What are your experiences using Linux for gaming?
I'm planning on switching to Linux on my main PC as I don't want to move to Windows 11 and was curious about other people's experiences doing so.
I have a Steam Deck and everything there works out of the box, but I imagine that's a more curated platform compared to standard distros.
What are your experiences, good or bad?
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.
Thanks. I didn't know about Bottles, that seems useful (mostly for non game software I guess).
This screenshot is just an FYI at some of your options. I've got bottles, PortProton, and the ProtonTricks launcher as options for any given EXE/MSI installer. Bottles is usually all that's necessary but I have the others for super tricky stuff like embedded software development BS that would never be encountered by a normal person (haha).
It works well for games that just come as EXEs too, but I mainly use it for non-games, yeah.
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.
I get avoiding those games on principal... but is there any harm that can come from playing those through Linux?
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:
rsync -ave ssh (i.e. if I want to play on the big screen via the HTPC).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.Also—generally speaking—Linux is just more fun to use! Customize TF out of your desktop experience. The only thing stopping you is... you.
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'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 Battlenet 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!
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.
Switched my main gaming computer in 2023, never going back.
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'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.
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.
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.
If that was more than a year ago it might be tine to try again with Bazzite or Nobara; the latter being my personal choice.
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.
I am playing almost exclusively in linux since 2012 (diablo3 came out, it worked on Linux, i sank an ungodly amount of hours into it.) the only thing that made me reinstall windows was to play counter-strike go on faceit, because their client did not work on linux.
proton made so much, so much easier that it almost became frictionless to play on linux. wine made huge strides before, but it never was so smooth before proton.
what often was a problem where laptops with dedicated and integraded graphics cards, or nvidia cards on rolling release distribution often having issues after kernel updates, which is why i was on fedora for a long time, because there the akmod stuff worked better in my experience.
overall: when it works on the deck its almost guranteed that it runs just as easy on other linux distributions, maybe don't pick a rolling release distro if you have an nvidia card, and most of the time you can forget about the fact, that you are gaming on linux.
I've only had problems with two games.
A game called OneShot, which has some meta things as part of the game. Like, it's supposed to change your wallpaper and such "outside the game" things. No biggy, just had to run an executable with a specific version on Wine and it worked as intended.
The other was Vermitide 2, never got around to finding a solution for that one, as I honestly didn't care enough to find out what the problem is.
Everything else has worked splendidly.
Addendum: getting Blizzards Launcher work was a bitch though. Thankfully, Steam provides.
So far, everything mostly works. Occasionally I have to tinker with some environment variables to get some games working, but so far everything I have tried has been playable.
I have ryzen 5800x3d, 32 GB ram, rtx3090, 1440p 120hz gsync screen, nvme + bunch of other drives. Running Arch (wayland, kde plasma), games installed from steam/gog + few standalones from regular installers. Mostly I use proton-ge, but some games run fine with just wine. ntsync + wayland enabled.
some games (eg. PEAK) have MASSIVE flicker unless I explicitly disable wayland support for them (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0), and then it's fine.
Only thing really lacking is performance, eg. Cyberpunk 2077 with RT is slower than on Win10. It still does about 60 fps, but the dips below are way more harsh. AFAIK this is a thing accross the board with DX12 games with current nvidia driver, supposedly there's a fix cooking, but we'll see.
I don't play competetive pvp games at all, so I can't speak for those. But so far friends only co-op & single player games have worked just fine.
Hmm, I haven't had this issue with Peak and I'm running Wayland... But I do run AMD.
are you using the env variable to enable it for the game? AFAIK it's not enabled by default, and It dawned on me that I have it enabled on /usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-ge-custom/user_settings.py (the config file for proton-ge). But it could still be nvidia issue, wouldn't surprise me
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)
I think it very much depends on what games you're looking to play, but I've been having a wonderful experience ever since I fully switched to Linux earlier this year.
I'm currently on Kubuntu and for games I'm using Steam, Heroic Games Launcher (GOG & Epic Games), and Lutris (Battle.net).
My experience with Steam has been pretty much flawless, Heroic Games Launcher was fairly straightforward to setup, and Lutris was pretty easy as well -- mostly took some extra time due to bad reading on my part.
I mostly play singleplayer games (e.g. Baldur's Gate III, W40K: Rogue Trader), with the occassional multiplayer game thrown in there (e.g., The Planet Crafter, Guild Wars 2). So far, I've had no issues besides having to install Proton-GE in favor of Steam's Proton layer due to some iffy cinematics in games, but that seems to be par for the course when following many guides online.
The main games that don't seem to work are those that require kernel-level anti-cheat, think PUBG or the upcoming Battlefield. Which is unfortunate, but I can personally live without. ProtonDB is an excellent website to check out before you make your switch, so that you can see which games won't work.
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
I wouldn't recommend replacing your steam deck os with bazzite... What's the expected benefit?
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.
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
As long as it is Steam it basically works seamlessly, unless it uses some weird ass DRM like Denuvo. Outside of that it basically depends on the game. Diablo 4 worked well, Anno 1800 or the new Anno 117 Demo did not (Denuvo, I think). Lutris helps witha lot of these but it's still not sure
Denuvo is not a blocker for Linux, anti-cheat is the main one.
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.
Frame time pacing seems to be a lot better through Proton. Elden Ring runs better on my Steam Deck than my i5 13600k & 4090.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Given that I'm currently enjoying CP2077 on a 1080/i5, quite good.
I use Bazzite on a different SSD in my desktop, and most of the game I play works as expected. I mostly play single-player and coop stuff, nothing competitive.
I've been on linux for 4ish years, and I've done a fair share of gaming in that time, with minimal issues
The few I can think of are mostly controller related:
Oh and one other I had was initially getting sims 3 running, but that one was fixed at some point and now it runs fine
Configuring and maintaining nvidia drivers on Linux continues to be a pain. I recommend using an amd-based gpu because their drivers are open source and more well integrated.
They're a pain, yeah but no worse than Windows. I want to point out that with Intel/AMD your drivers update in the background (like everything else) and you experience no issues at all. With Nvidia, the drivers will update in the background and—until you reboot—some apps can get a bit glitchy. The same shit happens with Windows even though Nvidia claims they can update the drivers without requiring a reboot. My father-in-law's brand new Windows 11 PC has the exact same sort of glitching/crashes that I experience in Linux with games (when the Nvidia driver updates; if you haven't rebooted).
The only reason why Windows users don't experience it as much is because Windows forces you to reboot all the fucking time. Windows users have just accepted this as a natural part of using a PC.
That is the pain of the Nvidia drivers. It's not a huge deal—just annoying.
This will depend on your distro, however on EndeavorOS one can just run
nvidia-inst
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.