For gaming and having it work out of the box ?
- Based on Debian : pikaOS
- Based on fedora : Nobara
- Based on Atomic fedora : Bazzite
- Based on Arch : CachyOS
- Based onUbuntu : PopOS (not so sure about its current state, their cosmic desktop isn’t released yet)
Beginner friendly : Mint, most of gaming distro (cachy might be a bit more advanced )
I do not know much about the current state of snaps, so I won’t recommend Ubuntu and derivatives (kubuntu, Xubuntu…). I guess it is easier to use .deb now, but I can’t call beginner friendly a distro that require terminal or tweaks to change packages you can install on it.
It will create a default profile in your home (games/heroic/Prefixes) where everything will be installed, and if you have steam installed, it will detect the proton version of steam, and use it.
If some dependencies of the game are not installed, you’ll be able to run winetricks and install it in the profile of the game or to use steam runtime.
Using Windows-only games on Linux is getting better at an impressive rate those last years. There is more and more games working out of the box with steam or heroic. But yeah, sometimes, you just have to give up (or use Windows ).
Try the heroic game launcher. It usually works well. It let you log into gog, epic and prime account and games easily.
If the game doesn’t run well, try your luck on protondb to see if there is a way to fix it : https://www.protondb.com/app/22380
I’ve install the gog version of fallout 1 with the heroic game launcher, it worked out of the box. Maybe you’ll have some luck with new Vegas.
I don’t use a Nvidia card, nor play Starfield, but I’ve seen some videos explaining that Nvidia drivers 535 don’t work well with Starfield. People had to downgrad to 530 or 525 to have it work. I don’t know if nvidia released new drivers since, but if you have issues trying Starfield, you can keep an eye on that.
Mull has been discontinued in December 2024. Ironfox is a fork of it.