Here is your up to date list of what distro you should be picking if you want to start gaming on Linux in 2026. The latest edition of you telling me I'm wrong.
The biggest problem I’ve noticed with every “best distro for gaming” article and social media post is that the author invariably assumes their own needs represent everyone else’s.
The second biggest problem is that they either overstate their favorite distro’s gaming performance compared to all the others (spoiler: the differences are negligible) or else present others as though they lack something important that cannot be easily added. Often both.
The best distro advice I can offer to a newcomer is to consider your other computing needs, like preferred release/upgrade cadence, or availability of help from an experienced friend, or vendor support for non-game software on which you depend. Pick a distro based on those things, and you’ll almost certainly be able to game on it with good performance, perhaps with a couple extra steps when setting it up in the first place.
If you have no non-gaming needs, then sure, go with whatever distro is being hyped on social media this month. But what matters a lot more is that you pick one and get started.
The biggest problem I’ve noticed with every “best distro for gaming” article and social media post is that the author invariably assumes their own needs represent everyone else’s.
The second biggest problem is that they either overstate their favorite distro’s gaming performance compared to all the others (spoiler: the differences are negligible) or else present others as though they lack something important that cannot be easily added. Often both.
The best distro advice I can offer to a newcomer is to consider your other computing needs, like preferred release/upgrade cadence, or availability of help from an experienced friend, or vendor support for non-game software on which you depend. Pick a distro based on those things, and you’ll almost certainly be able to game on it with good performance, perhaps with a couple extra steps when setting it up in the first place.
If you have no non-gaming needs, then sure, go with whatever distro is being hyped on social media this month. But what matters a lot more is that you pick one and get started.