As regulareel mentioned, if you don’t use Steam, Ubuntu Mate. Otherwise, Pop!_OS. Despite Linus’ bad experience, the issue was fixed fast (and again, it was part Linus’ fault for not updating his OS first thing, which you should keep and mind and have your OS updated) and Pop!_OS is a good start for beginners.
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I like vanilla Ubuntu myself, the Gnome-based interface is just so polished it is incredible. Ubuntu 20.04 is one of the best Steam distros if you have an AMD system (cannot vouch for Nvidia unfortunately).
Regardless what you choose, always remember that your distro is but a starting point. Think of distros like houses/apartments in the vast city of Linux, some are more remote and more difficult to get to than others (Arch) and some are pretty much empty lots of land (Linux From Scratch). Now, empty lots are useful for certain people (especially DIYers and tinkerers) but most just want a house to live in.
Arch is like that two-story building that stood for 100 years but always need the odd maintenance job, always something broken in there somehow. Manjaro is like Arch but they already redid the plumbing necessary to install modern stuff.
Ubuntu & friends are like a 4 room apartments in the Ubuntu complex, Windows would be a nice downtown apartment hotel in the Microsoft block and MacOS would be the penthouse on Plaza Hotel. Freakin’ expensive but man oh man the experience…
No matter where you live though, you can always modify your place of living to whatever you want. Unlike the Microsoft block you own the property rights to your house. 
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Ubuntu all you deal with is a mailman that delivers and receives mail for diagnostic purposes. And you can say no to that.
This isn’t really a problem or an issue, more of a curiosity but has anyone else found that Ryzen’s boost characteristics are different in Linux than in Windows? I’d expected this to be determined by the motherboard and so would be OS agnostic but in Windows default temperature and power limits would have all core loads settle on 3.8GHz and the temperature would settle on the low to mid 70s Celsius. All-core workloads in Linux are holding 4.0GHz and temperatures are settling on about 81 C.
I’ve also found Linux to be much better at balancing simultaneous multicore workloads. On Windows I had to manually give OBS and games their own cores to play with otherwise I get horrendous stutter in both, but I haven’t had to do that with with Linux (which is a good thing, because I still haven’t worked out how to reliably do that for workloads that will happily max all cores such as handbrake)
THE FINAL PART:
The Raccoon Review:
Honestly, I don’t blame them for feeling left out with the social pressure Luke endured as I basically had that pretty much constantly with my brother until I gave him Windows 10 2004 AME. (Finally solved EAC problems with War Thunder, and allowed him to play COD: Warzone)
The “SLI jitteriness” is par for the course of Nvidia OpenGL support and Unity OpenGL support. Devs need to seriously switch to Vulkan, but you know what happened last time I said -force-vulkan on “Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy”? It hard crashed the entire system never to render the desktop environment ever again, and this was with MangoHUD as a frame limiter. Unity Vulkan support doesn’t exist. It’s literally a crapshoot if you try to run a game using Vulkan on Unity because not even Unity themselves test it for stability.
That was an extremely important point that developers were not going to take the “native Linux” cake if 100% of bug reports were from Linux, and their time and money was not worth a 0.1% market share, hence why Proton exists. But this is also why most toggles for Anti-cheat just won’t be bothered with, and you’re better off with a customized VFIO instance. (Edit: I am being informed that this portion of the video was debunked as FUD a while ago, also a good thread on thoughts here: Thread by @shanefagan on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App)
Mod creators without cross platform mindsets is another thing that will really hamper the experience. In the XNA and FNA communities this is less of an issue, but for other games, mod support is pretty much provided as is with no support.
EXCELLENT point that ProtonDB needs both a overall score and a “more recent reports” score. Nobody that just looks at the score presented is going to dig through reports to see if it still holds up.
