linux", or bugged, or has license problems and don't have some essential functionalities.
I highly recommed you to choose between community distos.

Does Gnome or KDE matter at all, or is it more personal taste?

Nobara/Fedora is the perfect balance of stability and being bleeding edge

Asking this is basically asking “how long is a text?”. Instead of saying what’s the best, I will give you some distros I like to use for gaming.

RegataOS - an OpenSUSE based gaming distro with KDE, that’s really smooth to use!

EndeavourOS - an arch Linux based distro where you choose desktop environment in the installation! Why I like it? It’s so stable!

Good luck 👍

I think the point the other person is making though is that it doesn't really narrow things down in some objective way, you get some combination of subjective personal preferences and whatever is popular in the current moment.

E.G. prior to about a year and a half ago very few people on Reddit would've been recommending Fedora for gaming or in General, no because it was less well suited for gaming or less of a good distro, but just because it wasn't popular with Linux youtubers or on reddit. Now it is and you'll see it recommended a lot.

I will warn you, that when it comes to Debian it depends on your hardware. I had an issue where my i7-1260p was struggling with Minecraft and I wasn't even hitting 20fps on Debian because the old kernel doesn't have proper support for my new chip. With pop os I hit around 200 since the slightly newer kernel has much better support for my chip. Other than that, they're right, I've personally used all 3 distros he's mentioned, and they're all great. I personally wouldn't use Pop Os anymore, I've opted to use parrot os instead because of the newer kernel and a couple of other reasons, however Pop os is really good and very special.

The one I've seen most often mentioned is PopOS but I personally haven't daily driven it so ymmv. I've personally had success with Fedora and Debian due largely to the recent changes with Steam. My desktop has an Nvidia card which has been my biggest challenges but both the above have ways to deal.

Good luck!

edit - links

Honestly, it doesn't matter. You ask the Linux community "what's the best distro for X?" and you get a random bunch of answers based on user preference.

I game on Fedora, Steam and Lutris work great.

see r/findmeadistro and r/linux_gaming.

there is no best but simply a preference.

I like ubuntu spins. right now it's kde neon.

• https://bazzite.gg/
• https://lutris.net/
• https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
• https://usebottles.com/
• https://github.com/Faugus/faugus-launcher
• https://prismlauncher.org/
• https://sober.vinegarhq.org/

Check the compatibility of your games on Linux here:

• https://www.protondb.com/
• https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Find your alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/

Test-drive a Linux Distro online here: https://distrosea.com/

To create a bootable USB flash drive, use Ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/

Here are some Youtube Tutorials on how to install Linux:

• https://youtu.be/n8vmXvoVjZw
• https://youtu.be/_BoqSxHTTNs
• https://youtu.be/FPYF5tKyrLk
• https://youtu.be/IyT4wfz5ZMg

Here are some Youtube Tutorials on how to Dual Boot:

• https://youtu.be/mXyN1aJYefc
• https://youtu.be/KWVte9WGxGE
• https://youtu.be/Nn7CPlUpflk

All

kubuntu LTS

CachyOS is great, and very quick!

The ones I know of that have gaming optimizations included are CachyOS (arch based), PikaOS (debian based), Nobara and Bazzite (both Fedora based). A lot of the optimizations are shared between all of them, so they're all just as good.

Nobara. It's Fedora + tweaks for gaming. You get better performance, and everything should work a lot better. It's made by Glorious Eggroll, a RedHat engineer, who is best known for Proton-GE.

Nobara, it's fedora, but focused on gaming, made by glorious eggroll

Arch Linux and/or any of its derivative if I had to specify Garuda Linux, it is simple does what you need it and has great in house apps for managing it.

SteamOS

Any. There are no specific gaming distros. The only thing that can be relevant to gaming is whether the distro allows you to easily install drivers if you have a nvidia gpu. Otherwise all distros are nearly the same for gaming. Ubuntu or a derivative is a solid choice, as is nobara. Arch is a bit too much effort for me, but endeavour os works great too. Basically, use any distro that you like.

Ubuntu is fine for gaming and if you have this level of performance problems, you are probably doing something wrong or configured something wrong and switching distroes is not likely to fix it (but you can try of course).

It would be better to provide info on hardware, what kind of game you want to run, how did you set it up, etc.

If it running 10x slower, there's something wrong with your install. I would recommend Mint, because it's daily easy to use, or Nobara, because it specifically targets supporting gaming setups out of the box.

Ubuntu can be great for gaming. What GPU do you have? If you have a Nvidia GPU you have to install the driver trough the software and update tool, there you can find additional driver.

Nobara

SteamOS

No clear answer because every optimization you could make impacts every piece of hardware and every individual game differently. You can tweak your system for days following every performance trick guide available and find that your game of choice runs worse now, or most often there's no difference at all.

As far as the most "optimized" distro goes I'd probably say it's ChacyOS. Their packages are compiled with X86-64-v3/v4 and they offer some special kernels with various tweaks and alternative CPU schedulers.

But I still wouldn't recommend that distro unless you understand what it's changing and understand that you could encounter quite a number of odd issues by using such non-standard tweaks. I'd instead recommend just getting a normal, popular distro and perhaps experimenting with alternative kernels or kernel boot arguments that can be reversed. Arch is a great playground for this.

Probably Nobara or SteamOS.

But I'm happy with my Debian 12 + KDE Plasma.

And the manual switch to the unstable repository, upgrade to Linux kernel 6.5.3 and Mesa 23.2-RC3.

Nobara

Most people use Ubuntu, i guess you will encounter less issues with more popular distroes

Every day. Every day. Every day.

Most Windows people feel at home with Linux Mint. Anything running KDE like Kubuntu will also feel similar. When it comes to gaming on Linux distros, it's a similar experience across the board for the most part.

Linux Mint; unless you want to dig and learn, in which case I’d say Fedora. Nobara might be a good choice if you want Fedora with no set-up.

Google “rpm fusion multimedia” to see the difficulty level of Fedora setup for yourself. You basically have to copy paste some commands to set up the non-free drivers that have better performance.

Just install Bazzite with KDE. When you game, make sure scaling in the OS display settings is 100%. It's easy to set up, performs well and unless you're trying to break it, you won't.

If you do gaming and don't mind breaking stuff and have to fix yourself or learning more about Linux then you can go for CachyOS or EndeavourOS. For me personally, I used Windows for years and my first distro is Endeavour. If you're going to mess with stuff and etc then I highly recommend it. But, if you want something that is already pre-tweaked for gaming then go for Cachy.

I personally modified my Endeavour install to match Cachy's performance, and other tweaks, so I can say that is a great learning experience.

Or you can just go for Mint.

Cachyos

Bleeding edge distros like arch based ones its much easier to run latest / git versions of drivers and things, but system maintenance / updating etc is much more involved.

Theres also Nobara which is a fedora based gaming distro made by the guy who made proton-ge. which looks more stable but still still come with latest mesa and stuff

I'm very happy with my experience in fedora... so happy I haven't booted back into Windows in weeks

OpenSuse Tumbleweed! It's rolling (so has current packages), but all of the packages must pass OpenQA before being distributed out (some packages may lag behind by a small period of time, either it's not made it to OpenSuse yet or it failed OpenQA). This allows OpenSuse to have a stable yet rolling release model.

Also helps that it ships with very sane defaults.

Steam OS used to be Debian based. It’s Arch now.

Nobara