AMD HIP support for Blender has landed or is landing soon for Linux so I wouldn’t be too worried. However, HIP is still slower than CUDA / Optix so there’s that to consider as well. I personally went Nvidia for that reason.
Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:
Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu’s approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don’t care about or are already religiously opposed to), but… for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then… that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.
Which kind of gets to the general “religion of linux” as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows… 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.
Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now…). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD’s CPUs… you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).
But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally “just work” outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.
But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.
But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr…), and… updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can’t be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.
Thank you for the recommendations! I don’t mind having some proprietary blobs here and there - as you pointed out, with Steam and the games I was going to run on it, it’s basically necessary anyway, especially with a NVIDIA GPU. However…
I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play.
All in all, that, the drivers being a bit behind on NVIDIA and the few annoyances that happen with external devices (like you pointed out, with a 3rd party controller) are unfortunately exactly the reasons I might not to switch just yet: while it seems to be more convenient to go full Linux for a few things here and there, but if I am going to need Windows, should I really bother keeping both installations? I’d have to buy a new, larger NVMe because my system doesn’t support that for now, reinstall everything anyway… And so far, I’ve been able to do everything I need without needing two parallel systems.
If that was sufficient to make you not want to use linux as a primary desktop: Cool. You would probably have been miserable the first time you had to use a terminal to fix a problem (which very well might be installing steam). It isn’t for everyone
But also: If you don’t think you have a need for windows (no gamepass, no VR, etc) then don’t bother keeping a drive. In my case? I know there is work to get WMR headsets working in steamvr on linux but I use mine maybe once a year at this point so it isn’t a priority to debug. And 8bitdo firmware updates are similarly rare (and I could probably get it working in wine if I cared enough). That basically just leaves gamepass PC for me and time will tell if I even bother to use the PC version of starfield or if I check it out on my xbox and then buy it on sale on steam if I like it.
At the end of the day: you know your needs and use cases. I personally like knowing that I can switch OSes at the speed of a quick reboot, mashing delete, sitting through 5 minutes of updates running, and then switch back in about 60 seconds when I am done. Good 2 TB nvmes have been going for about 100 bucks these days so storage is cheap. I could also have futzed around with partitions to share a drive but… why bother?
I’m a software dev, so I’m already quite used to using the terminal routinely. My current plan is to reconsider if I see an interesting enough NVMe sale - and there are constantly a few these days, so I just might, in the next few weeks.
After all the advice I’ve been getting thanks to this thread, it appears that I would almost be among the best candidates to switch: I mostly play single player games, nothing with anti-cheat and no VR, I’m having heavy doubts that I still need anything Windows-centric. The main downside I still see is the performance hog with an Nvidia GPU.
I have an Nvidia GPU and have had no problem playing BG3 or Diablo IV, for instance. Nvidia drivers are a lot better than they used to be, at least by my estimation.
Most webcams use USB UVC protocol which is supported on Linux. I have a Logitech Brio 4K webcam I use for doing YouTube videos (with OBS) and I have some cheaper Redragon webcam I use for video calls. Both work great. I also just picked up a 4K HDMI USB capture device that also uses UVC and it works just fine as well.
For graphics card, AMD is best. Intel is getting there as well. NVIDIA works but the drivers are proprietary, out of kernel, outside of Mesa, and painful to maintain. Do not recomment NVIDIA. I personally use an Intel Arc A770 in my main PC and it works fine for the games I play EXCEPT that Yuzu emulator runs like absolute crap with it, so this past week I swapped it out for my older AMD RX580 to play TOTK at 60fps.
NVidia RTX 3070, closed source drives, rock solid. Open source drivers usually lag behind, and was pretty broken when I first got it.
Haven’t seen a webcam not work in Linux in years, they are all mostly standardised. Have used Logitech, MS, and a HP camera, along with laptop built in cameras, all worked fine.
AMD for graphics - RX 6600XT. Works flawlessly with the opensource drivers. I don’t use a webcam currently, but in my experience most Logitech webcams work fine these days. Before you buy one, look it up on Amazon and search for “Linux” in the reviews and usually you should find a comment indicating whether or not it works fine.
