I would recommend staying away from Manjaro regardless of your distribution preferences, for a whole range of reasons, some of which are documented here.

When it comes to Nvidia, don’t let people make it look like it’s some kind of an adventure quest with no map markers. Practically any reasonably maintained popular distribution will either have everything installed already, or will give you an Nvidia option during installation. There are still some long-standing issues, but the vast majority of them are either actively being worked on, or just got upstreamed, and it’s up to your distribution to deliver the update.

If you like Debian/Ubuntu based choices, Pop is not my preference, but it is a good distribution. Otherwise, Endeavour has been absolutely excellent. Fedora isn’t necessarily a bad option, but their package management policies will make setting up gaming workflows a pain. Nobara comes with all of that pre-configured, but is otherwise just regular Fedora

Hi,

I’m going to say that at a high level it doesn’t make much of a difference. Some distros will make claims they have tweaks for gaming but for most players I doubt you’ll notice the difference. Almost all distributions make it easy to get Nvidia drivers working these days so I wouldn’t worry about that.

I’d say to pick the distribution based on other factors, such as update policy (rolling vs stable) or desktop environment you prefer.

I wanted to wait to the end to mention Manjaro has some controversial aspects to it. In terms of how the project handles money and leadership. I’d personally not recommend it but that has nothing to do with gaming.

Long time Fedora user here. I’ve used Manjaro for a few months before Fedora and I’ve switched to PopOS! a few months ago because it was better supported from my laptop manufacturer…

I’ve to admin I was a bit skeptical about switching to a Debian based distro, because I’m someone who likes to follow the latest news in the field and gets exited to try the latest stuff. But then I did and gosh if it’s a smoother experience compared to Fedora! (which itself was a notable smoother experience compared to Manjaro). I’m not saying that Fedora experience was bad, I still think is one (if not the) best compromise between usability and freshness, but I’d say that with Pop I’ve had even less troubles than with windows! The price of that? Being stuck with Gnome 42 after having tried the goodies of newer ones :/

TL;DR: If you think you can live without the latest magic from the linux community, to then I’d reccommend you Pop. Otherwise Manjaro is a good distro and from what I can remember NVIDIA drivers works almost out-of-the-box but be ready for some frequent minor troubleshooting sessions

Been rocking Pop! with a 3080 for about 3 months with only a few minor gripes. Darktide had some weird tiny lag in it somewhere that I couldn’t nail down but every other game I’ve played has worked just fine. And for some reason if I connect to mullvad using their app before opening Firefox, it’ll lag out for 10-15 secs.

Everything else has been rock solid. I’d prefer KDE to Gnome, but with Dash to Panel, the Pop Gnome is good enough for now. Cosmic should be out relatively soon. I tinkered with Nobara and KDE plasma 6 for a few days but it was nowhere near as stable, so I came right back to Pop.

Nobarra or bazzite are the way to go.

I used Pop for a couple months (nvidia GPU) with no issues at all. It was rock solid! They also have a new DE coming soon (hopefully) that looks really good so far - context

Installing the lastest Nvidia drivers for Debian was pretty straightforward, after which everything runs smoothly. I suspect the distro you pick isn’t going to matter as much as you think!

New hardware from the last 1-2 years or you want to take advantage of new software features quickly? Use a rolling release distro like Arch or Fedora or one of their derivatives. EndeavourOS is a great place to start with Arch if you don’t want to manually install things. On the Fedora side I’ve heard good things about Nobara and Bazzite.

Hardware older than 2y? Use literally anything.

I have tried both and a bunch of others with a laptop with nVidia and Intel and have had a range of experiences.

Anything Ubuntu based worked out of the box but any significant deviation from the exact current standard made things less stable. Changing WM/DE was not really possible and troubleshooting was opaque. Snap was also a nightmare of broken packages and bad update processes.

Manjaro looked really nice and had that lovely Arch flavour, but it is not really Arch, more Arch adjacent. Lots of things work similarly but lots of things break in bad ways. They have had numerous issues with security, bad updates, and general poor practice.

Pop is cool, I like it, but just not a good fit for me. Cosmic is a great environment but I like to tinker too much and while the team is great and do good work it is just not the same kind of defaults I like.

EndeavourOS is my current pick. It is Arch with sane defaults. It comes prebuilt with a DE configured, backups using BTRFS snapshots, a handy updater and package management config, some cool apps built in, and it is very performant. The guides for hardware video acceleration worked first time for me which has never happened before, normally that is a major pain and takes a few days to get sorted on a fresh install. Graphics performance is awesome, same with built in OOM protection. That said, make sure you have enough RAM. I had 8gb in my laptop and ended upgrading to 32gb after a number of failed builds and messing around with swap to get things to finish. If you have less than 16gb RAM I would recommend upgrading.

Whatever you choose, I would recommend trying a few things before settling down. The right fit is right for today and may change, so try things again in the future if you feel uncomfortable. Also do what works for you, not for anyone else. If you don’t like Arch you are not obligated to use it, same with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. Keep the fun of it and play around, maybe just boot up a few live environments and see if something tickles you. I hear good things about Hannah Montana Linux.

Definitely use the Nvidia installer if that is the card you have. Nvidia’s drivers are a common source of problems for me over the years resulting in wasted time troubleshooting. Zero issues since switching to PopOS on 2 Nvidia machines. (1080 laptop and 3090 desktop). No green screens, no blank screen boots or wake up, no kernel module compilation issues. Far more productive and much less frustrating.

Fwiw I started out with PopOS as I had a 1080ti and am still with it having moved to a 7900XTX. No issues with it apart from the Pop Shop being slow which should be remedied by the new Cosmic version

Get Nobara or Endavour