Basically, I have a laptop (5800H/RTX3050) and Windows is irritating me to no end. I am thinking of completely formatting it and replacing it with whatever distro can give me the best gaming compatibility. For reference, I play - CS:GO, DoTA, Asphalt, and a little bit of Overwatch.
I was thinking of Arch since SteamOS is based on it but would like your opinion on it.
Linux mint give you great driver support and looks (in my opinion) like windows could if it wasn’t run by an insane greed machine. It largely stays out of your way and delivers a truly boring Linux experience. If you want a heart racing experience you can try arch which will involve significantly more effort.
Like, if you are super into cars and love spending a bunch of time learning how each part works and reading manuals that is approximately what being an arch user is like. If you just want to buy a car and have it do car things you’ll want a boring OS like mint, Ubuntu, or Pop OS.
Check your games’ compatibilty first on protondb if they’re not specifically made for Linux, so you know what to expect.
If your mind is set for Arch, go for it, it has an installer these days, but consider some other distributions of Linux that are easier for a novice user. Reserve some time to install a few, if you don’t like the first one or it’s not working out then you can just move on to the next.
Stick to the big ones, because you’ll be able to get the most support for then and find the most information about them.
Linux generally works with software repositories that will contain most of the software you’ll ever need. You rarely need to search for software on websites to install manually.
If you like to get the latest versions of software as it is released, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux. They are so called rolling releases. They are not tied down to versions, like Windows, but perpetually update their building blocks as time goes on. Your version is always the latest version.
If you like a more traditional approach with stable releases, consider distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Twice per year they bring out a new version (with software updates regularly still) but they tend to stick to large point releases of the software they are built on. You can expect things to work as they are until you install the next version of the distro. In this sense stability means that features generally don’t change. You still get security patches nevertheless. If you don’t like to update the entire system every 6 months you can choose to use their “long term support” versions instead. This will feel the most like new Windows versions, only you’ll get to see the rolling distros on newer cooler stuff, “beta-testing” all the things before your distro’s next LTS rolls them out. I’m starting to digress here.
I never bothered with distros that are built around specific niches, like “gaming distros”. If that maintainer stops you’ll need to switch distros anyway.
I can recommend rolling releases, always have the latest version of everything, as far as the maintainers of your distro can keep up (in which case it helps to go with a large well known distro with lots of maintainers).
Thank you so much for such a detailed answer. I ended up going with Nobara and that has ended up being a decent experience so far :)
The RTX is gonna give you issues, since the Linux kernel doesn’t handle it natively like all your other hardware, so it’s gotta be a distro with good Nvidia support
For Nvidia, your best bet is Pop_OS, as it has the Nvidia drivers prepackaged. I wouldn’t mess with arch for gaming especially if you’re new to Linux - you’d need to do a lot of tweaking to get it right.
Linux Mint is what I use and have no issues with my 3070.
Chimera OS might be something you can look into however I have not used it
Pop OS is also great for nvidia support
Ubuntu LTS
If it works, stay with it and play your games. Learn its innards as needed.
If it doesn’t, look for something with a more recent graphics stack.
NVIDIA 3000 series is fairly mature line already and should have no issues slapping with the latest drivers coming with Ubuntu. They’re available for installation after you install Ubuntu.
What SteamOS uses is largely irrelevant to the end user as Valve likely uses it as a base to modify, build and specific versions of SteamOS that make it out. What ships is likely not the same as running the latest Arch. Kinda like using AOSP because Samsung uses AOSP to build their Android OS. They both share AOSP but they’re not the same.
I play CS:GO and Dota 2 among other things on Ubuntu LTS with a 2080 Ti.
Some rolling release might be good for driver updates, so arc si good for that or manjaro for easier use, but I guess it doesn’t really matter if hardware isn’t the cutting edge and even like mint might do and it might be a bit more stable.
