this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Ive not had a PC or gaming PC in 15 years. I want to get back into it now.

Im fairly against windows. I'd like to try a Linux system and thought this would be a fun way to get into Linux.

Ive been looking at some black friday sales here Newegg sales

Its been so long since ive looked at PC specs I feel like im completely new. Ive read that an AMD GPU can be easier for Linux so I started there.

So Ive got two questions!

What are some must have specs in you opinion to run most modern games, and would you have a #1 recommend for a prebuilt to get started with?

What disto is best for a total newbie who wants to use it for gaming and eventually transition for anything/everything else?

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[โ€“] Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Even after using PopOS I dont understand the hype. It is Ubuntu-based, meaning that its packages are stale and often quite out of date, which isn't something I would recommend for a gaming distro.

Better to pick one of the following, which are gaming focused, user friendly, and have up-to-date packages for {Mesa, Vulkan, Wine, Kernel, etc}:

Edit: My reason for saying that up-to-date packages are paramount is because a newer kernel supports more features, better performance, new hardware support, less bugs, and the same is true for packages that effect gaming. Desktop environments get better quickly through updates and bug fixes that effect gaming may take a year of more to reach pepetually out of date distros like Ubuntu. It is generally quite important, but less important if you use Steam Flatpak because it is slightly sandboxes.

[โ€“] HaraVier@discuss.online 1 points 1 week ago

Regarding Pop!_OS, (at least historically) it was the easiest distro for Nvidia users. Add to that some neat stuff like a Recovery Partition^[Btw, if you happen to know any other distro that offers something similar, then I'd love to hear about it.] and I can understand where (at least initially) the hype was (IMO justifiably) coming from. Unfortunately, erupting COSMIC DE from the ground hasn't done Pop!_OS well for upkeeping its good name and reputation. I suppose they're lucky that Linux users are seriously delayed when it comes to adjusting their recommendations. (Like how a chunk of peeps continued to proselytize for Manjaro till last year or so.)