So any is that has an update DE (desktop environment) and Mesa/Nvidia repo (drivers) is good for gaming.
I really like Bazzite, a Fedora Atomic image, it is gaming centric and made to be low maintenance. They also have good docs to guide new users.
Emby Server can be installed using the discover app.
And for llms, easiest way to run them is installing ollama
, their docs will guide you, I followed their docs to run deepseek in podman, and it worked great
if gaming is a primary focus check out Bazzite.
ubuntu does all that, install the latest drivers & mesa and it's what you'll get on any distro.
if you are trying them out, why not bounce around? figure what you / want need, and play away! Lots of good distros out there.
Any distro can be a good distro, with nvidia most ubuntu based distros work out of the box. So they tend to be the easy sell. Linux Mint is the Ubuntu distro most recommend.
However, really any distro will work and overall diference is minimal. I use fedora, cause my hardware works well with it and gaming is perfect. However with fedora their is tons of spins and types which is nice is you want something niche.
Anyways, what's a distro that's good for gaming plus running stuff like emby and running llm's? I need an all around os but a little more on the gaming side because I'm not letting this 4060 go to waste. I just got it so don't hate on me too hard.
anything with somewhat quick updates, i run arch on my system right now after running kubuntu for a bit over a year (22.04, 23.04, 24.04, and 24.10 in the end before i decided that the updates are coming a bit too slow), if i was you, i'd probably want to try fedora, i haven't tried it myself, but i've only heard good things, opensuse tumbleweed is a good option as well, maybe something arch based like endevouros
You really gotta try to figure out what you like, and what you don't like, but it's gonna be a very similar experience on most distros, the most relevant difference is how soon you get new features
I've considered switching to Linux fully but most pc games are just made for windows, so I just thought I'd rather have a second PC that runs Linux; although I haven't done that.
This is changing quite rapidly ; ProtonDB is quite positive, and SteamOS for the Deck is based on Arch Linux. Previously most people often just didn't bother to produce a Linux version, which is understandable, but for most it is not difficult to do so.
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