I made the switch almost a year ago when they started announcing all the spyware coming to win11. The distro you choose matters a LOT. After several that were buggy and frustrating I landed on Garuda dragonized. Setup was easy with their assistant finding the drivers I needed and I have yet to have any system breaking updates. Better track record than windows TBH. Performance is great, and steam integrates so well with proton that my experience is honestly just as good as windows native. I should probably go make a donation to the Garuda project, now that I’m thinking about it.
And how many run on linux via a well documented way?
I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.
Linux is making good progress in this regard, but this title feels a bit over optimistic (or at least, users who take it at face value will quickly be disappointed when they can’t get 90% of their games to work).
I’m installing Mint for the first time at this very moment. So far, it’s easier than I anticipated. Fuck You Microsoft.
Edit: bro, firstly, what the fuck and where did all this performance come from?!?! I vastly underestimated how many resources windows was hogging. I downloaded Steam (easy-peasy) and then Project Zomboid just as a test. This game runs like butter now. I was having major problems with it before. To the point I basically stopped playing. I know its just one example but I haven’t had my machine run this well in several years, I feel. Also, got Spotify running. Super easy. I need to figure out how to get my VPN set up (ProtonVPN) but so far, I’m kind of in shock. I can’t wait to actually dig in and see what I can do with this new setup.
It’s honestly surprising how bloated Windows has become, and for no clear reason either. Even with all of the obvious bloat disabled and resource-intensive features turned off there’s still a significant overhead, it’s just so constant that you don’t notice it. Then you load up Linux on the same hardware and realize what you’ve been missing.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.protonvpn.www You are welcome :)
That did it! Thank you so much!
This is just how I felt when I first switched, also to Mint. I’ve experienced it a couple other times too when switching from some proprietary application to the FOSS option.
I like to describe it as feeling the different priorities of the teams working on each project. When one is made by passionate users who care about it being good software for its purpose, and the other is designed by a committee to hit as many different corporate metrics as possible, it shows.
Windows 10 did that to us. My work workstation and my wife’s laptop suffered with W10, so I searched alternate OS and found Linux. Luckily our CAD software had a Linux version and I got productivity back.
My wife’s 2010 laptop on w10 was not usable. Its super fast with Linux. Faster than my work issued brand-new Lenovo laptop with W11. The only performance problem would be rendering video or other hardcore tasks.
Protonvpn has a flatpack. Check your distro’s app store for it.
BASH will be your best friend for any Linux distro.
Ill definitely look into this.
Yeah, once you get the basics of BASH down Linux becomes really easy.
Open up your Console/Shell/Terminal and type “help” it will give you the list of standard commands that let you navigate the shell.
- cd = change directory
- mkdir = make directory
- nano = edit file
- rm = remove file
- rmdir = remove directory
- sudo = run command as administrator/root privileges
And once you get that going you’ll eventually get the options for each command, for example
rm -rfis remove a file forcefully (the -f option), if you apply that command to directories it will remove anything within those directories with recursion (the -r option).You also don’t need to cd into a directory if you want to edit a file in it. For example
nano /home/user/Desktop/SomeRandomFile.conf
Well, I’m 90% proud of Linux!
I am a PC gamer and I exclusively use Linux. It’s completely viable for gaming, I can say for a fact.
How is device support? Direct drive steering wheels, gamepad, VR, status LED or info displays (ie. Making your keyboard glow red on low health) and bunch of other things like my Sound Blaster G6
I can’t say for certain if steering wheels or LEDs work, but I know gamepads work better than on Windows, especially Sony ones. DuelSense works perfect. It only works if plugged in but as far as I’m aware that’s how it works on Windows.
Hit and miss since those tend to not have actual standards and generally do their own thing. If it’s popular, there’s a decent chance someone has reverse engineered it and there’s at least partial support (mostly applies to simpler things like steering wheels), but there will be concessions to make until device manufacturers officially support Linux.
If you’re willing to replace equipment, there’s something that works for most of those categories, if not all.
Direct drive steering wheels
Which one? Support varies wildly depending on manufacturer.
gamepad
I have never seen a gamepad that doesn’t work on Linux. You may not be able to update their firmware if they only provide a Windows tool but they work perfectly fine.
VR
Valve Index and HTC Vive work out of the box. SteamVR is pretty rough in Linux and plagued by issues but it works.
For any other headset you will have to depend on community support. Some work, some don’t.