I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I like it, but it’s not perfect.
Experience
Pros
1st-class developer experience.
I don’t have to deal with MS’s increasingly insane OS design. No fucking with my preferences. No baked-in junkware. No invasive telemetry. No dark-pattern mindgames.
No fighting with the Windows compositor. Better system performance more generally.
Better filesystems. Better package managers. No driver nonsense (AMD user btw). Total customization.
Yes, really! The miracle of Linux is that almost every driver you’ll need comes baked in. I’ve installed exactly one device driver in 5 years and even that one is technically preinstalled for most people (I manually installed it because I was customizing it)
Cons
Some games simply will not work. Usually for anticheat reasons, but this is also true for obscure stuff more generally. Part of gaming on Linux is just accepting that some games are not for you anymore.
Outside of Proton, you often feel like a 2nd-class citizen. Wading out into the weeds when you just wanna game sucks.
FWIW: Lutris helps. The experience still isn’t great, but it’ll gets you 90% of the way there. I’ve successfully used it to play games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, and MTG Arena with minimal tinkering.
Wayland/X11 shenanigans. It’s a total quagmire. Your issues with that ultrawide were almost certainly related to this in some way.
Picking a Distro
There are a lot of pitfalls when choosing a distribution. I can’t personally tell you which one to pick, so instead I’ll give targetted advice.
Things to avoid
Avoid Ubuntu. Avoid Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. Avoid any distro with less than 5 years of active development history. Avoid niche single-purpose distros, including gaming ones. Probably also avoid NixOS until you’re more comfortable with Linux in general.
tl;dr: Pick something that’s very popular, but not Ubuntu. Ideally, the project should have multiple full-time donation-supported maintainers and a detailed wiki.
Rolling Release vs. Point Release
A “point release” distribution is one which guarantees a certain level of stability out-of-box. It achieves this by partially freezing the available packages at well-tested & known working versions (explanation simplified for brevity). This way, when you install the distro, there are very few or even no “gotcha” moments where one niche part of the system randomly breaks during daily usage.
The downside of this strategy is that, over time, the packages on your system get more and more out of sync with the rest of the world. Eventually, you have to sit down and do a big, fat upgrade to the latest version. This has the effect of potentially breaking lots of things all at once, which makes upgrading these systems comparatively onerous.
A “rolling release” distribution has no numbered versions. You just upgrade your packages and presto: you’re rolling the latest code. Yes, there are more day-to-day difficulties, though you generally experience fewer cascading catastrophic failures, since usually only one thing will go wrong at a time. The risk of day-to-day issues is then addressed by splitting the distribution into time-gated “channels” where new package releases are intentionally delayed for days/weeks based on which one you’ve opted into. This gives you as a user flexible control over how current vs. stable you want your system to be.
tl;dr: For most newcomers, I recommend using a rolling release set to the safest available release channel. It offers most of the day-to-day stability of a versioned release with none of the upgrade headaches. These days, I feel that versioned releases are mostly only preferable in corporate/institutional usecases (this is a controversial, personal opinion and not a statement of fact, but I welcome flamewars down below…)
Wayland vs. X11
Wayland replaces X11 (which is old and bad)… but it also breaks compatibility with stuff. If you use Wayland, you will have more issues, so I generally recommend newcomers choose X11 if the installer gives them an option.
With that being said, sometimes you have to choose Wayland because you need its modern features, such as display scaling. If you have a >1440p monitor or use monitors with mixed refresh rates, this probably includes you. It’s not the end of the world, but you’ll have to deal with learning to troubleshoot Wayland’s various quirks as you go.
tl;dr: Use X11 if you can unless you have big/weird monitors. Wayland’s still very workable though, despite what reputation would otherwise suggest.
Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other
Gnome/KDE are what we call “Desktop Environments”. I won’t dwell on the terminology too long because it’s a mess, but basically these are the two major “all-in-one” kits that distros tend to bundle for their sytem GUIs. Gnome is the usershare king, so it’s generally the most well-supported by other desktop software and therefore my default recommendation. KDE is mostly interchangeable with Gnome, though it’s a pretty distant second usage-wise.
