I personally wouldn’t look for a distro made just for gaming. I’m currently using Fedora 41 on my PCs and I’ve just closed Red Dead Redemption 2 a few minutes ago, also played baldurs gate and resident evil 4.

Fedora works great for me using it for everything

You can install battlenet with steam, just add it as a non-steam game and proton does everything for you. I did it yesterday.

wow is one of the easiest things to run and has ran pretty much fine since it came out in 2004 lol

The newer battle net launcher is more difficult to run, but lutris auto installs all that for you.

I play both Classic and Retail on Pop!_OS using Lutris. Chose Pop! because my machine has an RTX 3090. The setup was super easy, and I actually get better overall performance than I did on Windows.

I play Starcraft 2 through Proton, it works pretty well. These days pretty much all distros are perfectly fine for gaming, maybe with the exception of Debian stable. If you’re new, I’d recommend staying away from Arch and derivatives like Manjaro. Also try to keep things simple for yourself and avoid flatpaks, snaps, and appimages.

I play on Arch with no issues. There’s a lot of guides with varying degrees of value and required skill, but I’ve found that easy mode is set it up is to run the program called Bottles and follow the wizard to set up the container and install all of the dependencies. It’s all automated.

There’s a little bit of jank when it comes to signing into Battle.net the first time, but after that it’s smooth. I’m all AMD in this build, but not super high end stuff and I manage 90+ fps with almost every detail setting maxed. There was a memory leak when I zone via teleport to anywhere in TWW, but I haven’t played since the last point release so I’m not sure if they’ve fixed it.

A little bit more than two cents, opinions on your list of distros:

Bazzite/Nobara: solid choices, but my experience is really limited with them. Atomic distros are really cool for any situation where you want to safeguard the critical system software from a user–enterprise, your grandma, your Minecraft nephew, etc. - - Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, a Fedora (or RH? can’t remember rn) dev who’s been critical to the rise of Linux gaming in the past few years. Look up Proton-GE, it can’t be overstated how important the work he’s done, free and on his own time, has been for Linux gamers.

Drauger: maybe someone else can weigh in on this one as I don’t have any experience. Looks like any other Ubuntu spin with a theme and some “gamer” apps pre-installed. Any time I see that, I prefer to just to back to it’s parent since I can just install anything it has on my own.

Pop! _OS: Cosmic desktop is pretty cool looking, but I prefer KDE. Very very small amount of experience here (maybe like 5 hours on my laptop before I jumped), but it seemed pretty good. Most of my drivers, including touch panel, worked right out of the box and Cosmic is cool. Not for me, but like I said, in this case I’d probably just go upstream to Ubuntu instead as I prefer KDE.

SteamOS Debian: bad idea. That project is not the same as what’s on the Deck (which is Arch based) and hasn’t been updated for several years. Not worth the headache, and you won’t get anything more than installing Debian and Steam aside from security issues. If you want the StramOS experience on something that isn’t a Steam Deck, Bazzite and Nobara are much better choices. Or even CachyOS, if you want to stay Arch-based.

Manjaro: Not a fan, at all. They claim to be Arch-based, but are more accurately described as Arch-related. Others are less willing to ignore the personalities associated with the Manjaro team, but I don’t really care about that. Whet matters to me is that they usurp, for lack of a better descriptor, the Arch repos for their own, which are not kept up to date with the same rigor. I’ve had system updates crash apps or nuke my system because of the mismatched revs of different pieces of system software causing issues. Plus there’s another middleman to worry about in the way of the dev and me. In Ubuntu’s case I let it slide because Canonical have a great track record with pre-release testing… Manjaro not so much.

I’d say that if you’re looking into Arch but aren’t confident in being able to go through the install, read up on the Archinstall script. Or check out Endeavors, you’ll get Arch with a graphical installer called Calamares. The installer defaults to installing their branding and a couple of QoL apps, but you can prohibit that by unchecking one box in Calamares.

Ubuntu: a great jumping off point for anyone looking to get into Linux. They’ve got spins pre-configured for pretty much all of the mainstream DEs, including some that are almost identical in day to day function as Windows. Based on the rock solid-est distro, Debian, with a ton of resources that go into dev and testing. My go-to recommendations for newbies when I can’t be present to troubleshoot things for them during/after installing.

Mint: all of the benefits of Ubuntu, plus out of the box proprietary software. Nice if you want an even more polished out of the box experience than Ubuntu. Again, they get a pass on the extra software they bundle in because it’s all been tested to hell.

