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.
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 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.
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.
Wind Waker holds a special place in my heart after a summer where the Wi-Fi and the AC both went out and Wind Waker was the only game installed on my Wii U. It’s definitely my Second Favorite Zelda
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.
Proton generally works pretty well but there is a slight performance hit. Depending on your setup you may not even notice it but especially with some less recent GPUs it can make a substantial difference. Games that run natively usually run an well or better compared to Windows. And then there’s a few that don’t work on Linux because of some anticheat but I don’t play online a lot so no idea about the specifics.
I think that’s pretty specific to Elden Ring – it’s had that stuttering bug since launch on Windows and while they made it better it still happens, but for whatever quirk of Proton it never happened on Linux.
Looks like I’ll be the negative one. I gave it a solid try dual booting for about 6 months before I went back to Windows.
I think I took for granted how much is abstracted away in Windows when it came to being my daily driver for my computer. Wrapping my head around things that “just worked” in Windows proved to be more difficult than I anticipated and I dealt with more friction. Trying to learn new concepts stood in my way of fully embracing it as well as not understanding what the “Windows equivalent” was for a given feature/function/action so I could wrap my head around it better. I also had a couple of workflows that I never got working in Linux despite all my attempts at searching for answers.
And I know people will come out of the woodwork with all sorts of questions or input on how if I just tried it again I’ll get it. For the record, I tried out Pop OS since it bills itself as a dead simple. I know the problems for me were more around my knowledge, years of built up muscle memory with Windows, and limited time to game so messing with whatever my current problem was made it more frustrating and soured me on the experience.
Both were on my radar as well. I want to say I tried Bazzite before Pop but one of those workflows I could not solve was a problem on Bazzite (some virtual kvm switch software I’ve used forever). Nobara was almost where I went after Pop before retreating back to Windows :)
Could you give some examples of things that worked for you on Windows but couldn’t port over to Linux? I’m interested if they’re related more to games or just using Linux in general.
Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.
For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.
Honestly, it’s my assessment of turning my only PC, which is primarily gaming, into a Linux machine and the struggles there with day-to-day usage. I have no idea what OP’s comfort level with Linux or tech is in general but my assumption is it’s enough to think “Yeah, I could install Linux and do this.” which was where I was at too. Nothing I’m doing was exotic but the investment required in finding suitable alternatives that worked nearly out of the box was too high at the time.
Gaming was decent by all accounts. I think I had a few compatibility items that will iron out as developers support Linux more and the technology that enables gaming on Linux just gets better and better. I have an AMD card and from what I gather that’s better for switching to Linux. A lot of my frustrations were not related to gaming and I recognize the issue is time and knowledge on my part. If those are in short supply when something breaks, you could have a bad time is all I’m saying. Everyone’s got to start out somewhere and if you’ve had Windows forever, it can be a mental shift.
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.
FANTASTIC! I love that 100% of the games I want to play work great without issue but what I love even more is the conveniences that Linux provides over Windows:
It is trivially easy to sync my configs/saves/game data across my network to different PCs with rsync -ave ssh (i.e. if I want to play on the big screen via the HTPC).
I can do the same with my phone using the FolderSync Android app (which supports sync over SSH just like rsync).
I can script stuff! Example: A lot of games (especially those with 3rd party mods) can be buggy AF and as a result of that, increase the possibility of corrupting my saves/game/world data. For these games I use rdiff-backup right there in the save/game/world directory every 10 minutes with say, 100 backups. Put that in a cron job and the worst that happens is I lose 10 minutes.
If the game has a server, chances are there’s already a native Linux version which means I can run it locally on my PC in the background or just sync my whole game over to another of my Linux PCs and run it there. No need for complicated setups where you have to manage things across two completely different operating systems (like Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 ahahaha; that’s a joke poking fun at the Windows ecosystem if you don’t get it 🤣).
I actually have the power to control where my sound goes on the fly and it actually fucking works (unlike Windows where you get to pick one device at a time and good luck keeping that one active if you have a Bluetooth audio device that likes to lose its connection from time to time… Ugh). You can actually do weird shit like send your audio over the network to a whole home’s worth of PCs (or stream it over the Internet I guess) but I only ever did that once and man was it cool, haha. Still, it’s nice to have the option (some open source dev worked really hard to make sure that works; and fantastically well too).
Multiple applications can use the GPU at the same time (if you’re using Wayland) and that actually works properly. Unlike in Windows—where if you enable “hardware acceleration” in an app like Discord it can suddenly become slow AF scrolling when you’ve got a game open in the background.
You have vastly more control over gamepad/controllers in Linux than you do in Windows. In Windows—if your controller is detected properly (which hopefully doesn’t require that you download a ~4GB of driver/bloat app bullshit)—you can test the buttons in the Settings/Control Panel. But that’s all you can do. The X button is the X button is the X button. You want that button to send something else? You need sketchy proprietary 3rd party software for that! In Linux, you can do whatever TF you want with that button and there’s several ways to do it (qjoypad gives you a nice GUI—right there in your distro’s repositories for quick install).
No “You need to reboot your computer” popups in the middle of gaming/streaming!
You don’t need sixteen bloated system tray/processes running at all times (slowing down your PC) to keep all your stuff working! If you use a Linux desktop for a few weeks then go back to Windows you’ll get annoyed AF pretty fast at all those pop-ups, “Why did I put up with this BS?” 🤣
Privacy by default: HP, Nvidia, Dell, Logitech, Razer, and Microsoft can’t see that you’re playing that game that just got banned by MasterCard/Visa 🤣
Also—generally speaking—Linux is just more fun to use! Customize TF out of your desktop experience. The only thing stopping you is… you.
Is there a co-pilot like function that can pair to controllers together? That feature with my Xbox Adaptive Controller is kind of keeping me on Windows. Or I have to give up those games.
Through the Xbox Accessories app you can enable co-pilot mode between two Xbox controllers. So both are seen as one device. So I can use Left trigger and right trigger with my feet on the XBAC while keeping my controller in my lap and disabling the triggers on it so they are accidentally pressed.
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.
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