I’ve been incredibly skeptical of Linux gaming for a long time now. But more than that I’ve been fed up with windows. I finally bit the bullet and bought some new ssd’s. Burned a bazzite iso and booted from the thumb drive. Honestly? The setup was flawless. The only thing I could see a non-technical person struggling with is burning images and booting from a drive. If a shop starts selling pre-builts with Linux configured for gaming then this might actually be the year of the Linux desktop
Now excuse me I’m gonna go play Arx Fatalis
You’ll likely run into some problems eventually but yes, for the most part things work very well now. My only significant problems are typically cause by anti-cheat software.
We know…People here sometimes complain when us Linux guys are saying the same, but if you discovered that Linux is actually pretty damn excellent, wouldn’t you tell people about it?
And you did. :)
People here sometimes complain when us Linux guys are saying the same, but if you discovered that Linux is actually pretty damn excellent, wouldn’t you tell people about it?
Exactly.
They tell me:
“But MajorHavok, you’re insanely willing to diagnose and debug command line bullshit. How can I trust you?”
To which I reply:
“Uh…good point. But…uh… Both things can be true?”
After tinkering with it a bunch this morning I will say that all the things that I can see normie’s struggling with are:
- drive management (renaming, mounting, etc)
- grub, or as they might call it “that menu thing that shows up for 5 seconds”
- setting up the thumb drive itself
That said I still think pre-builts with good defaults could smooth most of this out
- I much prefer how Linux does it, hopefully others agree
- easy to disable if it bothers you
- balenaEtcher is pretty easy to use, I’m not really familiar with the options anymore
I’m happy to walk anyone through the process, and I’m guessing most other Linux users would as well.
I’ve been loving Bazzite as well, I didn’t have to install ANYTHING to have it working, no Nvidia drivers that try to force that stupid Game Ready crap, just installed the OS and steam and my games and it worked, it’s better than windows with ninite ever was as far as getting a usable OS was.
The Steam Deck was a big convincing point for me, after seeing how well it worked I just had to go for it. Last time I tried switching to Linux fully for gaming was ~2012 and it was a LOT rougher, Garry’s mod worked but had issues with filename casing and things like that
I run a fairly standard arch setup and have had very few issues with games. I’ve done a bit of tinkering with bottles, lutris, etc, but pretty much everything just works first time with steam.
I’ve only had to set a few launch flags, usually for a game to use directx instead of vulkan or vice-versa. Sometimes you can’t play a game on launch, but usually one of the first few patches will get things in working order. Steam deck popularity has done wonders for this aspect.
The most common issue I run into is a game update that will break or degrade the experience. But usually those get fixed fairly quickly in follow up patches. A lot of developers will skip testing in proton (mostly because itll “just work” these days) but i imagine theyll start doing so more often before pushing updates as steam decks and Linux become larger shares of players.
