I hereby retroactively grant you a permission for committing the following action:
Searching for secrets in a video game with an exceptionally large heaplet of secrets and then, after having shown general skill and interest in committing to said action, seeking appropriate help for completing your task, including in the form of perusing a walkthrough.
I commend you for your engangement in achieving the best possible result in the process of donkeying the kong.
I’ve been gaming exclusively on desktop Linux for more than a decade.
All my games work, either natively or (more often) using some variant of Wine. Most Steam games work with very little tweaking or none at all.
I occasionally have to apply workarounds for broken Battle.net updates (I run Blizzard games without Steam) but this doesn’t happen very often and usually only takes a couple days for the community to figure out a workaround. The last few updates haven’t broken anything new.
Games with certain anti-cheat systems, especially kernel-mode ones, are known not to work. I don’t care, because I wouldn’t allow such invasive and dangerous things to run on my hardware anyway.
Switched last year from Win 11. Had some previous experience with Ubuntu and Mint but wanted to try Arch. I ended up with EndeavourOS, which is Arch based. At that time I had some things to learn about making my Nvidia GPU run and run properly. But there were some new drivers coming out alongside Nvidia partially opening up to the Linux crowd. Together with further advancements in Proton it’s been mostly smooth sailing I’d say.
Games on Steam mostly run out of the box. There might be some, that need another Proton oder GE-Proton version but those are easily switched/installed. You can always look up if games need certain tweaks on protondb.com I’ve even got Fallout 4 with 300+ mods (managed by Nexusmods / Vortex) to run. Currently playing Stalker 2 with some mods and “it just works”. I even managed to manually inject DLSS 4 to Stalker 2 so the really bad ghosting is far less.
Lutris or Heroic Launcher work for GOG, Uplay and EA Access (or whatever it is called nowadays).
There are a few games, like Icarus, that run like shit generally but even worse on Linux. Also, when using Steam / Proton, every time you change shaders they need to be pre-rendered. Usually that also happens when there’s been an update. Most of the time that doesn’t take long but I had singular games where that took 30+ minutes. And then there is an increasing number of games that run kernel level anti-cheat. Games like CoD 7 (I think), Valorant or the upcoming Battlefield 6. They straight out can’t be played on Linux. It sucks, because I wanted to play BF6 with friends but I just have to pass this one. Anticheat shouldn’t run on kernel level anyways. Speaking of anticheat: I think (please correct me if I’m wrong) BattleEye also doesn’t run on Linux. EAC does, but it needs to be enabled by the devs for Linux. Squad or Hell Let Loose run EAC and have it enabled for Linux and it runs fine. SCUM and Rust don’t have it enabled so you either have to play on servers that don’t use EAC or on specific linux compatible servers (there are some in Rust).
BattleEye and EAC have both worked on Linux since 2021. Any games that use those at this point but don’t support Linux are choosing to block the platform (e.g. Fortnite).
Does BattleEye in general just work or does it require fiddling? One of my main games uses it, so that is a big factor in me not having made the jump yet. (The others are an NVidia GPU and my absolute dread to have to get around to actually clean up my files)
In my experience it either works or it doesn’t, based on whether the devs have blocked it or not. The only extra step I’ve needed to do for anti-cheat on Steam games is installing a Proton runtime for the given anti-cheat, which are just in the tools section.
If you use steamdeck I’d check out bazzite. You can use the deck image for your steamdeck and desktop image for PC and then you won’t have to worry about big differences.
I switched to Linux about 2 years ago now and its been fine. The only games that don’t work are ea games like battlefield or Activision like cod
I don’t really like to mess with it so I just use the default settings on almost everything unless there is an issue then I check protondb to see if there are any solutions, usually all you need to do is go to the game properties in steam and select for use a different version of proton and it runs fine
From my understanding its just more features and up to date, my reasoning mainly was if you go bazzite on desktop might as well use it on steamdeck so you have a similar experience across your devices
SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.
It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.
If everything you play works on the steam deck already then you shouldn’t have any issues just using steam on Linux. Some things will be more difficult to set up and there are compatibility issues with a lot of games, but since everything you play works on the steam deck I would say you should be fine there with the games you currently have
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