My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.
I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.
On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.
I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.
There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.
I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.
Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.
One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)
Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.
Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.
Configuring and maintaining nvidia drivers on Linux continues to be a pain. I recommend using an amd-based gpu because their drivers are open source and more well integrated.
They’re a pain, yeah but no worse than Windows. I want to point out that with Intel/AMD your drivers update in the background (like everything else) and you experience no issues at all. With Nvidia, the drivers will update in the background and—until you reboot—some apps can get a bit glitchy. The same shit happens with Windows even though Nvidia claims they can update the drivers without requiring a reboot. My father-in-law’s brand new Windows 11 PC has the exact same sort of glitching/crashes that I experience in Linux with games (when the Nvidia driver updates; if you haven’t rebooted).
The only reason why Windows users don’t experience it as much is because Windows forces you to reboot all the fucking time. Windows users have just accepted this as a natural part of using a PC.
That is the pain of the Nvidia drivers. It’s not a huge deal—just annoying.
I’ve had pretty good experience with Bazzite recently. There were some initial pain points, the biggest one is that my Nvidia GPU wasn’t even used in Steam games by default. But after working around all of those, it’s been a smooth ride. I’m playing a dozen of lesser-known Windows-only games in Steam and Lutris/Wine with zero or very minor issues.
I’m using Bazzite on hardware that is, notoriously Linux unfriendly (nvidia GPU, partitioned SSD…)
And the only major issue I had was completely self-inflicted: I tried turning on Frame Gen in Cyberpunk and it made it not happy. The game was unplayable.
The minor issue I had (that was actually OS related) was some color accuracy issues - everything looked washed out on a default install, some googling got me to a small piece of software that I set to launch on login that fixed it, allowing me to set my color saturation how I want.
Aside from that, it’s been pretty straightforward. I don’t play many multiplayer games, and the one I do (OSRS) is pretty well-supported. The client everyone uses runs well and I was able to install the Jagex Launcher just fine, even if it is unsupported it works fine.
Bazzite desktop has been the best desktop Linux experience I’ve ever had and I’ll probably stick with it going forward.
I switched from Windows to Linux last year. I’m typing this on Ubuntu 25.04. All the games I have ever tried to play work, and work well, with very few exceptions.
Steam just works, all I had to do was go into its settings, the Compatibility, and enable Steam Play for all titles. I set the default compatibility tool to “Proton Experimental” and haven’t needed to change it. Even for the titles that say they don’t work on Linux.
Heroic Games Launcher handles my Epic and GOG libraries, and again, everything just works. Epic is not friendly to Linux users, and the only exceptions have been a couple of free games on Epic where the developers have gone out of their way to break Linux compatibility. Red Dead Redemption is the only game I would like to play, but haven’t figured out how to get it to work. Most of my Epic games work, including complicated ones like Train Sim World 5. All of my GOG games work without exception.
I use a program called Bottles to handle edge cases. It’s a little trickier to get set up, but once you’ve got it running, again, stuff just works.
Hope this is helpful. I’m happy to answer questions.
This screenshot is just an FYI at some of your options. I’ve got bottles, PortProton, and the ProtonTricks launcher as options for any given EXE/MSI installer. Bottles is usually all that’s necessary but I have the others for super tricky stuff like embedded software development BS that would never be encountered by a normal person (haha).
I stopped dual-booting 5 years ago and I already was able to play most of my library back then. It gets better every day and I even almost forgot about adding launch options now, as they mostly run out of the box.
Anti-cheats might be a problem, especially the devs of the game refuse to use its Linux version. Or the anti-cheat is kernel-level. I also run into some games that use weird custom-made engines that won’t run. They were niche Japanese games, so I kinda understand.
I use Bazzite on a different SSD in my desktop, and most of the game I play works as expected. I mostly play single-player and coop stuff, nothing competitive.
I am playing almost exclusively in linux since 2012 (diablo3 came out, it worked on Linux, i sank an ungodly amount of hours into it.) the only thing that made me reinstall windows was to play counter-strike go on faceit, because their client did not work on linux.
proton made so much, so much easier that it almost became frictionless to play on linux. wine made huge strides before, but it never was so smooth before proton.
what often was a problem where laptops with dedicated and integraded graphics cards, or nvidia cards on rolling release distribution often having issues after kernel updates, which is why i was on fedora for a long time, because there the akmod stuff worked better in my experience.
overall: when it works on the deck its almost guranteed that it runs just as easy on other linux distributions, maybe don’t pick a rolling release distro if you have an nvidia card, and most of the time you can forget about the fact, that you are gaming on linux.
I’ve been on linux for 4ish years, and I’ve done a fair share of gaming in that time, with minimal issues
The few I can think of are mostly controller related:
having downloaded steam as a flatpak originally I ran into some issues with missing inputs in the steam input software (getting the .deb version of steam fixed it)
warframe crashes when switching windows with a controller connected
running steam in big picture mode results in some keyboard keys not working in certain games (o is the one I remember but there were a few of them)
Oh and one other I had was initially getting sims 3 running, but that one was fixed at some point and now it runs fine
I think it very much depends on what games you’re looking to play, but I’ve been having a wonderful experience ever since I fully switched to Linux earlier this year.
I’m currently on Kubuntu and for games I’m using Steam, Heroic Games Launcher (GOG & Epic Games), and Lutris (Battle.net).
My experience with Steam has been pretty much flawless, Heroic Games Launcher was fairly straightforward to setup, and Lutris was pretty easy as well – mostly took some extra time due to bad reading on my part.
I mostly play singleplayer games (e.g. Baldur’s Gate III, W40K: Rogue Trader), with the occassional multiplayer game thrown in there (e.g., The Planet Crafter, Guild Wars 2). So far, I’ve had no issues besides having to install Proton-GE in favor of Steam’s Proton layer due to some iffy cinematics in games, but that seems to be par for the course when following many guides online.
The main games that don’t seem to work are those that require kernel-level anti-cheat, think PUBG or the upcoming Battlefield. Which is unfortunate, but I can personally live without. ProtonDB is an excellent website to check out before you make your switch, so that you can see which games won’t work.
A game called OneShot, which has some meta things as part of the game. Like, it’s supposed to change your wallpaper and such “outside the game” things. No biggy, just had to run an executable with a specific version on Wine and it worked as intended.
The other was Vermitide 2, never got around to finding a solution for that one, as I honestly didn’t care enough to find out what the problem is.
Everything else has worked splendidly.
Addendum: getting Blizzards Launcher work was a bitch though. Thankfully, Steam provides.
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Aktywne