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.
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.
I started out using an old Nvidia Geforce 1060 TI and an i5 whose model number now escapes me. My experience was terrible, on Mint, Ubuntu, and Bazzite. Most games didn’t work, and researching the error messages I found in my logs just directed me to Nvidia forum posts from 6 months to a year ago where a user described my exact issue and received no response.
Then, I purchased a new pre-fab computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D processor and a Radeon RX 9060 XT GPU. I still had a handful of issues on Ubuntu, so I switched to Bazzite and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. I can run the vast majority of games through Steam, and use Bottles for anything else.
The lesson I learned was fuck Nvidia. Team Red 4 lyfe.
its not NVIDIA’s fault that Mint, Ubuntu and Bazzite can’t implement a driver properly. I have never had a problem with the multiple NVIDIA cards I have used with my Arch installs.
I had the same experience on those three and popos with my 2070. Then I switched to Endeavoros and finally things worked. Since then, my Nvidia card works just as well as Windows.
I’ve been on NixOS for a little over a year, and have been absolutely delighted at how well gaming works now. I initially thought I would dual boot until Windows 10 EoL, but have had no reason to use Windows in that time and a couple months ago I converted my storage disk from ntfs to ext4.
Steam is nearly seamless; there have been one or two titles where I’ve had to switch the Proton version to experimental or GE, but nothing more than that. Heroic and Lutris have been similarly easy for non-Steam games. There has been nothing that I have tried to play that hasn’t worked, but I don’t play multiplayer games so YMMV there.
That said, this is not my first rodeo with Linux. I used it extensively in the late '00s and early '10s, which probably helped to sand some of the rough edges off of my recent experience. Though back then wine was not really suitable for gaming. I also have an AMD GPU, which I understand has an easier setup process than Nvidia. (I literally haven’t had to think about graphics drivers at all.)
I use Arch and its fantastic! Sure some of the multiplayer games with bullshit DRM won’t work (only because the companies will ban you even though the tech is working as expected FU EPIC)
Once you get your system functioning the way you want it, you almost never have to worry about a patch breaking your shit. That is unless you customized your video drivers or the kernel.
Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.
The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can’t find the goddamn ladder.
I think souls likes are just not for me. I just want a cool story told in a relatively linear fashion. I’d take a linear 15 hour game over an open world 150+ hour game any day.
Most of em are pretty linear, really. Elden Ring is the exception. But like Bloodborne for instance, youre gonna go pretty much in the same order till you have to return to earlier areas to finish stuff. You’ve gotta explore a lot though.
Not trying to be like “LOVE THE THING THAT I LOVE DAMN YOU”, theyre totally not for everyone.
Soulslikes are great if you're looking to scratch an itch for mechanical mastery, discovery, exploration, etc., but stories are not their strong suit. I'm not saying the stories are bad, just the delivery of them, unless you're the type of player who wants to play detective.
We were so bored back in the day we spent hours, days, months finding out how to get by stupid things in point&click games, it was better than not playing them but it was also not like the best time ever either.
Being bored was the healthy part, developmentally speaking.
Not that there weren’t overstimulating games back then, or healthy problem solving games today. But with enshittification, the shit is drowning out the gold.
One time I used a GameShark mid game for a Zelda game, I saved my file and came back later to find that by maxing out, I had ruined my save file and lost all my progress. I cried my eyes out and it took days to get back, boringly replaying the game.
I always wondered if that was an intentional lesson by the GameShark devs… ChatGPT seems designed to make you act against your best self interest.
Weird, I love problem solving. Its why im so upset with people complaining about computers when all they have to do is tinker with them or google about it. Walkthroughs are for when you need it, if you have an urge to use the walkthrough only instead of actually playing the game, then thats a you problem.
Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.
I’ve fallen into this exact trap when I played the HD remaster of Suikoden 1&2 a few months ago. The games still hold up pretty well but are a bit too dated to my taste to have more than a single playthrough, so I followed guides to get the perfect ending, which involves recruiting all 108 characters into your army.
At first I was just looking at a very light guide that told me which characters were missable and approximately when to get them. Then I got impatient and looked up their location and recruitment conditions. And then I ended up following a complete walkthrough step by step to make sure I wasn’t making any mistake.
That completely took the fun out of the games and I burnt out halfway through the second one.
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