this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Linux Gaming

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Admittedly, the last time I tried it was maybe 5 years ago. I used ubuntu (can’t remember which distro) but I recall having to fiddle a lot with drivers and WINE. Is the scenario still the same today?

With the horrors of Win11 widely talked about, I’m thinking of flirting with linux once more. Is it a good idea at this time? Or is gaming on linux still niche as it once was?

What is your distro and what tips and tricks/perspectives you can share with a newbie like me :)

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[–] simple 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So far this is the best answer in here.

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Frostwolf 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] marzhall 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] A_Random_Idiot 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] synapse1278 11 points 1 year ago

Any popular distro will work fine for gaming. The difference between distros are becoming less and less significant with de advancement of sandbox packaging like Flatpak. Pick which ever distro is exiting to yourself!

If you want a subjective opinion: Fedora is my personal favorite for few years now; otherwise Debian is a very strong and stable distro that I daily-drove for ~10 years.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This. To me Mint is what Ubuntu should've been.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] A_Random_Idiot 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] scutiger 6 points 1 year ago

I'm running Ubuntu, and gaming on it has been as simple as installing Steam via apt and having it download my games. I haven't yet found a game I own that won't run.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I think most distros will work just fine. It's gotten so so much easier since Valve invested in Proton to make the Steam Deck work.

Personally, I'm on EndeavourOS with Gnome and it works fine for all my Steam games on an AMD GPU. Years ago, I was on Linux Mint, and that worked just fine for gaming too.

One caveat: if you have an Nvidia GPU, driver support can sometimes be a headache (or at least it was several years ago when I had one). Some distros claim better out of the box support for Nvidia, like Pop OS

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've liked Mint and Ubuntu for awhile now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

My gaming PC is Ubuntu 23.04. Steam/proton works for every game I wanted to play.

You can check ProtonDB website to get an idea if your games will run with Proton/steam.

[–] GustavoM 4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Garuda Linux if you are lazy.

Any distro if you are not.

Tips and tricks

As much douchey as this may sound... but yeah, RTFM works 100%.

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[–] Vahenir 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On Fedora Linux. It's basically plug and play with the Steam flatpak.

Discord video streaming works only for the entire screen. OBS works as expected.

Controllers and VRR work fine now as well.

[–] verdantbanana 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

arch is what steam deck uses maximum compatibility plus steam puts in code

[–] ThreeHalflings 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Frostwolf 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] verdantbanana 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

Try something Ubuntu based, something arch based, debian based...

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.

[–] KidDogDad 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Garuda as well! Can I ask what you’re referring to by the maintenance panel? I’m not able to place it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] OwlPaste 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Manjaro user here, it works fine for me Using it for years now

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[–] verdantbanana 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

archlinux.org

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn’t the Steam Deck use KDE Plasma 5 instead of GNOME?

[–] kjetil 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sambeastie 2 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] UkaszGra 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] FreeLikeGNU 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I love Xubuntu LTS and have been using it since Ubuntu dropped Gnome 2. It's light and stays out of my way.

Some things that make it really great are these PPAs:

  • Oibaf (for the latest mesa graphics drivers) ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
    • Kisak's Mesa PPA as an alternative is great too! ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
  • Mainline (for the latest kernels) ppa:cappelikan/ppa
  • Xubuntu-dev staging for latest Xfce software ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging
  • WineHQ staging (I rarely use wine directly anymore and just launch non Steam windows games in Steam (leveraging Proton) https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

I'm a bit frustrated that Xubuntu is using snap for browsers so I use the Firefox tar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_local-firefox-installation-in-users-account

[–] shadedmagus 1 points 1 year ago

I guess it depends on what your use case might be. I have heard that Manjaro is decent for a desktop Arch experience, but I have yet to try it.

My use case recently was for a living-room PC that works like a console version of the Steam Deck. For that purpose, ChimeraOS works really well. It's an Arch-based distro that uses the Steam Deck controller-first interface and so far is handling almost everything I've thrown at it. It even has a remote admin app where you can install games from GOG or Epic (although GOG support only installs the base game at the moment, no DLC or updates) or upload console ROMs for emulation.

I would say if you go this route, get a PS4/PS5 controller. The touch space is recognized as a mouse, which removes the need to attach a mouse for those moments when you need to get into the desktop (such as formatting a secondary drive for use in Steam).

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