I’m saving to get a framework computer for Linux (Pop OS) Gaming/Streaming. I’m not very literate with specs and whatnot, so if anyone who uses framework desktop to game, are the options given good, if so what are recommendations, or should I mark as bring your own and bring something not listed to build it?
For some reason the tags “Linux” and “Pop OS” were not compatible with my other tags, sorry if this makes it more difficult to find help.
Edit: Thanks for everyone’s replies! I hadn’t heard of or considered Bazzite before this, but I will defiantly look into it! I chose Pop OS as from my research it appeared to me to be the best compatible with gaming, that was also stable and easy to use.
For resolution, I’ve got a duel monitor setup, both 1080, so super resolution isn’t a concern for me.
As for the system, I was unsure if the 128 was overkill as I’m not planning on running LLMs, but I was also not sure if the 64 would be enough. As its non upgradable and prices skyrocketing, picking between these two have been extremely difficult for me with my little knowhow. Either way it will likely take me a long time to save, even longer if I decide to go with the 128.
Pop-OS had a major update and is now shipping with the new Desktop Environment Cosmic (which is pretty nice in my opinion). Before that update, it was working just fine, maybe not the most cutting edge environment but getting Steam games to run was fairly straight forward. AS Pop-OS is based on Ubuntu, it is not the most bleeding edge among distros. But it depends how much you value that, in turn it is a very stable system.
With Cosmic, they switched from X11 to Wayland. I don’t know how well that transition has been. I do use Pop-OS on my Mini-PC, but haven’t used it for games since the transition. No harm in just trying though.
I have no experience with streaming, Linux or not, if you have experience with it on Linux I don’t think Pop-OS would make it harder than other distros though.
In terms of gaming performance, the Framework Desktop (with a 395/8060s) is somewhat comparable to a regular PC with a Radeon 7600 XT. It is up for you to decide if that is enough for you, for my gaming needs it is perfectly fine. The great thing however is its energy efficiency, which is much better than any regular Desktop dGPU. That means, you have much less of a hot air cannon in your room when playing compared to traditional Desktop systems.
Hello! I’m sort of in the same boat as you, as I am saving for a desktop for gaming.
There are some good videos on YouTube measuring the Framework Desktop’s gaming performance on Linux. I would recommend checking out the video by Level 1 Techs, as he goes through a few different benchmarks with good comparisons.
Also, any reason why you were considering Pop OS? I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Nobara as a good distro for Linux gaming. Would like to hear your perspective on it since I still haven’t completely decided which distro I would like to use.
I am not the OP but maybe I can chime in. Nobara is certainly a very gaming oriented distro and it is maintained by the same guy who is behind Proton GE. The downside is, that it is a very small development team from what I know.
Pop-OS is rather unique in that it is an Ubuntu based system, and with that it is very stable but at the same time it has many Gaming optimisations that Ubuntu lacks by default. Pop-OS is backed by a company and its development team (System76). It has suffered popularity recently because the development of their own Desktop Environment has eaten up a lot of resources. Now that this Desktop Environment has been launched, I’d hope that they can rebalance priorities again.
When it comes to Distros two main aspects are how bleeding edge it is and how stable it is. Those two things are usually on opposite sides of the spectrum. A side factor is, how well it is optimised for games by default. Most gaming distros are on the “bleeding edge” side, Pop-OS is one of the few that is on the “stable” side.
PS: My personal Distro choice on my Framework Desktop has been a bit more obscure: openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is a rolling release distro (ie bleeding edge) but generally considered one of the most stable rolling release distros. Kernel, drivers pretty much as up to date as it can be. Installing steam was also super easy and games run well so far.
openSUSE is its very own thing, so not just some Debian or Arch fork
I am very new to Linux, are you able to comment about the downsides of a small development team? I have heard the wisdom “Don’t let your everyday OS be controlled by one person“ but I don’t have a good understanding of how impactful that can be. Also on the topic of stability vs. cutting edge, how much control does one typically have over their system on rolling release distros? For example, if an update to the distro breaks something, can I just choose to not install the update? I have been strongly considering running Fedora on the desktop since it is officially supported, but in general I value stability over new features.
