I use Ubuntu as my main steam gaming install because it was recommended by Valve. Does anyone know if it's similarly decent on Fedora? I just want a few games, steam, discord, and a browser.
I use Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg) on my laptop since about a year. It is based on Fedora, with KDE built in and a lot of back end configurations for easy gaming that just works.
It is also an immutable distro.
It has been completely smooth for me, that said for Discord, I would recommend installing Vesktop as a flatpak, it is an alternative electron packaging of discord with Vencord (a plugin framework for the discord client) but more importantly it has support for screen sharing, that the official Linux discord client has but with a lot of issues.
I went with Bazzite and after a hiccup (installed Nvidia-open when I needed just Nvidia) it is working great! Was able to install and play a few games already! Thanks for the recommendation, hoping it will carry on as well as it did today.
I run Steam via Flatpak on Fedora and it all seems to work fine. I haven't exactly pushed the machine to its limits, though. Team Fortress 2, Overwatch 2, and various random old or indie games. Stock Proton works fine, and i also use Proton-GE via asdf:
A few years ago, i did have all sorts of problems with graphics performance, but recently it's all worked perfectly. I may also have applied some funky environment variables in my Steam settings; will hopefully remember to check later on.
I have a SteelSeries controller, and at one point used that to play Behold the Kickmen. Worked fine, as far as i remember.
Long-time fedora user here. I don't have any problems with it (though I've been using Linux over 20 years so I might just not be seeing some things as problems) but as all things linux-desktop, ymmv. Nvidia drivers (currently on a system with AMD gpu which has been a breath of fresh air) and hardware accelerated codecs (patent related stuff) tend to be the biggest pain points for people afaik.
For gaming: windows 10 pro had the greatest title coverage, but windows 11 is the standard for most modern steam titles.
Ubuntu does have better non-free driver mystery-blob support, and while that is not necessarily a good thing... it makes it compatible with a lot more hardware.
Anecdotally, Fedora was frustrating as F as a desktop due to limited package ecosystem. Thus, it is better for headless servers due to the security model. =3
Generally, I don't think there's much of a difference once you've got Steam installed.
I've had some crashes of Steam itself in the past and I don't know if those were somehow distro-specific.
I don't think I've run into any issues with games themselves on Steam that would have turned out to be distro-specific. Installing and running games on Steam is the same point and click exercise. Steam uses its own set of runtime library binaries for games anyway, so that probably also unifies things for games regardless of the distro.
Discord worked fine when I used it. I wasn't a heavy user though.
Someone said not to use Fedora if you have an Nvidia GPU and I have no experience with that. Also, I don't know about controllers, but I doubt those come with proprietary Linux drivers so I wouldn't assume there'd be much difference between distros.
My games work great, I actually get better FPS than I do on Windows for many of them. I use the Steam flatpak.
Admittedly I have had some sporadic issues with games not starting or having very bad FPS, but I have no idea who is actually at fault for those issues (and I doubt it's Fedora, maybe an app or a gnome extension or night mode messing with the compositor). Like I said, they're sporadic, so it only happens occasionally. The rest of the time it's smooth sailing.
Steam's recommendations, and their actual "SteamOS", moved to Arch-based around the launch of the Steam Deck.
I've been told Bazzite is a really nice Steam-focused distro: https://bazzite.gg/
Haven't tried it yet, I'm procrastinating moving a gaming desktop to Linux as October gets closer (end of Windows 10 support; end of Windows support for that desktop's CPU/TPM).
