I’ve got an old win10 laptop. It’s nothing fancy in 2025, but I use it now and then while traveling, just to have a proper computer on hand. It’s time to move it over to Linux, and I have A LITTLE Linux experience. I work in software dev, so I know my way around CLI, but I don’t have much firsthard experience, other than occasionally using Kali for offsec tools. What are the distros I should be considering for a personal gaming laptop for occasional use for both gaming and occasional general use? Why?
I ended up writing for a while on this haha sorry 😅
A misconception that many people who are new to linux have is that certain distros are better for certain kinds of use cases. While this is definitely true to an extent, hardware support is pretty good all around for most popular distros, so all that really matters for a mixed use cases like this is differences in how the distro sets up the desktop experience. What one distro offers out of the box is probably available with some tweaking in another distro. What is most important in having a good gaming and general experience is the apps, so make sure that all the apps you want to use have support on Linux, or alternatives are available. For specific game compatibility you can look at https://www.protondb.com/
In terms of distros, I’ll list a bunch. You can look into them more. Any distro should work fine for your uses, so it’ll come down to personal preference.
Bazzite
- Bazzite is probably the most popular distro with a specific gaming focus. It comes pre-installed and configured with steam and launchers for other games, and has tweaks for gaming out of the box. It is immutable, which means that apps are stored in containers and can’t directly modify the base system, which makes it a lot more secure from accidental breakage, and any changes can be easily reverted.
CachyOS
- CachyOS is a distro based on Arch, pre- configured with a variety of themes and desktop environments for whatever look and feel you may want. The handheld version comes with gaming tools pre-installed. Arch generally requires a bit more tinkering than other distros, but CachyOS seems to be pre-configured pretty well so I don’t think it should require much of that.
General use distros
These won’t have steam or other launchers installed by default but you can download them with one command so it’s no problem at all. Any distro should work, I use Fedora as I find it to be stable and reliable with my gaming laptop. Mint, Pop!OS and Zorin OS are also popular options for new users. Ubuntu and its derivatives are ubiquitous, but are also at times controversial among linux users. Arch and NixOS are great if you want to customise everything about your OS, but you’ll spend a lot of your time setting them up and getting everything working for your hardware. CachyOS offers a similar amount of customisation without as much hassle.
Feel free to ask any questions you have about any of these.
be advised that if you’re doing dev work on Bazzite, you might have to make use of a distrobox depending on the software you use. for example, VSCode is available as a Flatpak, but if you want to use other things with it like NPM, you’ll have much less headache trying to get it to work by installing it in a distrobox.
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/integrate_vscode_distrobox.md
That’s true, I forgot to mention that, thanks
Edit: Bazzite has tools for this preinstalled as well so it would be very simple to set up if needed.
I use Nobara, I’ve daily driven on my gaming setup for 8 months. Strong recommendation. It’s maintained by GE of GE-Proton. I have an RTX 4080 and it has been completely smooth with drivers, my mic, camera, XBox controller, all working out of the box.
I’d recommend starting with either Linux Mint for a solid general purpose starting point or Bazzite if you’re focused on gaming.
Edit:
You can always try other distros later if you want. Make sure your starting point and foundation are solid first.
If you want to focus on gaming go for bazzite.with kde. If not go for fedora kde.
Both are close enough of W10 and will offer a good starting point.
If you want to learn linux try arch but I would advocate it as a daily driver unless you know what you are doing.
Agreed. While I would say Mint for older computer reasons, the entire debian line (includes Ubuntu) is too “vintage” to be of use for gamers, mainly because gaming support in kernel, drivers, wine/proton, and the big Wayland switch is happening at warp speed, where debian is designed to be a stable and reliable dinosaur that works for servers and business desktops, and isn’t RedHat Enterprise.
Like, any of them
especially hannah montana linux and red star os
Your mileage may vary depending on your specs, but: very happy with CachyOS on my DELL Latitude 5590.
Based on Arch, meaning you get constant updates. Many tools and easy installation compared to stock Arch. KDE is similar in it’s ergonomics compared to Windows. Many pre configurable gaming packages, getting stuff up and running is easy.
More „conservative“ and not liking living on the bleeding edge? Debian would be my personal choice. Bazzite is really interesting, but the „insistence“ on BTRFS breaks some gaming things (e.g. was not able to get Battle.net running with BTRFS, with ext4 on CachyOS it works)
No matter what distribution you choose, ProtonDB is your first stop for infos on windows games you want to get running on Linux
Specs like cpu, ram etc would be handy?
I’ll have to dig up finer details in a bit, but it’s a backup device I got on discount years ago. i5 what gen I’m not sure, gtx 960m, I may have replaced ram up to 16gb at some point and it’s running on an ssd at least.
If it’s not your daily driver, and you want to learn more about Linux, open the Arch Wiki, click on Installation guide, and have fun.
