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)

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed here, both on my desktop and Steam Deck. i like the stable rolling release model. Allows me to get shiny new things that have at least gone through automated tests.

And in case anything goes wrong it comes with snapper configured by default for easy rollbacks.

Fedora

I game on Fedora because it was just the OS I installed on my gaming PC when I moved to Linux. Everything is fine between Steam, Heroic, and Lutris. The NVIDIA drivers were easy to install from the App Store and the only game that doesn’t run well is Death Loop but there’s been some updates and I haven’t tried it in six months so it may be better now. There was a memory leak apparently but I think there were more problems.

Debian. It wont win any awards for fastest release cycles but it's rock stable with great support for my Ryzen 2700 and 6700xt.

Nobara (Fedora)

Tried Bazzite for a year. Was fun but now back to a normal distro.

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

I'm a Linux Mint user and I've not had many problems using Steam as a Flatpak.

Pretty much any distro will work for gaming these days. Really up to personal preference. I use Arch but have heard good things about Pop!_OS.

Rocking Garuda here!

I've been enjoying EndeavorOS on Plasma.

Tumbleweed. Stable rolling release distro.

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

Fedora on my desktop, bazzite (rebadged fedora) on my steam deck.

I'm always a lil surprised how few fedoras I see on these posts. Fedora is chill. Considering the difference between distros is basically a package manager, seems weird the second most bleeding edge distro doesn't get much love.

Endeavour OS! So far it's been smooth for the past 4 years. I've enjoyed it.

I switched to Cachyos KDE a week ago. It's the best distro I've used (previously I ran Debian KDE, and Mint Cinnamon before that). I have a GTX 1070 ti and it set up with zero issues. Steam installed perfectly, and I used AUR to install the gaming-meta package.

Just rolling with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Currently Pop!_OS

Bazzite on the living room PC.

Void with X11 (fvwm3). The fussier games tend to be online live-service titles; every new release Genshin Impact does a new weird.

PopOS. Lots of folks recommend bazzite for gaming though.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Meets all my requirements 😀

Manjaro (Arch) with hyprland for my window manager.

Slackware current.

This isn't a troll. I use it to game on my dual core pentium lovingly dubbed 'the craptop'. And I use it to game on my mid-tier gaming PC.

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

Bazzite. Literally built for gaming.

I just run Arch, I've been an Arch guy for years and never saw any reason to switch

Fedora and steamOS

Nobara but considering other option such as Bazzite and GLFOS.

Linux Mint Xfce

Mint because it doesn't break often and usually fixes are simple enough, and Xfce because, though I don't know how well it fares compared to others nowadays, it was the variant that would run the lightest in a previous computer I had some years ago, so I grew attached to it.

Also besides Steam, Heroic (for GOG, EGS and Amazon Prime) and Mitch (for Itchio) work fine on it.

Arch, all flatpacked.

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

I've been using Nobara for about 2 years and it's been very good.

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

GTX 1080 + i7 4790K here: I run an Arch Linux Wayland setup (labwc) on my machine. So I use this for gaming, too.

I have a handful of native games running without any issues. Other games I run on Steam (installed via Flatpak to avoid the 32 bits dependency hell). Never had any REAL issues that were not coming from Nvidia not running well on Linux or Valve not getting Linux support right.

I was running a GTX 1660ti and an i7 until yesterday using CachyOS. Worked great! Though for older cards, I might recommend a LTS distro to ensure you retain support (Mint is my go-to recommendation).

Bazzite and Mint

Eh, I don't find dnf very limiting nor do I frequently get stymied by a missing package.

Arch. If it's not a server, arch. Always arch.

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.

Windows 11 :/

Though heavily neutered, where even defender is disabled.

I boot CachyOS Linux with a lot of tuning (and some recent game testing). A linux gaming OS! I'm using Cachy like 95% of the time; I am not anti linux.

But honestly... It's just not worth a few lost features and performance hit over Windows for me, on top of the extra hassle. Its easier to just reboot. Maybe the experience is different on AMD GPUs, but I suspect Nvidia is at a disadvantage here.

This is on a desktop. Based on my experience with a RTX 2060 laptop I used to have, you also have the to deal with graphics switching, rendering on one device while displayong on another, and making sure your 1050 actually goes to sleep when not in use.

Be aware support for 1050 on 580 version of driver is ending so rolling release distos can make u a problem when they will upgrade version higher than 580

I use it for general things as well, but I have MX Linux on my laptop and it works well enough for the type of games I play ( nothing all that requirement heavy ). Steam's Proton works fine. So does WINE for modern games.

I've tried WINE without any tinkering on a couple old abandonware games ( 3D-Ultra Minigolf and some other game ) and both had issues with scaling, fitting into their borderless window, and crashing when selecting a menu button thing. So, older titles like those might be out of the question... if I don't try them on DOSBox.

Up to a couple of days ago was using arch linux, now using opensuse tumbleweed.

So far I got the same experience in both, and most of the issues I got were related to my poor understanding on how to properly setup Hyprland when using a minimal installation setup.

I guess the distro itself wont make that much difference.

Fedora atm, I heard it's pretty good I haven't really tried anything else.

What I've found is that what works bet for your preferences and build is best. When I had an Nvidia card, Pop!_OS worked best for stable performance. I'm not a fan of Gnome though and it got me to upgrade to an AMD card and I've moved to Bazzite with no regrets.

I started with Bazzite but wanted a system that wasn't immutable, so I switched to Garuda. Both have been easy and reliable.

Mint. I've been happy with it. I'm more familiar with debs/apt/Ubuntu so I wanted to stick with something familiar but didn't want to use Ubuntu. It's worked very well for me for gaming. I just upgraded my GPU from an Nvidia card to an AMD card which, aside from having to manually install the drivers from the terminal, has worked very well.

I don't think the hard part of linux is getting proprietary GPU drivers. They all have package managers that will grab them for you, after quick google search anyway. Mint will have the most specific google support for more esoteric problems/goals. Pika OS includes gpu driver bundles and is similarly debian based. But it wasn't good at waking from sleep on my old hardware with 1650super. Too hard to fix.

SteamOS on a Steam Deck.

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

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).

Void Linux with XFCE on my desktop, and Bazzite on my media center PC.

Arch. Just dropping the dxvk/vkd3d libs in the game main dir with exe and double click. No need for bottles, crates, kegs and other warehouse ware. 😂 Just plain old simple and highly customized Wine 10.5.

Guix

arch on a walmart gaming laptop, hooked up to an old external monitor

I'm using Manjaro because I wanted a rolling release distro that focused on kde, and SuSE didn't feel like downloading that day. No problems here