Personally I think that rolling release distros aren’t the best choice for beginners, unless they really want that and accept the downsides. The downsides being that there is very little cushioning between you and early bugs.
What you can do when updates break things depends on the Distro and how you set it up. openSUSE Tumbleweed for example has Btrfs as file system and snapshot configured by default. Snapshots are automatically made before updating so if something breaks one simply launch the prior snapshot and rollback. This is certainly possible on other Distros as well but I don’t know in how far it is enabled or configured by default. The thing with bugs in rolling release Distros is that the are usually handled soon enough. In case an update breaks something it is a good idea to wait with the next update for some time.
Tumbleweed has another advantage. They have an automated testing pipeline, that means, it usually needs a few days more to get the newest stuff but on the other side it is far less common for anything to break. A bigger team means that there is more manpower to test stuff and make sure things don’t break. It also means more eyes on the system. It also means that it is less likely that the distro is going to be abandoned.
Fedora, from what I have heard (I don’t have much experience with it, just installed it quickly once) is a bit middle in the road, more bleeding edge than Debian but not quite as stable. There are quite a few who like that balance. Given that it is the mainstream option supported by Framework, I don’t think it is a bad choice for the Framework Desktop.
Hey, I will try to give you some useful insight into my daily gaming experience on Framework Desktop (128gb).
First of all: It’s great!
I am using basic Linux Fedora 43, slapped Steam on it and it works. Most of the time you don’t even need to look into steams compatibility settings because games just run. That goes for early access games too, where you would expect compatibility and performance issue the most.
Examples:
Path of Exile 2 - Early access, unoptimized, vram melting game - works like a charm
I just tried out the controversial Ashes of Creation which is even farther away from beeing optimized. Lot of players are angry with the games performance (and some other things) - works like a charm too.
I found my niche within ARPGs and mostly MMORPGs, and for those Framework Desktop works extremely well. I think it’s best when you know exactly what you are going to play on it. It might be not the best, if you want to have peak performance in the newest blockbuster action games for years to come.
Why I pulled the trigger in the end:
Power efficiency (as already mentioned) - This computer is perfect as a server too
AI capabilities - running local LLMs on it, without the need for AI subscription models and sharing my prompts over the internet. It’s not only a consumer product its also a pretty powerful tool.
So if you really only want to game and nothing else, you’ll get better deals. But as an overall system, it is really hard to beat.
Maybe to add regarding the hardware. The Desktop 395/64 GB wasn’t the most cost effective option for gaming, when it launched. However, given how memory prices have exploded in the meanwhile,while the 64GB version of the Framework Desktop has remained almost at the same price point, I would say that now it is at least competitive price wise. On top of the advantages of being more power efficient and its LLM capabilities. The downside is a limited upgrade path.
I don’t have a Framework Desktop (yet) but I have installed openSUSE Slowroll on five Framework models (Framework 13s and Framework 16) and it works very well and has up to date kernels (6.18.5 today) and up to date specific drivers for specific Framework hardware.
openSUSE Slowroll is a variant of openSUSE Tumbleweed, but it gets regular security patches but the major upgrades happen once a month instead of every day so the amount of files you are downloading is less than Tumbleweed and it’s less bleeding-edge than Tumbleweed so might be a little more stable.
In my use of both Tumbleweed and Slowroll I’ve found them to both be quite stable considering how up to date they both are.
Steam works well with both Tumbleweed and Slowroll.
I run Arch Linux on the 128GB variant of the Framework Desktop and gaming works great. So far, I have tried Factorio, Minecraft Bedrock, Minecraft Java, modded Java Minecraft, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and The Witcher 2 and all of them run > 60 FPS on medium to high settings at 1440p.
Like @rko mentioned, you can easily just install Steam and most games will run through Proton or natively. The only game which didn’t work was Battlefield 6 but that’s because it has DRM which doesn’t run on Linux.
I do LLMs and gaming and general desktop stuff. It just works. The advantage of Bazzite over say PopOS, is official support from Framework, also that flavor of Linux comes read to game out of the box–no patches or intervention really necessary–as that is what the devs make that Linux to do. As for gaming performance, it entirely depends on your game selection, the settings, and how big your monitor is. I have a 4K OLED, I can bring even Windows games in Windows on an RTX5080 to their knees in AAA titles.
