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.
Mint works fine for gaming. For a gaming focused machine I’d consider Bazzite, though, which has been getting a lot of hype lately.
Garuda is also very user friendly and gaming focused if you want something that isn’t immutable.
Mint is fine, most things work via Steam/Proton and Heroic/Proton/Wine. Nvidia drivers could be better.
You may run into problems with various forms of anti-cheat (kernel level etc.) which may or may not be supported later.
Mint is fine :3 there’s probably gonna be something about not using the latest kernel or whatever in terms of getting “peak performance”, but I don’t think that’s a major issue generally? Also last I heard the nvidia 5000 series cards had issues with gaming, but I don’t know what state we’re at now
Other than that on steam you’ll need to enable proton in the settings, there’s a tab for compatibility; protondb.com is a good website to check before making any game purchases as it lists compatibility and tinkering steps that people have needed, and that’s all kinda it?
Great, glad to hear that Mint will be okay. I don’t mind the slower kernel/driver updates. :)
2 quick followup questions:
- Should I set my filesystems to something other than ext4? I know some games in windows I feel like would benefit from a faster filesystem, but I don’t know a whole lot about it.
- If I upgrade my videocard (I’m using a NVidia GTX something something), would it be better to go for an AMD card? Do they have better linux driver support?
Ext4 is gonna be the fastest for general daily use. The extra utility of copy on write filesystems is stuff like efficient snapshot backups, optional compression at rest for your files, and really really fast copy operations.
AMD’s drivers are fully FOSS and built into Mesa, whereas Nvidia’s are closed source, so yes, AMD GPUs are more reliable and less of a hassle on Linux. However, Mint makes dealing with Nvidia drivers easy, so it’s honestly your call there.
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Filesystem doesn’t matter hugely but as the other user said, ext4 will be the fastest anyway (possibly xfs, not sure how ext4 and xfs compare). CoW filesystems like btrfs are slower, though most people don’t notice a significant difference. People use CoW filesystems for other features like self-healing ability and backups.
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I would strongly recommend getting an AMD card. As the other user says, AMD’s drivers are fully FOSS and work well with Linux. Nvidia has a bad reputation with Linux and especially Wayland, though these days it’s mostly usable, but IME is still prone to breakage upon updates. IME AMD GPUs “just work”.
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The AMD cards have better performance with the in-tree driver than Nvidia does, so it is just a little bit easier with an AMD card. But it’s really not that hard with Nvidia, so you do you.
Ext4 is perfectly fine for most uses, although some distros will default to btrfs. Whatever the default are in the distro you use are going to work fine
Mint is fine, as the others have said, and there isn’t going to be a WILD performance difference between any distros (+/- 5%, you can check Phoronix for benchmarks), so just pick whatever feels okay for you.
To expand on the general difference between distros: if you want something that is running the most up-to-date kernel versions and Mesa drivers, you’ll want something that does rolling releases like Fedora, CachyOS (Arch-based), or Tumbleweed.
If you want something that is more generally stable and unchanged over time, and doesn’t upgrade the kernel or drivers, stick with Mint LTSbor Ubuntu LTS.
