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
TIL people still burn their isos… Just use an USB stick. lol
Read closely and you’ll notice they used a thumb drive.
People usually refer to the act of copying the data directly onto the device as something other than “copying” to differentiate from copying the ISO as a file to a filesystem on the drive.
I’m honestly okay with the term “burn” being used here. It’s not correct, but it’s the same general operation. I usually say I’m “dd-ing an image onto the USB,” but that’s because I’m a Linux nerd and use dd for this.
This is also one of those weird things: Why do people use dd for this?
It doesn’t do anything special, it just does a plain old read()/write() loop on regular-ass UNIX files. Its actual purpose is to do character set conversions while doing so.
You can just cp image.iso /dev/sda or even cat image.iso > /dev/sda. (The latter only works in a privileged shell because it’s the shell which open()s the device file.)
Oh man i love Arx Fatalis, have you seen Monomyth? It’s basically a love letter to Arx
That’s literally why I started playing it lol. I ran through all the content and wanted more
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.
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
