Arch Linux with Gnome Desktop proton-experimental and wine-staging installed just like the Steam Deck Two computers in the house both have 16gb DDR3 ram and 8gb rx 580 gpu Hogwarts Legacy plays smooth as does most modern games.
It does yes. Although it launches Steam directly as its own … “shelll”? Is that the right word? KDE is bypassed entirely unless you launch “Desktop Mode”
Anyways, I still wouldn’t recommend Arch to a new user, go with something easier and more mainstream for your first Linux experience. PopOS, Mint, Fedora, Norabora, Ubuntu/Kubuntu
Also, saying Steam Deck uses Arch isn’t wrong, but it’s a bit misleading. It uses an Arch base , curated, configured and tested by Valve, and finally periodically shipped as updates using immutable root images (on a single well defined hardware platform). If you install vanilla Arch yourself you’re responsible for all configuration and testing yourself.
Fair points. I will say I use EndeavourOS and I find that to be much more usable than vanilla Arch. I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a beginner though. Not sure how a completely new Linux user would take all that in.
Endeavour is what I recommend for people who are technical but not interested in setting up Arch from scratch. It’s about as close to Vanilla Arch as you can get while having an installer and sane defaults. It’s kind of perfect for gaming, where up to date packages can be the difference between a game working flawlessly and that same game being a choppy mess.
I set my partner up with it, and they’ve had a very easy time running all their favorite games from Elden Ring to Valheim. No headaches required!
Good old Sony MDR-7506 I found in e-waste, replaced the pads and they are golden (light and comfy over ear)! Before that I was using a modified David Clark H10 headset (heavy but naturally isolated with loads of insulation) with MDR-CD999 drivers (can’t believe these were a perfect fit) a Shure boom but it’s only for when the environmental noise is particularly hostile.
I just made the switch from Windows to Linux a week ago and here are my thoughts:
Use Xwayland if you have several monitors with different refresh rates.
I switched from Xorg to Xwayland because I have three monitors with different refresh rates and Xorg doesn't work well with several refresh rates. XWayland is Wayland but with backwards compatibility so you can run Xorg applications as well.
Use Btrfs filesystem on your drives
Btfs is in my opinion the more modern filesystem and it can handle a lot more files than Ext4.
My parts:
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX
32 GB memory
I am on Arch Linux with KDE plasma as desktop environment and XWayland as display server.
My experience has generally been positive except some annoyances in the beginning and I will never switch back. Although if I wanted less complicated setup but still Arch, I would go with Endevour OS.
I am really happy with the performance so far. I can max out FPS in Overwatch 2 (600 is max) with no stutter or anything.
I get 240 fps in Mount and blade: Bannerlord 2 and same thing here, no stutter.
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.
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.
Thank you for the inputs. I have had experience with ubuntu and fedora before (they came free in my old high school computers). But I wasn’t so sure they can game. But maybe this has changed in recent years.
I’ve been using fedora the last few years and have had a pretty good experience. Sometimes I need to go into steam and change the properties of a game to specify an arbitrary version of proton, but between that and googling some issue I’m running into and finding a solution online, I’m pretty darned impressed considering I started using Linux in 2005, and would never have believed back then it would become my primary gaming machine. Granted - I also have a PS5 and switch. I’d recommend giving it a go.
Gaming on linux on a whole has changed in recent years, in large part due to Valve dumping dumptrucks of money into Linux development and Proton, to make it easy for people who arent sysadmins to use and play games on.
The only downside that I've found to Pop!_OS is the default use of Flatpaks. While Flatpaks are generally pretty great, they can sometimes cause odd issues with interactivity with other apps because of their isolated nature. A pretty famous issue is with KeePassXC's Firefox add-on not being able to detect the Flatpak version of KeePassXC, but there are quite a few other notable examples. I also personally like theming my system icons which is a bit of a pain with Flatpaks.
/u/[email protected] I can’t reply to comments from kbin.social, so here is the reply
I couldn’t reply yesterday for some reason, but we are gonna do a mini prebuilt for 3 reasons, 1) the space caters to it more, he’s at a small area of my desk in my home office. 2) He’s not interested in building a computer yet. We just rebuilt the minecraft server and he was totally disinterested, and it’s desktop parts in a server chassis, he just wants to use it. I think that’ll change when he’s a little older, but for now this is a better fit. 3) Warranty; I have used system76 machines for years for work and the warranty is worth it for a really reliable machine.
We will make his own computer for sure one day…I don’t know how to explain this, but hopefully this shows how much I get it, this is me custom designing my own acrylic lan party case in 2001: www.surfrock66.com/compucube-case-design/ and here’s it’s successor in 2004: www.surfrock66.com/the-supercomputer-mod/ I’ve been doing super-customs for a LOOOOONG time, and one day he will for sure enter the world lol.
I personally use nobara kde because I don’t have much time to spend on tinkering and installing things to make gaming on linux a reality. Everything I play is working fine, pre installed obs features preinstalled plugins to easily move from windows. It uses pretty fresh kernel and gpu drivers. Pretty solid foundation if You ask me.
