Admittedly, the last time I tried it was maybe 5 years ago. I used ubuntu (can’t remember which distro) but I recall having to fiddle a lot with drivers and WINE. Is the scenario still the same today?
With the horrors of Win11 widely talked about, I’m thinking of flirting with linux once more. Is it a good idea at this time? Or is gaming on linux still niche as it once was?
What is your distro and what tips and tricks/perspectives you can share with a newbie like me :)
There’s a lot of back and forth on this question constantly in the community. IMO you should just choose a Linux distro that’s beginner friendly with sane defaults. Any of them can game, basically.
- Nobara Linux is made specifically for gaming, you might want to start here.
- ZorinOS is made for people who aren’t used to Linux. It’s got a great UI and good features. I used to play Elden Ring on it, it’s very reliable.
- Pop_OS is another great general distro. Lots of people gaming use this. They’re also making their own desktop environment which they’ll use here when it’s ready.
- Arch Linux only if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, avoid an arch linux based distro.
So far this is the best answer in here.
Just choose something you can wrap your head around and start from there. No need to jump to anything complicated like Arch linux.
I first started gaming on openSUSE and then moved to Fedora. Can’t say I don’t have to look around for answers to run some games but I’m more than happy with the experience in general. I play some older games like Deus Ex, Baldur’s gate and such, but I also play Cyberpunk 2077, Stray and Marvel’s Spider-man Remastered without any real issues.
Also, let’s be realistic about it - arm yourself with a bit of patience, because the process of installing games could be as simple as clicking install and then play, but it could also require some tinkering to get some games running smoothly.
I think most distros will work just fine. It’s gotten so so much easier since Valve invested in Proton to make the Steam Deck work.
Personally, I’m on EndeavourOS with Gnome and it works fine for all my Steam games on an AMD GPU. Years ago, I was on Linux Mint, and that worked just fine for gaming too.
One caveat: if you have an Nvidia GPU, driver support can sometimes be a headache (or at least it was several years ago when I had one). Some distros claim better out of the box support for Nvidia, like Pop OS
I guess it depends on what your use case might be. I have heard that Manjaro is decent for a desktop Arch experience, but I have yet to try it.
My use case recently was for a living-room PC that works like a console version of the Steam Deck. For that purpose, ChimeraOS works really well. It’s an Arch-based distro that uses the Steam Deck controller-first interface and so far is handling almost everything I’ve thrown at it. It even has a remote admin app where you can install games from GOG or Epic (although GOG support only installs the base game at the moment, no DLC or updates) or upload console ROMs for emulation.
I would say if you go this route, get a PS4/PS5 controller. The touch space is recognized as a mouse, which removes the need to attach a mouse for those moments when you need to get into the desktop (such as formatting a secondary drive for use in Steam).
Any popular distro will work fine for gaming. The difference between distros are becoming less and less significant with de advancement of sandbox packaging like Flatpak. Pick which ever distro is exiting to yourself!
If you want a subjective opinion: Fedora is my personal favorite for few years now; otherwise Debian is a very strong and stable distro that I daily-drove for ~10 years.
Manjaro user here, it works fine for me Using it for years now
I am surprised no mention of Mint yet. As far as beginner-friendly Linux desktop Mint is one of the better ones and it is just very nice overall. To be fair I have not used it for gaming but I would not think there would be any more issues with that than any Linux distro.
If one is interested in the perspective of using Mint for games:
I have been using Mint for gaming for ~4 years and anything that was broken for me is fixed now. Went straight from Windows 7 to Mint and have had a very pleasant experience. If you’re using Steam primarily, there’s very little that doesn’t simply work out of the box. The rare case that doesn’t is generally solveable through ProtonDB, or eventually fixed.
The only shit that doesn’t work for the foreseeable future is generally online-only stuff specifically that has invasive anticheat. Big MMOs, Destiny 2, Valorant, that sort of thing. Blizzard games mostly work fine, though have some random temporary issues rarely. But I don’t usually play games like that for various reasons, so I do not personally care myself.
Special mention to League of Legends which is the big multiplayer game I do play and works a hell of a lot more consistently than it used to, there’s actually a community here on the fediverse if you have issues setting it up, ( !kbin.social/m/leagueoflinux ) but in recent years it should be pretty easy compared to even 2 years ago. Install through lutris and it just works for me now, and it runs measurably smoother.
I wouldn’t really recommend using the Epic store, as stuff does not run very consistently and it’s awkward and slow to run through lutris. Itch has a native client that works very well for native games, and at least tries to run windows stuff through wine (so-so on if it works, some small first-timer games just aren’t very stable ha. Most games work for me.) GOG is a pain in the ass imo and I know that’s a controversial opinion, some people like downloading every individual game through the website lmao. I have hundreds of games and this is mostly annoying to me, personally. There’s actually a third party doodad for it (minigalaxy) that works fine, but I don’t care to try it myself. (A lot of the appeal to GOG for me was their client, not being able to use it just makes it “worse steam” to me.)
