Gaming

For the loooonnnnngest time, I had issues running VR on Linux. And for a few years when I started off (many years ago), most games wouldn't run. Things have changed since then however. Now I'm finding all the desktop/handheld based games I want to play; I can just play. In addition, the issues I've constantly had with VR now have been alleviated (albeit with some manual tinkering).

Desktop games without anticheat will just work 99/100. VR takes some effort to work, but is worth it. VR on Linux still isn't exactly perfect either. You sometimes press something in a game, the screen will freeze and you can see/feel it for sure. But, that happens maybe once every 10 mins or so, so it's workable since all I use VR for is VRChat anyway.

Life's good on Linux now. Besides college, I don't think I'll be needing to switch to Windows at all anymore. Oh, actually, now that I remember. I run World of Warcraft through bottles. Every so often WoW updates and kills functionality. I have to rebuild my Bottle, shift my files over and then it runs again, but that's also outside of what Steam does, so.

Besides all of the above, I think I can stick full time to Linux now. It feels wonderful having an operating system that doesn't own you anymore.

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.

It's been remarkably unproblematic.

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.

Very good experience to the point that I hate to use Windows at work because I just love the Gnome way of navigating my PC. Windows just sucks now 😅

I’ve been running Nobara on my machine for like a year and it’s been a really easy experience! The creator also maintains a popular build of proton and designed it to be pretty hands off.

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.

Welcome to the party!

It works great for most games. Steam makes it really easy to enable proton for all games in your library. However, one caveat I would add is that certain intro/cutscene video formats didn't play for me out of the box. I fixed it by using ProtonUp-QT or ProtonPlus to download the newest GE-Proton and selecting that to default in my steam compatibility settings.

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'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 a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there's no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.

So far I haven't had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn't display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.

As for distro side of things, I don't know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what's happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.

Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don't change the language to a certain language because it'll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I've played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that's more or less thanks to the devs.

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.

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.

All my games work, however I avoid games that require kernel level root kits to run so your mileage may vary.

If you ever have an issue with a game running under proton. Look up the game in ProtonDB and make sure to use the filter to match your hardware.

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.

Switched my main gaming computer in 2023, never going back.