There’s lots of info on https://vronlinux.org/
status LED or info displays
Which ones? They usually use completely proprietary protocols.
Sound Blaster G6
It will work like any other bog-standard sound card has for years. You will lose any features that are custom to the sound card (dialogue mode, virtual surround, equalizer, …) but those are rarely necessary because there is lots of other software that achieves this for every sound card.
I recommend you boot Linux from USB and take a look. No need to install anything, just boot from USB and take a look if your hardware works.
Status LEDs/displays likely won’t work unless the manufacturer makes a Linux driver, publishes driver documentation, or it’s a super popular device. Reverse engineering USB is possible but very much a passion project. Most gamer hardware hasn’t had to care about Linux users till the last few years. Input devices at least are usually normal HID devices which are standardised.
Me since 2017 when I stopped dual booting. Never looked back thank goodness
I have you beat by a few years.
me since dec 2024, i usually use Linux for gaming(thank you Valve for Proton) but i may still spin up a Windows VM to flash roms to my Samsung Phone(grimlers fork sucks).
apps are also pretty alright on Linux but would love this area see some improvement.
i also feel like FOSS works the best on Linux cause duh Linux itself is foss, incl apps.
In my personal experience, the only games that don’t work are those that explicitly choose not to :
- Fortnite
- PUBG
- Roblox
- Valorant
I’m not much into competitive games myself, so the only one that’s inconvenient in this list to me is Roblox. There are a few really fun games on their platform that I wish I could play on Steam Deck, as used to be possible.
I believe Destiny 2 also doesn’t work. I just don’t play it anymore lol
You can play Roblox through Sober. It runs the Android version directly so it’s pretty similar to what an official port would be, in terms of performance
Sober is awesome, and I can actually have Roblox LAN parties with my son thanks to it.
Not too surprisingly, you can add League of Legends (another Riot games title) to the list. While I’m not a fan of kernel level anticheat, I do love most of these games, and it’s really frustrating how I don’t see any change in the future. After more than a year of struggling, I finally managed to get my Mint working (turns out my old mobo was faulty), but it looks like I will still have to keep Windows for basically all multiplayer titles I play.
really sucks that League doesn’t work . . . I know some people who play and the fact that it used to work just sours the pain.
I guess, at least Dota 2 works? I know they are very different, but I’d say similar enough and worth a shot so long as one isn’t too tied to LoL.
I play a lot of Space Engineers, and it randomly crashes… No idea what’s causing it.
And Space Engineers 2 just doesn’t launch for me.
There’s likely a config option that could fix things, but I don’t know it.
Every other game I play is fine.
Check the Lutris website, there may be a custom install script there
You know about protondb already? Gives a good list of potential fixes if you come across issues, it’s been a godsend on the rare occasions something doesn’t work first try
I know. Tried a few things from that site, but no luck on SE, and SE2 is under active development so I’m waiting on it for a bit.
Fair, good luck with it. Just had to figure out that a drive from a windows install was causing huge permissions issues and any game installed on it wasn’t executing. Sometimes the problems can be really obtuse.
Have you changed which version of proton it uses? It’s in the compatibility options for the game, sometimes going to an older version solves some issues.
For SE2, it’s likely a version issue. But that game is under active development, so I’m waiting on it.
For SE1, well that one is a bit of a mystery… It probably isn’t. I have a few mods.
Rocket League as well; it’s the only reason I haven’t gone full Linux for gaming.
…you’d think after 8+ years of playing I’d be bored, but it’s just fun.
I played Rocket League yesterday on Bazzite through Steam without issues
Whaaaaaat
Bazzite here I come
Heroic Launcher (frontend for Epic Games Launcher) also worked for me on arch linux
Rocket League works on linux? Unless something changed recently, because I used to play it on my Steam Deck all the time.
Rocket league is inside fortnight now.
Basically they want fortnite to be a complete (malware) gaming package with every game inside it sp youre tied to epic.
Fortunately it’s still up on Steam for us (few) legacy players
Had to install it twice because it first installed the linux native, Proton version runs fine might need to give it an input to get past the welcome screen which was blacked out for me.
Try wine bottles, Im using that for games on Linux Mint, havent found any issues yet. You may also need flat seal to make it accessible outside the flatpak environment.
