You can use my post as reference: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
You can use any distro you want for gaming. Maybe try to choose a more popular one, niche distros like Nobara often aren’t as secure as major ones.
I would advise against Nobara. Why?
- Only one maintainer. If he quits the project, it will leave many many users without maintenance updates
- Slow updates. Maintaining a distro is a lot of work, and especially major updates can take many many months.
- Very insecure. It disables SELinux for example.
- Many tweaks that might make the OS less reliable.
- And much more… I absolutely respect GE’s work, but for one person, it’s just impossible/ hard to keep it secure and well working.
What else would I recommend? Bazzite (if you use your PC only for gaming) or the various other images from universal-blue.org
Why?
- They also come with QoL changes by default, just like Nobara
- They are actually secure because they maintain themselves automatically without any input. If a update comes from Fedora, it takes less than a few hours to also land on uBlue
- It’s reproducible. Every Bazzite install for example is the exact same. If one user has a bug due to a modification from Bazzite, the dev will have it too and can just fix it easily.
- And much more.
Proton is just the compatibility layer, which allows you to play Windows games on Linux.
It’s one of the main reasons so many people switched to Linux in the last months and years, since Proton gets even better from week to week. Something, games designed for Windows run even better on Linux (Proton) than on Windows!
From what I’ve heard, requiring Proton isn’t that bad, especially for the devs. Often, games engineered for Windows run better on Linux than the same ones for Linux.