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.
If not Bazzite, Nobara is an option. It is based on Fedora, but is not an atomic distro, and iirc, it replaces selinux with apparmor, but unless you’re getting into development, docker/podman etc, selinux will never be an issue.
Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, who also maintains proton-ge. Is also comes with an iso with built-in nvidia drivers, and also comes with an HTPC iso.
I have been using it for a few years, now. The documentation is also well detailed. And anything that works on Fedora will work on Nobara.