The distro really matters as far as Roblox goes. I tried Arch, Manjaro, Garuda and couldn’t get it working. Ended up back at Ubuntu and it works fine now
For Roblox you have to use Sober
if i cant run something at linux i’ll just do without it. Might try virtual machine if its something really crucial but might not care to even bother. Fortunately any games i know that will not run are kind of games that i wouldnt want to touch anyway.
That’s what I’ve done. I have a windows VM but I don’t even bother spinning it up anymore
Linux gaming is good enough that I would consider not getting the Playstation 6 if I didn’t have kids and didn’t want to watch basketball through the nba league pass.
I’m trying to get my kids to play with the Steam Deck, but it’s honestly still not as good as a Playstation for such a use.
Still it’s going the right way.
Linux doesnt have games that install kernel-level spyware under the guise of anti-cheat. Hopefully never will, but I don’t underestimate gamers who love think spyware is a good idea. Stay away from linux if you want kernel anti cheat please, its ruining computers
Breaking News:
This just in new game requires sudoers access to play!
What’s hilarious is that is par the course on windows to run Steam as an admin. In fact that fixes a ton of bugs for people, so any executable the steam process spawns, like game executables, has admin rights as well.
You are not in the sudoers file, this incident WILL BE REPORTED. ಠ_ಠ
I’m confused, first you say that Linux doesn’t have anti-cheat, and then you say you should stay away from Linux if you want anti cheat.
No I think you got the message of what they were saying correct. Linux doesn’t have kernel level anti-cheat at the moment, and they’re saying that if you are a proponent of it, then don’t use Linux because it’s something we’d like to continue not having.
There are layers of abstraction between the kernel and the userspace, and few applications need kernel level access. Anti-cheat poking around in the kernel is very invasive. I know plenty of people who equate it to spyware, myself included.
Linux doesn’t have kernel level anti cheat and I hope it remains that way, but I fear my opinion will be in the minority soon if not already.
Kernel level anticheat. There’s very effective anticheat that is not kernel level and therefore works fine on Linux.
I have a 3090 and heard nvidia gpus dont do very well for Linux gaming if anyone wants to quell my fears and get me off Windows
been running an nvidia gpu since 2019, literally switched from windows right as cyberpunk 2077 was being launched, and trust me, it was possible back then, and it’s even more performant now.
I have a 3090ti. Made the switch to Linux last year after reading that most games work. Never had a problem with the card, it works flawlessly out of the box (using the proprietary Nvidia drivers).
It still was a bit of a learning curve for me though… Using steam they work without a hitch. If they are not on steam, I found that the easiest (for me) is to install them using lutris, and then adding them to steam as non-steam games and using Proton to run them.
I don’t play that many games though, so ymmv
I have a 3070 and it runs the majority of games better than windows. The “Nvidia doesnt work good for linux” statement has become dated. Nvidia has become much better about giving support to other platforms, I think it has alot to do with being flexible for the ai market
I’m on a 5090 and bazzite has (in the majority of games and apps) just worked.
I have a brand-new lenovo workstation with an nVidia RTX card. Works great. Vulcan calculates the shader cache on first run of a game that takes a minute to run through, but after that the game runs great. I’m on tumbleweed, the only issue I had past week was kernel moved ahead but the nvidia driver wasn’t ready right away. Just meant booting the old kernel in the boot menu till that all syncs up
As long as you run the proprietary nvidia drivers, performance is more or less noise for a given driver version. There IS some annoyance with slower releases for drivers to Linux but… nvidia has had much bigger problems with new driver releases over the past year.
The big issue is if you run the open source community drivers. And… if you are spending leather jacket money and then using low performance drivers… you are an idiot. Because Mistah J already has the metrics and money he wants and doesn’t care if you actually use your card after buying it.
Check my post history I repeat this so often I’m getting tired of it, sorry, but basically 2080ti since it’s out, been gaming nearly daily on it, from AAA to indie, from “flat” to VR and… it just works. I just followed https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and that’s it, no tinkering.
My rtx2080ti runs perfectly in linux and fine on games, thats fairly old card too. My kids computers use gtx1050’s and they are also running every game including Roblox just fine.
Desktop on a 3060 Ti is doing fine. Never ran Windows on it to compare though
The only real issue is hdr in my experience, runs fine through gamescope usually but I’ve found the proton only option (expose Wayland and the like through proton_ge) technically work but the colours are washed out (and yeah, I have all the dxvk hdr stuff there). Dlss and frame gen work perfectly fine, HDR through gamescope does work as well for most games, bl4 has weird dlss artifacts in linux for some reason but that’s the notable standout to me. Been running a 4070ti for the last year for reference, I do intend to go amd at some point but nvidia works fine.