Other notes: I run Arch, not because I feel like it’s a flex, but because I like rolling release models better than incremental ones. I don’t like waiting for stuff if I don’t have to, but I don’t install anything too wild either. I also don’t like reinstalling my system when a big update comes out… not an issue often these days, but it wasn’t atypical when I switched over a decade ago. Worthwhile to mention there are rolling release model flavors of the distros above: Linux Mint Debian Edition, Rolling Rhino (Ubuntu-based with a heavily customized XFCE interface), plus OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Sid (close enough at least).

Incremental releases are nice too, because every once in a while (1-2 times a year, normally like October and April, or a little bit later), Ubuntu releases a big update. Usually that just means a lot of neat new functionality and stability. If you’re cool with it, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll often be behind on a lot of software, which can be frustrating when you’re at the “I know this mouse lag bug is fixed in the new version of blueZ but it’s not going to be in the repo for 3 more months…” stage. There’s also the potential of nuking your system on a major update, or just losing personalization you may have put dozens of hours into.

I ran WoW for years on Arch until I stopped playing a few years ago. IDK what the experience is like these days, but it was fine then.

Personally, since I don’t like the runaround to install things on Bazzite, I would use Nobara or just vanilla Fedora with your own drivers. You can use Btrfs Assistant to set up Snapper snapshots and boot entries if you want, but I’ve never seen a Fedora update fail in any critical way. Frankly, I’d be inclined to just go with vanilla Fedora since GloriousEggroll is a busy guy and updates aren’t very up to date on Nobara IME.

Try using all of them in a vm and see which one you like

Try each for a week. Go through the installs. Set up a thing and do a update.

Make notes! I can’t stress this enough, want to actually learn a bit make a small note on why you like what you like and why you don’t. Ease of install, ease of finding support, ease of updating, and so on.

Shrug I distro hopped a lot. Tried a bunch before I stick with arch. Even did manjaro and ubuntu.

The beauty of linux is there’s a lot of options and choices.

Do Bazzite. It will be unbeatable for just working and ease of use.

Stay away from Manjaro for anything.

SteamOS that Valve offers is not the same as what’s on the Steam Deck. It’s extremely dated and is what it used to be. A real distro from Valve has yet to be released.

The best way to install WoW is using Lutris, which also comes with Bazzite. You search for and install Battle.net, then you can install WoW normally. Lutris can also add a WoW shortcut once WoW is installed, too.

You can also just copy and paste the WoW folder from your Windows Program Files folder. It keeps all your settings and addons.

For addons use Wowup-curse. It’s a open source addon manager that is just straight up better than all others.

Currently, WoW needs Proton-GE to work. Using wine-staging, or the dated wine-ge, and Battle.net will have problems starting. It’s something weird with authentication and connecting online. Proton-GE contains a patch specifically for this.

The easiest way to get Proton-GE is using Protonup-Qt if using KDE plasma, or Proton Plus if you’re using Gnome. For Protonup-QT, you select Steam, then install Proton-GE for Steam. Lutris will also be able to use it.

Just general advice, I’d use the latest Proton-GE as the default for all Steam games.

In Lutris set the runner for Battle.net to Proton-GE.

Source: I’ve tried all but Drauger OS, and currently play retail WoW.

You may need to try a few to make the most of your hardware config. Make a few bootable USB drives, and spend an evening trying your options I’d say at least pop!os, manjaro and nobara to cover the main distro bases. But everything is pretty good these days and everything has corner cases that cause trouble.

Wait wait wait.

There’s no shitty anticheat in wow? I guess I took it for granted these days…

I just rebuilt my wife’s old Dell laptop (AMD with a super generic Intel on-board GPU). It’s now running Debian stable + KDE and WoW installed easily under Lutris (start with their Battle.net wizard). Diablo III runs as well, but with some weird grphical glitches. Wife thinks they’re cool tho, so I stopped trying to fix it. Anyway, WoW seems playable enough for her, though super crowded towns like Orgramar (sp?) occassionally crash the game.

Like others have mostly said, Mint is a great choice.

All the different distros can basically all do the same things for the most part. The main differences between them are mostly philosophical and don’t matter to a new user.

Once you get comfortable with linux, you can easily switch to a different distro if you get annoyed with something.

For now, just choose a popular distro that you think has a nice user interface.

I think mint, popos, and Ubuntu are all great choices.

I am running Manjaro KDE on two general purpose PCs, both with Nvidia graphics, both without problems.

On my living room gaming setup (also Nvidia), I am running Bazzite, which also runs very nice.