Bazzite and Mint

Bazzite runs great on my main gaming PC in desktop mode and on my HTPC in gaming mode. Maintenance is minimal and it just works (on AMD hardware), while packages are pretty recent and it’s absolutely stable.

I’m on Mint with an RTX 3060ti and Ryzen 5. Pretty much everything “just worked” except for the proprietary software for rebinding my mouse and gaming controller. I found alternative software for the mouse (Logitech g300s) but I’m still having difficulty with the controller (8bitdo Ultimate 2).

I use stock Arch with i3wm. My girlfriend uses Nobara with KDE.

SteamOS on a Steam Deck.

When I want to game, I want to game, not be stuck playing a round of “tech support simulator”

You can game on just about any distro – I’m using NixOS and it’s great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.

But if you’re looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.

I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)

Cachy OS on personal PC and Bazzite on steam console (htpc) and a onexplayer handheld. Then just good old steamos on the steam deck.

Just rolling with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Another vote for Bazzite. It’s been such a smooth experience for a year or so.

CachyOS KDE + Windows 11 debloated dualboot with games on shared BTRFS drive and WinBtrfs driver

Mint for two years. Then Arch for a decade. This year I have been trying out CachyOS.

Fedora KDE works great for me, but I’m quite comfortable with Linux already

Arch Linux. I wanted to try Hyprland with something and I felt like it was the easiest with Arch.