I have been running Eve Online ( among other games ) on as little as, this old hardware;
HP SFF 6200 Pro
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i3-2100
RAM: 8 GB
SSD for OS: 240 GB PNY
Game operated from: WD Black 2 TB
I was testing in Xubuntu last year, but Manjaro with Xfce DE has it beat on both performance and ease of setup. I just happen to like Xfce Desktop Environment, but they offer builds with KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, etc.. Manjaro is Arch Linux based and Xubuntu is Ubuntu based. I doubt anyone would notice much of a difference between them. Arch uses Pacman instead of Apt Get at terminal level but you can always install apt if need be. Otherwise you shouldn’t have any issue finding new software packages using the UI system menu Add/Remove Software, which of course is just pamac-manager %U at the terminal prompt. No steep learning curve, I have 8 refurbished boxes with Majaro on them gifted to seniors. No complaints from those people, so far.
Something here for those of you looking at Debian systems, SparkyLinux made this distro about 10 years ago. SparkyLinux 4.0 “GameOver” is a heavy distro with games, emulators, wine, Steam, Lutris, etc. all preinstalled.
This site states, minimum system requirements for SparkyLinux “GameOver”:
- CPU i586 / amd64
- 256 MB of RAM memory (some games need more than that – 500-1000MB recommended)
- an optical DVD drive or 4GB USB stick for Live medium
- 20 GB of space for installation on a hard drive (30GB recommended)
- 16 GB of Flash/Pen USB drive for “normal” installation (32GB recommended)
I got it up and running on the thumb drive demo and was able to play several online games from it without installing it to the PC. Also as mentioned before, my test box is only i-3 core. The trial is so fully loaded there wasn’t much need to add anything. If you attempt this yourself, I recommend a USB 3.0. I was “stuck” with the limitation of USB 2.0 hardware and a 3.0 thumb drive.
Whatever you decide on your final distro, enjoy your Linux OS!