I fully agree, the year of the Linux Desktop for gaming is NOT here. The closest you can get without counting VFIO’s own anti-cheat issues is to just spin up a Windows VM for those special snowflake launchers like Ubisoft, EA, and Battlenet. There’s still nagging issues like Hat in Time becoming unstable over time and one unsolved Crash Bandicoot NST issue that make me just want to spin up a Windows VM instead of using Proton. In fact, all Unreal Engine 4 games with Media Foundation are only supported if you are directly in contact with the devs of something like Proton GE (and if they deem you an annoyance, you could be banned over personal reasons from a issue tracker. *ahemdiscordserverahem*)
I think Wendell should update VFIO guides with a Nvidia and LTS centric view, as I’m not a fan of Fedora and the rolling release thing especially since the 470 drivers from Nvidia have unresolved issues. No, this does not mean using Pop!_OS. This just means how do I get from point A to B from a Vanilla Ubuntu or Kubuntu install?
What this teaches is to double down on VFIO. As Wendell said before, VFIO is a lot better than trying to do stuff natively for now.
2:07 onwards in this video is very relevant to anyone who has just completed the series:
And here’s the PopOS WIP thread:
On Ubuntu you don’t deal with systemd boot, but on Pop you do.
(Disclaimer: haven’t watched it yet)
I feel like the title is a little misleading (but again, probably intended because Engagement).
IMO Linux is very much ready, been doing it for years, but there are exceptions of course, namely everything with Anticheats and that should hopefully change over time.
That being said, the same is also true for Windows, especially when you look more at older/retro games. When you try to run some 10+ year old games on Windows, you will often run into situations where they don’t install or run properly. And the ironic part about that is that they often run better under Wine.
If you have a game with SecuROM you can just forget about it on Windows, but it’ll run completely fine on Linux. Just one of many things that can go wrong.
edit:
commenting as I go…
“Luke and I avoided specifically seeking out titles that would either validate the Linux gaming experience, or intentionally make it look bad”
First game pick: BF 2042, a game that is known not to work because of known restrictions on EAC.
I mean 
I get what they’re trying to convey here, I just found it funny.
And yea, it is frustrating when you have friends you wanna play with and can’t. I started playing Apex a couple months ago and can’t play it on PC either, but luckily I’m actually rather enjoying the console version and if need be there’s actually cross-play, so whatever.
The rest seems rather fair. One note on Linus’ experience with Supreme Commander Forged Alliance… there is a script on Lutris that installs the Forged Alliance Forever stuff, and that is regularly maintained, by their devs… soo why is he looking for random guides (again!).
He’s the type of guy that makes it hard for himself because he looks for his own solutions first instead of just using what’s already there…
And also the “not applicable to my particular distro” I mean… has he actually tried it? Just because it was tested on Xfce doesn’t mean it doesn’t run on KDE…
Overall I think Luke sums it up fairly well, it’s not a one-click-and-go kinda deal, but that’s not to say it’s not possible. It requires some preparation at times.
I just wish they had done the Challenge after the Steam Deck launch to include all the (hopefully?) positive developments especially in the Anti-Cheat department.
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My problem are the teething issues that continue to be issues now making me seriously reconsider VFIO. Media Foundation patches for Wine just dumps video files directly into RAM and never lets it go. With a title that uses a lot of videos, you run into quite a bad memory leak situation. Then there are UE4 titles that crash as soon as the second of the 2 videos you’ve loaded in a session is finished.
What works great though are Unity titles in Proton with a 8 core processor like Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero. (For some reason Unity does not like high core count processors)
Oh the irony of this paragraph 
Not really irony.
Linux as the base system is “ready”, for basically anything you throw at it. Of course the software needs to support it, and that’s no different on Windows. Windows is certainly ready, but a shitty game can still not work properly (see also the aforementioned older games).
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You can blame the game developers all you want, the fact is that 99% of “gamers” use windows, so it only makes sense for them to spend their effort towards windows development.
I’m not blaming anyone, I’m simply stating the fact that stuff can just not work on a system for whatever reason. I never said or implied it’s the developer’s fault it doesn’t work.
