Give it a try and you most likely wont regret it. Linux has come a long way since the general statement what you want game on it. I purchased a Asus ROG laptop about a year ago and installed Manjaro Linux on it (spare the hate) and its been working flawlessly. With that said. I'm not a hard core gamer and been sticking to Steam and console emulation so others with more time to play games should flank in.

nvidia shenanigans aside this should be fine for linux gaming.

Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means...

• out of the box support for Nvidia cards
• ships with a lot of useful gaming utilities
• very hard to break as you should primarily be installing Flatpaks and can do rollbacks

Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.

https://bazzite.gg/ if you're interested.

IMO, basically any distro with fairly modern (fairly often updated) packages should do. Apart from some build/packaging differences it's all same software anyway. The gaming side of software gets updated fairly often, so that's why you'd probably want frequently updated packages.

"Gaming" distros are basically just selection of gaming specific packages installed as default, instead of lets say productivity apps. You can run VM's in gaming/studio/whatever distros

FWIW, I got 5800x3D, RTX3090 - so, "close enough" same system as you. At least same series cpu/gpu. Running Arch, and gaming has been pretty easy, haven't yet found a game which didn't work - that said, some occasional game has had odd stutters (Darktide, for one. But I haven't tested in months).

Getting things to run did get a bit more involved than "just click it". Some extra compatibility stuff (proton-ge-custom), launchers (lutris, heroic, because GoG Galaxy just refuses to work). Steam & steam-games tend to "just work", although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.

But overall, stuff works, and in case of issues it now just seems to be either disabling ntsync and/or wayland for specific games and gaming away.

Take Fedora, as you're already used to it. Steam handles Windows games for you. In 99% of cases they just work. Only games that do not run nowadays are games with unsupported kernel level anti cheat. Look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/ to see if your games are supported. A VM won't help you as that is usually blocked by such anti cheat as well.

If you do have a problem with a non-multiplayer game look at https://protondb.com/.

For games from GOG, Epic or Amazon use Heroic. For every other store you can add the launcher or just the game itself to Heroic.

I can't believe that no one has asked you this question yet (fucking fanboys...):

Do you mind losing access to most features on your GPU, including (but not limited to): RTX HDR, Shadowplay, the Nvidia App, the Nvidia Control Panel and everything it offers, including the 3D Settings page?

If any of this matters to you, you may want to consider switching to an AMD GPU first before you consider Linux. Nvidia does not support it nearly as well as they support Windows. You get a driver that lets you run games, and that's about it.

Surprised I haven't seen Bazzite or Nobara recommended here, those are full desktop experiences with built in features for gaming. I use nobara because it has a version with pre-packaged Nvidia drivers.

There are a ton of distros that work well for gaming. I am currently running CachyOS. It was easy to get set up, runs smoothly, and I've been happy with it so far.

https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/gaming/

You don't need a gaming specific distro. Those just mean some apps are pre-intalled, like Steam and Heroic (for GOG, Epic, Amazon games). If you like Fedora, keep using Fedora, it games just as well as any other distro.

Hi I recommend against using an Arch based distro like manjaro or cachyOS ( arch by nature demands active maintenance ) also depsite the brand name ubuntu is a very bad place to start ( due to them forcing snap packages ). Go for something like fedora kde or bazzite, most of the app you need can come from flathub.

For games you got Steam, Heroic ( for epic games ), lutris ( for everything else ). You will have to quit the habit of hunting .exe file online, most of your apps will come from your store ( discover in your case ).

Vms will not let you bypass anti-cheat stuff so keep that in mind. Check for game compatibility on protondb if needed. Don't be afraid to ask question ( even dumbs one ).

The only thing that kept me booting windows for gaming was destiny 2, which choses not to support running on linux.

The current expansion "edge of fate" is terrible though, so it's full time linux gaming for me.

Coming from a Steam Deck, I was really happy when I learned about Bazzite. I tried installing it and stuck with it for a few months now and I'm excited to have gotten rid of Windows. It's fast and works well out of the box. Plus I have the SteamOS experience without fuss.

Bonus points for you, it's Fedora based and easy to install on top if Fedora.

Notably I had tried Ubuntu before this and had issues with VRR and a couple of other things. Bazzite is built for this, and it works well.

FYI: I have a rig similar to yours. I’m currently running Mint and have had no issues. I used to run Pop OS, but even after a fresh reinstall of their LTS, updates stopped working, so I recommend avoiding Pop OS.

DO IT.

Benchmarks online tend to show very minimal performance difference between distros. The main difference with gaming distros will be ease of installation of gaming stuff like gamemode, etc. Some distros also have a Steam Picture like mode if you prefer that. Besides the "gaming" stuff, the distros are otherwise just a normal Linux experience so yes you can install a VM software like normal.

Bazzite and CachyOS are two popular suggestions. Bazzite is a Fedora atomic spin for gaming and has specific images setup for your hardware. CachyOS is arch based and has optimized packages for your specific hardware

since you already have experience with fedora, you might wanna look at nobara, which has an nvidia-specific installer available. i'm running it a bit longer than 7 months now, and don't have any issues with it, and i have a pretty similar hardware config to you (a ryzen 5 instead of a 7, and a 3070 Ti instead of the normal one)

I also run a windows 10 VM, mainly for stubborn installers from cracked games that won't run correctly under wine and for my mouse/keyboard software (they have onboard profiles, so i pass them through to the vm to configure)

You should go with Fedora.

Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.

You absolutely can use VMs, but you don't need a VM to run windows software and you won't have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.

Honestly the biggest headache is with the "linux native" stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they're all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it's far from transparent to the user. Maybe I've overthinking it but in my opinion it's a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don't know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.

Linux Mint Cinnamon was is my first Linux distro coming away from Win10, and I have no issues with it. Mint uses Ubuntu as its codebase, so it's essentially Ubuntu with a different desktop presentation/look/feel.

I am still very happy with CachyOS. That'd be my recommendation. Nobara / Bazzite are good options, too, but I never tested them.

I recently made the switch. Running intel ultra 5 and nvidia rtx 5060. Bazzite and Pop!_OS were advertised as working, out of the box. I couldn't get either to work, following the wiki setup guides. I tried Ubuntu, couldn't get that working, either.

I switched to Nobara, and learned that I was messing up gamemoderun in Steam. So I have no idea if Nobara fixed my issues, or if I was messing something up the whole time, or maybe a little of both. It was fun, though! Absolutely glad to be done with windows.

Garuda dragonized gaming will get you everything out of the box and you can change the theme after. It will walk you through a lot with assistants, which is nice to learn things on an arch based distro. Its an easy switch from windows, plus, now I can use fish konsole htop and paru alright.

What about Bazzite? It's fedora based and made for gaming. I've only tried it on handheld like steamdeck and rog ally but it's awesome, even better than steamdeck os.

Dunno how nvidia drivers are for manually installing these days, know there was som jank before.

Im running Nobara and they got ez driver setup for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Either way I think you'll be fine no matter what distro you use.

Personally I like Nobara because it comes with a bunch of kernel patches, fixes and gaming utilities pre-installed.

I have a very similar build as yours, just with a RTX 3090 instead. I switched to Pop!_OS about a year and a half ago, and it's been running like a charm ever since.

Of course you should - Do a dual boot as a test on whatever rig you're currently using. Easy to undo and it costs you exactly zero.

I see bazzite mentioned a lot here, but wasn't there a post here a while ago saying that it might stop existing if fedora pushes through with the decision to ditch 32bit support? Did they decide not to do it after all?

I'm a simple man who use Mint on my gaming PC. No issues. Everything worked out of the box.