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

Any reasonably modern, well maintained desktop distro should be fine; whether they’re “for gaming” or not shouldn’t matter. I’ve successfully run WoW on both Debian Stable and Arch.

I personally (I’m sure others will disagree) would recommend skipping Manjaro and maybe Pop.

If you want to try Arch based pick Endeavor instead of Manjaro.

It seems like new folks have a lot of trouble with Pop to me. Out of the Ubuntu-based side I’d choose Mint over the rest.

Also don’t discount base Debian, people sneer at it because of the speed of the update cycle but the other side of that is it being the least likely to blow up on a new user.

Full disclosure: My devices are currently split between endeavor and Debian, depending on my tolerance for things breaking. I know fuck all about Bazzite/Nobara/Fedora.

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.

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.

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.

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

At the end of the day, any Distro that you pick will be essentially the same, as far as handling WoW. I have played WoW over the years on the multiple Linux Distros that I have used. The best way would be via Proton from within Steam. I tend to like the custom Proton version - Glorious Eggroll’s version.

For Linux Distros, pick one that is heavily documented like Ubuntu / Mint, both Debian based and tons of troubleshooting articles in case you need to reference them. Tend to prefer Mint between these two, personal choice. I tend to prefer Arch based ones, since they have what is called the AUR (Arch user Repo) which allows more complied apps to be downloaded and used on the system.

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.

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.

As long as all of your drivers working fine, I don’t think it matter all that much on which distro you choose

I would personally recommend popos or mint. I have varying amount of experience with the others.

Bazzite is very hyped on Lemmy, I don’t quite understand how it works, it seems good for what it is, but I don’t know if I would recommend it as someone’s first Linux daily driver.

Manjaro seems great most of the time, until the maintainers mess something up and royally screw up your system. But that’s just things I’ve heard, your milage will vary.

Nobara worked really well for me, but ultimately I wasn’t very comfortable to use a distro maintained by one guy, even if that guy is glorious egg roll.

I personally use popos. I wish it was fedora based like Nobara, but you can’t have it all. Wow works straight out the box. There are appimages or deb packages for warcraft logs and curse as well, so they work fine.

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.

Nvidia graphics is terrible on Linux you need to switch, honestly use Linux mint, it feels like windows and makes it easy to switch