Now, which tier of system you get…is kind of a tricky thing. This RAM shortage–is going to last years, most likely. Further, you can’t upgrade the system. On cold boot in 2026 doing nothing, even with an optimized Arch install, you’re going to use 16GB of memory. Which makes the 32GB configuration not look great even middling term. Chrome or Fireforx are notoriously memory hungry. 128GB is honestly overkill for my needs–but I bought it because I want the machine to have capacity in the bank when software gets more demanding in the future. There’s also your budget, the whole Framework lineup just got its 1st price bump, with the 128GB 395 going up 25% in price.
I am no serious gamer, but I am running CachyOS on Framework desktop, and it was pretty much painless to set this up for gaming. CachyOS has a meta package bundle which installs Lutris, Steam, Heroic launcher and other stuff. I also followed some of the tips mentioned here…and so far, it has been working.
Oh yeah screen resolution is a very good point. I may add, that I went for a 2560x1440 OLED instead of 4K to make things a little bit easier for the machine. I knew some of my games will be quite demanding. Had some not so good experiences with an iMac some years ago with a beautiful 5K screen but it’s hardware only allowed using it as a typewriter.
64 will be the good kind of overkill. The ps5 has 16 gigs. The upcoming steam machine will have 16 gigs of ram and 8 vram. Most graphics cards have 8 gigs.
Well, the PS5 is now nearly 6 years old. The upcoming steam machine having 16GB of RAM–is pretty pathetic for a PC. Most cards still, in 2026, having 8GB is a real problem–because it was easy 6 years ago to max out an 8GB framebuffer. For reference, the RTX1070 was released back 10 years ago and had an 8GB buffer. That 8GB is still common–says lots about how Nvidia has been shafting us.
64GB should be mid term adequate…I wouldn’t even look at a system with less than 32GB of RAM in 2026. I bought my FD, because my M2Pro Mac Mini with 16GB of memory was paging–browsing the web in Safari.
I was also shocked when I saw the Steam machine being so weak. Still think 64 gigs will be fine. Thats like 48 main + 16vram, but better because the os will allocate as needed.
Supposedly it describes 70% of machines on steam. At first I thought Valve has the data and must know what they’re doing. Then I found out how well the last Steam Machine did. Total flop. Now I think a lot of people who don’t game much just happen to have steam and that gets collected in their survey. The Steam Deck did really good. I’ve seen it play well at 1080p, but that was an older game.
For gaming 64GB unified memory is overkill for the GPU performance the 8060s has. But overall it is nice to have. I have seen as much GPU memory usage as 12 GB (Indiana Jones TGC at 1440p) with around 4 GB CPU memory (with openSUSE Tumbleweed). So 16 GB unified memory are something I would certainly not recommend anymore. However 32G, like for the weakest Framework Desktop model should be fine for gaming. I think 8GB VRAM for the Steam Machine was a bit stingy, even for the compute power of its GPU. 12GB would have been the sweet spot. I mean that’s what for example the Radeon 7650XT had already as well.
Now if you you want to do some work like manuipulating large images, videos or 3D models, 64GB can be actually useful and also used. Never mind LLM tasks where up to around 60GB GPU memory is worth a lot.
I would also recommend Bazzite as your OS. It comes pretty much working out of the box, has official support from FrameWork.
Also good thing is that it is image based, so get it to break is lot harder than with traditional distro where invalid package can make your system non-bootable.
Bazzite release updates usually on weekly basis, so you get that stable build once a week, that has been tested (they have a separate testing branch) by the maintainers and users. This way you are very well immune to possible kernel issues, packaging issues etc.
From what I’m seeing in the replies, 64 is already slightly overkill, so 128 would defiantly be overkill for my needs.
As for the Linux, I’ve seen Bazzite OS recommended over Pop OS many times, however when I look into Bazzite, it just looks like it turns your pc into a console, which isn’t what I’m looking for as I will want more from my computer then just games.
Anymore information or recommendations are greatly appreciated, I will continue looking into Bazzite, although it is not currently feeling right for my needs.
Looking into Bazzite a bit more, it seems to very well be the go to for gaming, so it might be down to if I want to try Fedora based, Bazzite, or Ubuntu based, Pop OS.