I’ve got an old win10 laptop. It’s nothing fancy in 2025, but I use it now and then while traveling, just to have a proper computer on hand. It’s time to move it over to Linux, and I have A LITTLE Linux experience. I work in software dev, so I know my way around CLI, but I don’t have much firsthard experience, other than occasionally using Kali for offsec tools. What are the distros I should be considering for a personal gaming laptop for occasional use for both gaming and occasional general use? Why?

  • Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    15·
    5 hours ago

    I ended up writing for a while on this haha sorry 😅

    A misconception that many people who are new to linux have is that certain distros are better for certain kinds of use cases. While this is definitely true to an extent, hardware support is pretty good all around for most popular distros, so all that really matters for a mixed use cases like this is differences in how the distro sets up the desktop experience. What one distro offers out of the box is probably available with some tweaking in another distro. What is most important in having a good gaming and general experience is the apps, so make sure that all the apps you want to use have support on Linux, or alternatives are available. For specific game compatibility you can look at https://www.protondb.com/

    In terms of distros, I’ll list a bunch. You can look into them more. Any distro should work fine for your uses, so it’ll come down to personal preference.

    Bazzite

    • Bazzite is probably the most popular distro with a specific gaming focus. It comes pre-installed and configured with steam and launchers for other games, and has tweaks for gaming out of the box. It is immutable, which means that apps are stored in containers and can’t directly modify the base system, which makes it a lot more secure from accidental breakage, and any changes can be easily reverted.

    CachyOS

    • CachyOS is a distro based on Arch, pre- configured with a variety of themes and desktop environments for whatever look and feel you may want. The handheld version comes with gaming tools pre-installed. Arch generally requires a bit more tinkering than other distros, but CachyOS seems to be pre-configured pretty well so I don’t think it should require much of that.

    General use distros

    These won’t have steam or other launchers installed by default but you can download them with one command so it’s no problem at all. Any distro should work, I use Fedora as I find it to be stable and reliable with my gaming laptop. Mint, Pop!OS and Zorin OS are also popular options for new users. Ubuntu and its derivatives are ubiquitous, but are also at times controversial among linux users. Arch and NixOS are great if you want to customise everything about your OS, but you’ll spend a lot of your time setting them up and getting everything working for your hardware. CachyOS offers a similar amount of customisation without as much hassle.

    Feel free to ask any questions you have about any of these.