Lots of off topic comment threads so I don’t mind adding my own: going to make the Linux dive here soon and just had a general question on VR. I recently got a mostlySteam setup (sensors / controllers) with a Vive Pro 2 headset. Overall is VR supported? Is it limited to certain headsets? I was thinking of getting a Bigscreen Beyond 2, if that makes a difference. Any info appreciated.
I use a quest 2 headset through my desktop via desktop streamer into steam VR into VRchat. Would this all work on linux? it’s already a pain on windows.
This page says it works, but it also might be a pain to setup.
I think virtualdesktop works, but don’t quote me on that.
i wonder how these numbers change if you weight by active players. like sure, Shooty Guns 2 (2008) running on linux is a good thing, but if it has a grand total of 5 people in the world playing it, it won’t really do much for linux adoption as long as games like league of legends, apex legends and fortnite still don’t work
(for the record i don’t play any of those games and i’ve been happily daily-driving linux with no windows intervention for the last 4 year)
I’ve yet to find a game that I couldn’t play (though knowing me I probably forgot one or two). It’s mainly mods that I’ve not been able to implement, as some of them require running an exe file.
However I’ve had very helpful people tell me I can do all that in a wine instance or something similar so mainly it’s just my own laziness (and lack of understanding about how to “do it in a wine instance”) that’s holding me back from installing fancy modpacks or playing the latest Stalker gamma version.
Also i don’t play multiplayer stuff so the anti-cheat thing issues don’t usually apply to me. So there’s that.
Lutris for mods. You can point it at the game exe downloaded by steam in many cases (not all), and then run arbitrary exes inside the same wine prefix.
Very fair argument. This way the statistics would most likely be considerably worse. Though personally, I couldn’t care less about games like League, Fortnite or FIFA. A case could be made thay they’re almost always harmful, so them being unavailable isn’t an issue.
I seem unable to find this Shooty Guns 2 (2008) you speak of.
I’m pretty sure that’s a mock-buster title so they don’t piss any fandom off.
It’s the sequel to Shooty Guns (1992), one of the first games to come in two separate floppy disks.
The only ones that wouldn’t work are probably the ones with kernel level anti cheat. Maybe if I would be much younger, I might have had different opinion, but, as of today, I believe that all these games that wont run on Linux due to anti-cheat are cancer anyway.
Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.
You have thousand of other games you can play that don’t require kernel level anti cheat, don’t be a fool
I respect where you’re coming from, but a) “fool” is literally in my name. And b) you’re saying “there are other good games, leave those games you’re enjoying.” But you’re also saying “there are other people, leave your friends and family that you play with.” And that’s a little different.
You can run them alternative ways usually. Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass, although gamepass is a shit deal just for fortnite.
I know a lot of people dual boot or use a virtual machine with windows on it too.
Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass
Only local streaming from an Xbox. Streaming from their website requires a controller and I’ve never been able to get a controller to work with a browser on Linux. Well, on Bazzite at least.
Ive literally done it, but thats not to say it might not work all the time or under all configurations. I was using I think librefox.
Done what? Used mouse+keyboard for streaming without a console at xbox.com/play? If so, I dunno what to say, I tried on both Windows and Linux under two Firefox browsers on Windows and Firefox and Chromium on Linux. Booting any game presents me with a console UI and doesn’t respond to any keyboard input.
It only worked for fortnite, I thought I made that explicit but if I didnt, my bad. For some reason fortnite console version allows mouse and keyboard, at least thats why I think it works.
I use a Microsoft Xbox One controller I use to play game pass games on Edge. I use Debian, but it was recognized and worked when I paired it in Bluetooth
I tried Floorp and Ungoogled Chromium, and I could only get them to detect my controller if I plugged it in while on the page. If I already had it plugged in, it just wouldn’t work. Tried some online HID testers and determined it wasn’t specific to the website. IDK.
That’s strange. I definitely figured bazzite would have much better device support for game controllers out of the box.
Yeah, idk. I tried both a PS4 and Xbox One controller, too, but it was all the same.
In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.
In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.
in my experience it’s the exact same situation on Windows
need some support from anti-cheat
its fine, cause no user program should run in the kernel. unless its a driver.