There are many alternatives to Gnome/KDE, such as the lightweight LXDE, but I generally don’t recommend these to newcomers unless there is a strong reason. This is because desktop apps can have all sorts of weird bugs if they can’t find a specific Gnome or KDE version of a certain components (e.g.: polkit).
You can also build your own desktop environment from scratch, which is actually what I do. This allows for maximum ricing, but obviously isn’t a great starter situation. Even if you eventually do want to roll your own environment, I recommend newcomers start with either Gnome or KDE as a base and then slowly replace individual pieces as they go, ship-of-theseus style.
tl;dr: Just use Gnome and eventually rip out the parts you don’t like. KDE is a good alternative if you really like it, though.
It works out of the box for me. You may need to enable Steam Input for Playstation controllers in the Steam settings in order to get it to work inside games.
As an nVidia user, I can confirm that it does suck quite a bit at times. I've had to fix a broken upgrade twice now (not fun), and attempting to use the Nouveau driver initially was just painfully slow. The nVidia devs are the main problem with Wayland progress, and AMD video hardware is starting to look much more tempting from the Linux side.
Customization is awesome. That's the main thing keeping me in Linux rather than Windows.
On one side my experience with Wayland and gaming couldn't be smoother since I switched to AMD.
However anything related to ML and tensorflow has been an immense PITA, not only to have it working but performance-wise the alternative to NVIDIA's CUDAS is not matching by far its competitor.
I'm starting to wonder if I should consider having two cards.
Flightless Mango has some comparisons for ‘newer’ games, in case you were concerned about performance. Short answer is that you might expect to lose a percent or two on frames vs. Windows, which is not really worth fretting over. Some games are worse, usually until the underlying issue is fixed. Some games are substantially better - usually Vulkan-based ones. The additional Linux efficiency is real, when it doesn’t have to translate all the DirectX calls.
Don’t know about missing, sorry. The problem is more that some games that use cutting-edge features might have really bad performance, since there’s been no priority on optimising it yet. The last game I played that was that troublesome was Horizon Zero Dawn - was almost unplayable on Linux at launch; couple of updates later, equally as good as Windows.
Never tried raytracing, would imagine that would probably have some issues. But I hear that even at best, RT is a horrific performance hog.
No Microsoft GamePass. Or none that actually matters, as the only solution is to pay for the higher tier and stream the games - so no game actually runs on the desktop. No, thanks.
Why “no thanks”? I use GamePass with xCloud and it works pretty well on Linux, and it’s a perfectly viable option - unless you’ve got really poor internet, or you’re into competitive FPS games or something that requires ultra-low latency.
NVIDIA support for Linux is far from being on-par with that on Windows, especially the open-source drivers. Is this still true?
Yes. If you’re planning to game on Linux, I’d highly recommend getting an AMD card instead, the AMD open-source drivers are excellent and see frequent improvements - both in terms of features and performance.
Many devices, especially those for gaming, might not have good (or even working) compatibility drivers for Linux. I know my UWQHD monitor works flawlessly on Windows, but requires quite a bit of tinkering on Ubuntu
“Many” -> citation needed. In my experience, depending on the hardware, you may find a better out-of-the-box experience with Linux compared to Windows. For instance, on my ThinkPad Z13, everything worked out-of-the-box on Nobara (Fedora) - including Fn keys, Wi-Fi, accelerated graphics/video drivers… everything. Same with my AMD desktop, didn’t have to install any special drivers or anything. But when I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows on my Z13 (dual-boot), there were almost no drivers - I had to manually install the Wi-Fi drivers first, and then grab the rest of the drivers via Windows Update, which was painful - took like 3 reboots to get everything installed, with long reboot times cause of updates. Painful.
In saying that, I’m surprised that your monitor - of all things - needed tinkering, when they’re usually mostly dumb devices that need no drivers or anything. But then again, it’s Ubuntu so… ¯*(ツ)*/¯. FWIW, I have a fairly recent QHD monitor from AOC and it worked just fine on Nobara, no tinkering required.
The advantages: What else am I not thinking about?
