bigb

So far so good for me. I switched last week after dual booting Pop OS and Windows 10 for a few months. I used to use Mac OS X back in college and missed the interface, so Pop OS’s implementation of GNOME felt good.

As for OP’s question, someone else with more knowledge can answer if a specific distro has the best drivers/compatibility with games. Pop OS comes with NVIDIA drivers which works for me.

I also wanted a full desktop OS. Some of the distros will focus on being a controller-friendly frontend for gaming rather than a desktop OS.

It might be helpful to try something like Ventoy for any distros that support a live CD. You won’t be able to fully test gaming performance, but Ventoy lets you try multiple distros on one disk.

Other questions for OP: What type of GPU are you using? What is your current OS?

My i5 6600k will turn 10 years old this year. I’m fortunate because upgrading to 32 GB should keep it running for a while still.

Hell yeah, keep chugging little guy 🤘

If Android is okay, I’d recommend the ONN 4K Pro player from Walmart (if located in the U.S.) with some privacy caveats:

• Do as little with Google: Make a throwaway login if Google requires one to get the device started up. Try to avoid Google Play Store as much as possible. If privacy from Google isn’t a concern, feel free to use your Google account to download apps from the Google Play Store.
• Learn how to sideload apps: There are multiple ways to do this, like a USB drive or FTP server.
• Pick an alternate launcher: This will replace the default Android TV OS UI with one that has much more flexability and no ads. FLauncher and Projectivity are ones that I recommend to friends.

The final product is a modern streaming device with much more flexability than any other store-bought device. Building a HTPC with Linux is probably the true self hosted option. Personally, I’m able to afford some privacy sacrifices with Google for something that “just works.”

I always wanted one so bad but never picked one up