Hi. I’ve been using Linux for decades on my work machines, but most of my knowledge is pretty rusty. However for gaming I’ve always used a Windows machine. I’m thinking of getting rid of microsoft entirely, since I’ve been hearing such good things about steam & proton lately.
I was going to just install Mint on my gaming computer, but since there are a ton of experts here, I figured I should check in to see if there is any reason not to use Mint for this? And if there is any other considerations or setup I should be aware of to keep my games running well?
Great to see you joining the GNU/Linux flock!
I have used Ubuntu (both regular and LTS releases), Mint, LMDE, Arch, Garuda, and others on my desktop. SteamOS used to be based on Ubuntu which mint is based on (or Debian, obviously in LMDE lol). SteamOS and Garuda are both based on Arch now. So, pretty much any of those and you’re good to go for sure.
Garuda is beautiful and has a Gaming Edition. If this is your primary use case and you decide you want the latest software and desktop environment(s) then this is a good choice.
If you’re looking for a rock solid foundation and don’t mind older software other than what’s available via Flatpak, Snap, and AppImages, then Linux Mint Debian Edition is fantastic. It depends what you’re after and what else you’ll be doing with this computer.
However, I have installed Bazzite (which is based on Fedora, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux is) on my Steam Deck and that’s my only machine now. It’s been great so far. Much like regular SteamOS much with a little more flexibility and features like fully encrypting the SSD.
One thing that I do like about distros that update more frequently is the updates to the desktop environment. Over the last few years there have been some great improvements with Qt6 coming out, HDR support, fractional scaling, Wayland progress, etc.
If you’re not using KDE Plasma or GNOME, it might not matter so much. Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, Enlightenment/Moksha, Budgie, and others are all beautiful and great in their own right but, tend not to be released as often or quite as robust as the biggest two. Personally, I’ve really enjoyed those other ones and still enjoy switching things up from tike to time.
If you do upgrade your GPU(s), I do recommend going with AMD. Their CPUs are great, too. If you want to keep that in mind whenever you do a full rebuild, I’m sure they’ll still be. As others have mentioned, they’re pretty good with open source. Not perfect but, overall the industry is improving.
Part of what’s fun is distro hopping. Keep a speedy, 8-64GB flash drive around with Ventoy installed. Drop any ISOs that interest you on it and boot into them and try them out for a while. You can even install all of these OS’s and multiboot. It’s possible to share a ~/ but, this could lead into some problems. YMMV.