Performance. Thanks to no bloatware like unnecessary background services/Defender/telemetry/Cortana/Bing etc, Linux in general would perform better, at least in theory. YMMV of course, depending on the game/hardware/distro. The good thing is if you use the right distro, or are willing to go the extra mile with tweaking, you can eke out way more performance, such as by using custom gaming-optimised kernels, fstab mount option tweaks and more. Using a gaming-optimised distro means most of these tweaks are built-in, saving you some time.
Arguably, a better gaming-focused experience, when you go for a gaming-focused distro like Nobara, or if you want to go the full mile and make an exclusive gaming box, you could install something like ChimeraOS, which is basically a community Steam OS. Imagine your PC booting straight to Steam, in the fastest possible time, with no distractions like Windows Update, Defender or other nonsense. Basically a console experience, with the power and flexibility of PCs and Linux.
What distro?
Nobara. It’s based on Fedora but optimised for gaming, made by the same guy who makes Proton-GE and Wine-GE (GloriousEggroll), so you know it’s the good stuff. Obviously comes with ProtonGE/Steam/Lutris etc out-of-the-box, custom kernel, patched Discord, codecs, nVidia drivers and more. Definitely give it a go if you’re considering Linux for gaming.
I don’t understand why, but I don’t see your message on the post, only in my notifications. Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
Why “no thanks”?
Because I have a powerful enough desktop to run games that I would be streaming then. It takes away some of the rights I have regarding my collection of games and creates a need that I did not have. I also just bought an NVIDIA GPU, I won’t buy a new one to be able to switch to Linux.
“Many” -> citation needed.
On two different computers running Ubuntu, my DELL monitor was not correctly recognized. I had to switch from Wayland to Xorg and define the actual monitor resolution through xrandr - not impossible, just quite annoying. Similarly, my Logitech G403’s buttons to change the sensitivity never have never worked correctly on Ubuntu, and there is no official Logitech software to make them work. Those buttons are just not seen by an Ubuntu computer.
Performance.
That’s one I didn’t think of! Although I don’t think backgrounds services impact that much performance nowadays on a higher end PC, it leaves that much more headroom to be used on the game instead. On the other hand, isn’t performance on a non-native software already impacted negatively? So all in all, which would have the greater impact?
Nobara
Thanks for the recommendation! I know have examples of Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch based distros optimized for gaming. As for which to choose, I will probably get as many answers as persons I ask. And ChimeraOS seems to be a nice project, it just doesn’t fit my needs.
I used Nobara for the past year or so and liked it for the most part but it had too many issues. Most annoying is every update broke my controller it was something to do with their Xbox configs. Then there were a few games that wouldn’t work despite working on my steam deck. Most notably it was uncharted. Finally I’m just done with RH and needed to move away. I switched most of my machines to Debian but the TV gaming rig is on Solus now that they finally updated their image. It boots way faster than nobara and uncharted and controller work flawlessly. So far I’ve been happy with it.
Good to know! Which version of Solus are you using? Although it doesn’t seem to really matter as I don’t think any of them are really dedicated to gaming.
4.4 budgie it was just released. Not a gaming distro but they do have a custom steam runtime app that used to work wonders but I find breaks things more than helps now that proton is a thing. So make sure to turn that off if you go that route. I like it for the TV PC as I don’t want to do as little maintenance on I as possible. Just launch steam or some light web browsing but i didn’t want to go the steam os route.
For your screen, try a live ISO of another distro that’s not based on Debian. I struggled for years with my 1440p monitor on Wayland when plugged in to my laptop. Turns out, there’s something wrong with the way Debian’s kernel decodes my monitor’s EDID. On Fedora, it worked out of the box.
About Nobara, I’m not sure it’s better than vanilla Fedora for a beginner. Sure, there are a lot of nice things baked in and rpmfusion enabled by default, but the dual system update thing is… not great. I’m still running my gaming rig on Nobara tho. YMMV.
About nVidia and their drivers… yeah, they suck. And they will continue to suck for the foreseeable future. That’s why I built my system around an AMD GPU from the start. People like to complain about Wayland and that it’s not ready for prime time and that Wayland sucks. Well, nVidia drivers are to blame. I’ve been running Wayland almost exclusively for the past 4 years on Intel iGPUs and AMD GPUs, it’s always been nice and reliable.
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