Seeing as you're coming from Windows and already have familiarity with Ubuntu, I'd say go with Ubuntu. The difference between Windows and Ubuntu is pretty minimal, and Ubuntu has amazing support because of it's popularity finding an answer to any question is a simple search away. The FPS gains from a leaner distro will be minimal compared to Ubuntu and you still get a fully functioning, well maintained and supported system.
I wouldn't recommend you venture too far from Ubuntu but if you're feeling a bit adventurous, Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and is a great option. Any of the Debian based distros would also feel similar to Ubuntu and Windows and will generally offer a user experience that a Linux noob should be able to get into as you gradually get used to using the terminal rather than GUIs.
I can say garuda linux (KDE Dragonized gaming edition) myself if you want to give that a shot. I did swap from windows 11 to that after some testing with other distros it was the one that felt like it just worked out of the box. Unless the game you want to play runs some form of anticheat it will typically work.
I did also get CnC3 working on it through steam/proton. As for how fiddly it is to get games running. If you own them on steam you pretty much just need to go into the properties and flip them over to use whatever the latest proton version is and install as normal. Modding will take a few more steps when it comes to skyrim etc but i havent really tried going into that too heavily myself. Unfortunately the vortex mod manager pretty much explodes if you try to use it on linux so you end up having to install mods manually but there is a mod manager that may do the trick “Mod organizer 2” but I’ve never used it.
Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with Nvidia in all those distros!
Just wanted to add: if you are stuck with Nvidia but want to get started gaming in Linux, install Pop!_OS . They have carefully tweaked Ubuntu to make even Nvidia “just work”. It works for me so far, on 2560x1440 @75Hz.
I would rather have some distro freedom with an AMD GPU but unfortunately my main (Windows) game (DCS World) does not work well in VR specifically with the RX7000 series drivers yet.
i do own a steam deck and can say with certainty that, after seeing how well it's handled every game i've thrown at it, i will be switching my primary pc to linux once support for win10 ends
I think any gaming on games or boxes post 2019 is just silly. It is a horror minefield of broken and buggy programming and drivers. The best bet is to stick with all hardware and software pre 2018 , preferably running Linux. Windows sucks so stick with pre win10 if u can. Windows is doomed. Hang on to all your all hardware and stick with old games, everything past 2018 is about to slide into a massive shitshow of broken bugs.
IIRC it was already fixed when Linus did this, just not distributed. It was caused by the bluntness Linus developed due to unmeaningful Windows warnings in the 1st place.
The bug was that you couldn't install steam without faking a the installation of a dep that went down the dependency chain ending in a conflict of essential packages. The functionality to still proceed is a feature. Linus could also just have copied rm -rf --no-preserve-root / from the internet as solution and would have trusted it blindly. If you want to be nannied all the way, I'd suggest you switch to iOS for everything.
If Linus would be a non-techie, he would have tried to install it with a graphical AppStore, it wouldn't have worked and he'd either given up or found the flatpak version of Steam, which would have worked. Not restricting power users is a good aspect. If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows. You have to differentiate between things normal users tried and things Linus attempted because he has some technical knowledge.
Some random user saying anything doesn't make anything true, you don't believe flat-earthers on the internet, either.
There was a library incompatibility between the Steam image in the Pop_OS package manager and the OS. It was caused by a bug introduced by the Pop_OS developers. Linus tried to install Steam using the package manager and it failed. So he went on Google to find out how to install Steam on Pop_OS. A thousand blogs and forums told him to enter "sudo apt-get install Steam", which he did. Unfortunately doing so automatically uninstalls certain important desktop components in Pop_OS.
@JasSmith@miggs597@F04118F@bionade24 lol, that's completely hilarious imo. Still though, that bug is definitely weird, I never got it my self on ubuntu or any of its derivatives. Is it only a pop OS issue then?
If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows.
He didn't "play around" with anything. He entered, "sudo apt-get install Steam". That comes straight from thousands of blogs and help sites which instruct users to do just that when they have issues installing Steam.
Talking about games, I’m so happy I don’t have any title that I play stuck on Windows. None EAC games always worked for me when I started using Linux full time, but I was only able to delete my Windows partition after Apex added support for EAC on Linux. Ever since I haven’t looked back :)
You’ll get better suggestions if you mention the games you play and the hardware you’re using. For example, destiny 2 is still unplayable in Linux because of choices made by the game devs.
Thanks for mentioning it. Nothing too modern. Fallout 4, Skyrim and Starcraft 2 are my staples but C and C games like Tiberium Wars and older would be nice too. I wouldn’t count on modern games to run perfectly but maybe there’s a chance that older games can?
If you’re not having any issues playing these games in windows, they’ll most likely work perfectly fine in Linux. I had no issues running fallout 4, Skyrim and StarCraft 2.
Distro choice is less important than you think but there’s always distrochooser.
Nobara is my choice. It's based on Fedora, which is a very solid base already, and Nobara adds numerous fixes that will save you days if not weeks of headaches, especially if you have an NVIDIA GPU.
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