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!
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.
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.
Eh, i recently did a fresh arch install on my desktop (had manjaro before) and I haven’t run into any bigger issues (at least related to gaming). Diablo 4 for example worked basically out of the box with bottles
Maybe I’m biased because my only experience with arch in the past five years was install, boot, update packages, reboot, fail to boot, laugh, install Debian.
Using rolling release distro seems to be great for gaming because you’ll get bug fixes, kernel and driver updates faster. Even steam deck is based on a rolling release distro (Arch). On the flip side, you’ll also get new bugs before anyone else. Doesn’t happen too often but it does happen.
You need to distro hop for a while, in the end, the other aspects of the systems are going to feel more important to you and which aspects you will like the most if only for you to decide.
you might end up picking one distro for a reason completely alien to most, I ended up on garuda because their little maintenance panel felt sexy for example.
Also I didn’t get one bug I had runing very old vn’s with gamescope and still don’t know why it worked on garuda but not on the othe arch including arch itself.
I’m mainly refering to the “garuda assistant” app that is installed on there but I should have said garuda apps, since even the terminal launched “garuda-update” is nice to have
whole point of arch is creating your own environment yes it is the experience we and all those we install for have arch works flawlessly with community constantly adding and improving
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.
I mean, I’ve had pretty much the same experience on ubuntu
the few games (outside of ones with broken DRM that will never work on linux, regardless of distro) that I have had problems with, have all been proton related and fixed in a future proton update.
Hell I even played Cyberpunk 2077 on release day, thats pretty fuckin amazing in and of itself, even if it did have some minor issues like ambient audio not working at the time.
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
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.
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.
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.
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