A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
I mean, the installer is Calamares, so it’s easy af. To install packages, just look it up here and add that to the config file. Steam in particular needs you to add 4 lines of code shown here but other than that, it’s not hard. You can certainly make it a pain in the ass if you want to go ultra customization mode, but it’s actually really easy to setup and maintain.
I guarantee you the people who tell you to stay away are either people who NEED to beautify their setup or people who haven’t tried NixOS and just assume it’s as hard as Gentoo.