Random Thoughts

[Ravenshire]

Most any Debian fork (ubuntu, kubuntu, mint, etc...) works well for gaming. I've also heard good things about gaming under Arch Linux, but Manjaro is the only good stand alone Arch installer that doesn't taka a ton of backend work, and they are notorious for breaking their OS with rolling updates. Last I heard, Steam OS (a debian fork based on, I believe, ubuntu) was supposed to be made available (again) as a stand alone distro. At a guess, I would think that would be the best pure gaming solution if/when it's available.

There are way more choices than I can list, but Mint seems to be the current top choice for Steam (outside a steam os re-release), though that may have changed since I did my latest gaming PC build. The best source for Linux Steam gaming I've been able to find is ProtonDB. You can find advice there on subjects ranging from "what's the best distro for Steam?" to "how do I get 'X' game to stop doing 'Y' when 'Z' happens?"

Honestly, It's more work to game in Linux than Windoze but, I think it's more than worth it. And, when you buy/build a new gaming rig, you clone the system drive from your old PC, drop it in the new system as the system drive, and Linux just runs, so you only have to do that work once. Something that will likely never happen in Windoze!

If you go the dual boot route, you can set up Steam on both with common libraries. Then you can game from either OS without maintaining two installs of each game, eating twice as much drive space. This will also let you really compare the differences and the pros and cons, on the same hardware, very easily.

Cool, looks like it's going to have to be Linux Mint then; that's the distro my dad uses, so I do have a little bit of familiarity with it... it certainly looks very polished, and is often heralded as a great stepping stone from Windows to Linux.

Yeah, I understand how it's going to be more work; my dad for instance spends most of his time either configuring things or looking up how to do things, but he still loves Linux with a passion... he/we just accept that things rarely work perfectly straight out of the box in it.

Yeah, I think I will be going the dual boot route, so that common libraries thing looks very interesting, and something I'll need to research. Thanks for all your advice.... I'll be bookmarking/noting it for future reference

A word of warning if you have an Nvidia 40xx video card. The Linux Kernal may not yet be updated to drive it. In that case, you can use the motherboard's on board video until you can get the proper Nvidia Linux driver installed. It's fairly easy and pretty straightforward, even if you have to compile from source as I did. There are loads of tutorials for it. Mint should have a place in the settings where you can select to use proprietary drivers but, YMMV.

ETA:
The latest Steam OS (in all honesty it's a fork, but compatibility is there) is now available here. It's an Arch Linux fork, but being developed for Steam, by Valve, (then translated for desktops/laptops) it will probably run steam games better than a Debian system. When I get time, I have a spare SSD partition to give it a spin on.