But since you brought it up, it would be nice if studios just called up their BattlEye/EAC reps to enable Proton support because that’s about all they have to do. That’s beside the point tho.
Oh yeah I remember he mentioned about that on wan show. He found it eventually, but getting multiplayer was a pain.
Well I haven’t actually tried that Lutris script, gotta say that.
But from what I can tell on the Lutris discord the devs are pretty on top of things when it comes to updates and issues, so I can hardly imagine it not working tbh
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One big question is, when is a new tech ever 100% ready to take over? It pretty much never is, but as it reaches more and more maturity the less sharp the edges become, and the more the use increases the less people get bothered by said sharp edges, to the point where today, no one gives a damn anymore about most of Windows flaws.
Just look at the Smartphone transition - in the beginning they weren’t even ready to replace phones, you couldn’t even make a call to a regular phone with the first iPhone! Linux is totally ready today if you don’t mind the sharp edges until the rest of the world catch up.
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I am grateful I found VFIO when I did, and planning HEDT computer builds to meet that need so I could get around most of the Proton/Wine issues by running a VM, but both have the same anti-cheat issues.
But if you want a single player game to be guaranteed to work (given you allocate/pin cores/memory properly) a Windows VM allows that for not just Steam, but the other storefronts too.
I would feel far more comfortable playing my GOG DRM-free copy of a Windows game on Windows than dealing with DXVK and Lutris. GOG scripts for Windows games on Lutris most of the time just don’t work.
Yeah, except as already mentioned… It is often easier to get games released before 2010 working on a Linux system with wine than a Windows 10 VM. So the argument is not perfect.
That said, Linux is not at the point where it is just pick-up-and-play yet… Though, slowly getting there with Lutris and Steam. Not all games though.
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This for me is the largest problem… For example:
These are my main launchers and combined with a couple of the anti-cheat games which show no interest in opening up their platform, it makes it so that I’d pretty much be running everything in a VM or stick to dual booting.
That’s just so much of a hassle (for me) that I’d rather just stick to Windows because “it just runs”. Yes… I know that Windows can and does have its own issues in that regard, but overall it is just a lot easier to just pick up a game and play it.
While I find it wonderful that Lutris and Steam make it so much more accessible in Linux to play games. For me the “plug & play” ability of Windows is way more convenient.
And as long as the general support for gaming on Linux isn’t there, I see no way for me to switch my main desktop.
Like they mentioned in the earlier videos; for general office, media consumption and productivity use it works great and, in some cases, even easier that Windows.
I had switched over to Linux on my work laptop for instance, because all the applications I used were web-based anyway. That (largely) worked great and I would do that again if I have the option.
And I had my mum run Linux on her old laptop, because I could make it less resource heavy and get some extra life out of her machine. For her use case it didn’t even matter too much what OS she ran, though she did need me for maintenance on it.
All in all, Linux is a lot more accessible nowadays and that’s great. But as far as I’m concerned it is a different tool than Windows, which should be put to use for different tasks.
Overlap is fine, but I don’t mind using different systems as long as each has their specific task. And for general gaming, Windows still is more accessible. 
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Re: the topics of launchers, why does the Windows world insist om copying broken ideas 
Ideally there should be one launcher with multiple backend storefronts.
I don’t want to wait 2-3 minutes to launch Origin just to play some Battlefield or whatever, nor do I want Origin to eat a few hundred megs of memory the 90% of the time I do not use it.
Substitute Origin for whatever other launcher you use. It is such a broken concept. But I digress.
Launchers are indeed quite a topic on themselves… 
I get that they’re the modern distribution and the first, most basic, form of DRM. They make a lot of games far more accessible and that’s great.
But I would love to see more freedom in stores instead of most things being stuck in a single one… That would make your game library more independent, which distributors might now want though.
But yeah, we’re stuck with those and I doubt that they’ll go away in the coming decades 
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