@Be_Far Nobara might actually qualify as the only true “gaming” distro I’ve heard of. Glorious Eggroll, who is an engineer who works at Red Hat and creates his own highly regarded fork of Proton, is behind Nobara.
Having said that. I still don’t recommend it for a beginner. The lack of Secure Boot and the fact that it is a very small project means that support will be limited and unless you plan to only ever game on that install, it just isn’t suited for anything else.
I would say nothing debian based, or dependent on debian upstream. Debian stable is so far behind with package updates that it’s getting ridiculous, kernel is EoL, Wine is EoL, it goes on.
Has anyone actually tried to put SteamOS on a Framework yet? Can you do so at all? IIRC it has an open iso, so it should be possible. I don’t know the requirements/limitations of SteamOS, so it might be impossible and I’m just unaware
Yeah. Though unstable kernels are not signed, so I had some surprises in the beginning and moved to stable. 
There’s no official ISO for the new SteamOS, and the open ISO is the recovery image tailored for the steam deck, it won’t install to other platforms.
There’s HoloISO, as mentioned earlier in this thread. It’s doubtful that Valve will produce any official ISO themselves at this point.
I was waiting to try it on my framework before posting - it actually boots fine. The README says it is not compatible with NVIDIA gpus (compatibility with eGPU setups unknown), but the scaling isn’t actually too bad. I thought the DPI would be way off due to the Steam Deck’s screen size.
Only issue is the latest ““official”” ISO has kernel 5.13, which I don’t think would work well outside of 11th gen. I’m not sure what the latest system update provides, this ISO was generated in December 2022.
Hey yall, just wanted to let you know that I have gotten Fedora 37 to (finally) boot on my MSI laptop, and I am writing this from that OS.
Also it appears all my stuff should work with Linux pretty well (yay)
Garuda
I unfortunately haven’t had a good experience with Garuda on my 13". Garuda Assistant refuses to detect it as a HiDPI display, so everything is tiny. Setting scaling manually also had no effect, I had to change font size and icon size manually in KDE settings to have a usable environment and even then that didn’t change everything. Garuda GNOME may have a better experience, my go-to Framework distro has been Fedora and its scaling “just works” (and preserves settings per-display setup automatically!!).
+1 for Garuda, it was the first distro I installed on my Framework when I got it and the experience has been great out of the box. It was one of the first few distros back in the early days of Framework where everything actually worked, because Garuda always had the most recent kernel versions (same release cadence as Arch).
You must be thinking of something else; Garuda Assistant doesn’t manage display settings at all (never has). If you were trying to change display settings in a GUI, that would be whatever settings app is provided by the desktop environment you chose (not Garuda).
Speaking of desktop environments, I’ve installed several Garuda spins on the Framework (KDE, Sway, Gnome, XFCE) and everything “just works”, as they say. Any tweaks you need to make will follow the same guidance you would use for Arch Linux (such as described in the Framework Laptop 13 - ArchWiki post).
The defaults Garuda has chosen are really what make it a top-tier distro in my opinion: Btrfs by default, zram, Snapper, Btrfs Assistant, bootable snapshots with grub-btrfs, really nice dracut implementation, and the Garuda-specific tools like garuda-update are really well done.
Great forum too, I spend a lot of time over there and really enjoy the community.
My mistake, I was referring to the Garuda Welcome app. There should be a hidpi toggle, but it’s not present:
I was also unsuccessful in changing scaling through KDE settings in Garuda (Endeavour KDE scaling changes properly in KDE settings though).
GNOME has been the only DE I’ve used that “just works” on framework, everything else I have had to fiddle with scaling (but KDE is usually just one setting and a relog, so it’s almost as good).
Gotcha–yeah, I have never seen that either! 
I think this may explain why our experience is so different; I found the default for Gnome way too “zoomed in” (defaults to 200% I’m pretty sure). I had to bring it all the back out to 100% to get a usable screen density. You would probably find my icons, fonts etc way too small. 
Interesting. 200% is comfortable for me when using it on my lap or at a desk. It’s absolutely too big for me on a 1080p screen when I plug in my egpu at home, but when I make the egpu my primary GNOME switches to 100% scaling automatically and it’s saved my monitor configuration with the internal screen on half resolution so I can still read that even though it’s farther away.
I asked about this at the Garuda forum. It looks like they got rid of this feature a couple years ago, but never updated the FAQ you were reading. I don’t know the whole story, but it sounds like the HiDPI app was causing problems for some folks so they scrapped it.
That comment has now been taken out of the FAQ.
For adjusting HiDPI setting on an Arch-based distro, this document covers a lot (specific desktop environments, specific apps, multiple monitor setups, etc): HiDPI - ArchWiki
This link is what got my scaling preferences working on EndeavourOS, thanks for sharing! I appreciate you reaching out and getting documentation corrected for Garuda as well.
Drauger linux.
Honestly once you understand Linux it is mostly down to personal preference for fringe unrelated things to gaming.
People could argue a few comparability issues and maybe edge getting easier and quicker access to improvements, but most the time it isn’t worth it for the newbie.
Debian based usually is my go to and specifically Ubuntu simply because it is just what I know. Usually things work okay, but Fedora, Arch(arch based manjaro). Then you would just be arguing on what DE you want or some other side feature.
So anyway I would just pick the distro based on the DE you like and their ability to keep up with upstream changes. So Nitrux for new Maui stuff, or KDE Neon for Plasma, or Mint for Cinnamon. Maybe Arch for Gnome, but maybe could go Fedora or even Ubuntu although the later is a bit slower of course for updates.
The safest bet is obviously SteamOS because it is immutable and you will have a harder time messing it up, but they haven’t really released an official version intended for any laptop. I do think the all AMD version would work pretty well though probably.
Saw this thread and post recently, decided to make a account (I’ve been lurking this forum for awhile), I would like to say that I’ve installed and using Nobara 37 on my framework laptop I got few weeks ago. Installation is pretty smooth and easy, overall it’s pretty good experience as it got pretty much what you need to play games or use window-based programs. Proton, Nvidia, Steam, Wine and necessary dependencies are all preinstalled.
PikaOS is also a good Ubuntu-based gaming distro, (they’re a fork of Nobara I think) as far as I know they’re also the only Ubuntu-based distro that doesn’t include Snap and utilize its own version of “sudo apt (commands)” (sudo pikman (commands), pretty faster than apt in my experience).
Garuda is a OK gaming Arch-based distro, terminal is pretty cool but not a fan of those app icons at all. They also have similar necessary programs preinstalled as Nobara but also have random games installed you can’t really remove through any means. This is one thing I personally don’t like and wouldn’t recommend.
Above all of these distros I mentioned are the distros that are “designed for gaming” I know (other than Pop_OS!). Personally I prefer Nobara because it’s fedora-based distro and is generally easy to use but that’s just my preference. Hope this help.
We’ll have specifically “officially supported” distros when time appropriate. However, Ubuntu and Fedora will be part of that list.
I would personally choose Arch Linux.