If you like indie games (especially those popular enough to have steam pages), singleplayer games, or retro games, it’s a great OS. (It’s actually superior to run retro games on Mint versus Windows, from my experience, trying to get some of them to run on Windows was an absolute nightmare.)
I have had no drivers issues, didn’t really have to go out of my way to “set things up.” Though I would recommend having a rig with an AMD gpu. Nvidia is the one you run into more drivers issues with. I did swap to pipewire manually but it’s not really necessary. Everything I’ve stuck in has been serviceable as plug-and-play, though some I’ve added tweaks to some things for my own tastes over the years.
How do you get Bluetooth controllers to connect. I’ve got an Xbox One controller and for the life of me I cannot get the damn computer to see it. I ended up just hooking it up to my steam deck so I got some use out of it
I just bought one of those 8bitdo usb adaptors - it works perfectly with Xbox one controllers etc
Garuda Linux if you are lazy.
Any distro if you are not.
Tips and tricks
As much douchey as this may sound… but yeah, RTFM works 100%.
What manual? cause everytime I look for solutions to a problem with regards to linux, I dont find a manual. I find random posts with a bunch of esoteric commands to copy and paste into terminal with minimal/no explanation of what they do, and a 50/50 chance that it’ll either fix the issue, or do nothing because the commands are now depreciated and the post is 12 years old. And when I finally spend 1-3 days of trying to solve it myself with no success, I sigh and tend to make a post about it somewhere, knowing there is a 1/3rd chance I either get a reply like yours, which does nothing helpful. 1/3rd chance of outright hostility, and if i’m lucky… the 1/3rd chance someone helpful will reply and provide help in a way I can understand.
Maybe if a manual existed that someone with no linux knowledge could understand and use as a guide to solve their problems, RTFM would be a valid stance, but now it just makes you sound like an ass.
If it’s a terminal command you need help with, type “man [command]” in the terminal and it will give you the literal manual page for the command. For example, to get the manual for tmux, type “man tmux”
If it’s something else, check the Arch Wiki. Yes, even if you aren’t running Arch. It’s some of the most comprehensive Linux documentation all on one site and most of it can be generalized to any distro.
But to be honest, your attitude here makes me think you will never have a good time on Linux. It does require a certain curiosity and willingness to learn – maybe even some patience while you get the experience to intuit solutions as you likely already do on Windows without thinking about it.
The manuals really do contain exact information on how to engage with pretty much everything, but if someone suggesting that you use the resources designed to help you makes them “an ass,” then I suspect you will simply fail to become familiar with the environment. I’m not trying to be a dick, I’m just telling you that when you’re new, you need a different mindset than what you’re showing with this comment.
you need a different mindset than what you’re showing with this comment.
Requesting a mod to make a sticky with this part of your post and the title, “Windows users migrating to Linux, please read this.”
“I cant be the problem, YOU must be the problem with YOUR attitude”
Great comeback dude. Thanks for proving my entire point. New people arent the problem. People who havent learned everything arent the problem.
People like you are the problem.
The dude literally gave you a couple of options on how to find manuals in the very beginning of his comment, yet you choose to be salty. SMH.
No one is obliged to help you. Most problems are fixable by taking the time to understand the whatever package you are having trouble with. If you tried and can’t find a solution, asking online is fine, obviously. I recommend explaining what you have tried already and extensively describing your setup, attaching log and config files, etc. This shows that you actually HAVE tried to solve it yourself and makes it easier for people to help you.
Tbh, with the tone of your comments here, I wouldn’t be inclined to help you either.
One last piece of advice : ChatGPT is actually pretty good at troubleshooting, if you provide the relevant info. Just yesterday I successfully used it to fix pipewire/pulseaudio resetting the device profile on every boot. Also it won’t give you sass and has the patience of a saint, no matter how dumb your question.
I mean it’s not a comeback, it’s just advice. I started using Linux in 2004, when trying to Google an answer basically never worked, and once I was told that the included manuals contained all the instructions for everything, I started having a much better time. It was humbling since I considered myself very proficient with Windows troubleshooting, but I had to recognize that I still needed to read the instructions now that I was in unfamiliar territory.
Anyway, since you’re not interested in that, have a nice day, and I hope your future experiences work out better for you.
Hey. Just wanted to say that you are an exemplar member of this community. Thank you.
arch is what steam deck uses maximum compatibility plus steam puts in code
Sure, but they don’t just go installing arch from an arch ISO, they carefully curate an environment with a team of experts to make sure it doesn’t break.
That’s not the experience you’re gonna have gaming on Arch on your gaming desktop.
I use fedora without issue
My gaming PC is Ubuntu 23.04. Steam/proton works for every game I wanted to play.
You can check ProtonDB website to get an idea if your games will run with Proton/steam.
