SteamOS is the only good linux experience I have had, that’s mostly due to the fact it’s made specifically for the hardware that is running it.
Do you mind mentioning the others you’ve tried and what snags you hit?
I’ve worked with Arch, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and SteamOS, and I would say that while arch and Ubuntu can have a learning curve, Linux Mint is on par with SteamOS in usability.
I went through an episode of trying to swap to Linux about a year ago.
I tried Arch, got it all setup but had issues with smoothness just on the desktop. Tried Wayland and didnt work well with Nvidia, after trawling through random fixes to attempt, gave up.
I tried PopOS, just because it was apparently the best out of the box for games, which setup was easy, but again it was sluggish.
I went back to Arch again, got it setup and thought I would just put up with the laggy dragging of windows, to give the rest a chance. I use a slightly advanced audio setup on Windows with Voicemeeter and could not get a similar setup working on Arch. I couldnt even use apps such as Discord in the same way, along with other little things piling up I just went back to Windows which “just works”.
I was running multi-monitor and apparently there’s no simple support for mismatched refresh rates and Nvidia GPUs still have trouble in general.
I run a Pi and Linux is great for that, I like it, but in my opinion Linux is far from becoming a good Desktop OS.
+1 to all these issues.
I tried a similar setup and eventually gave up after the monitor problems. Having 4 displays with different resolutions and refresh types just doesn’t seem to work at all.
That is some fair criticisms mixed with some things that are unfortunately not tackleable by linux devs. Arch is more a toy for configuring IMO; you lose alot of productivity up front getting it set up. I can’t really speak for Wayland.
I’ve also been a fan of using Voicemeeter Banana, since it allowed me to output to both my speakers and headphones simultaneously, but only binding the audio control buttons to my headphones. Currently nothing like that functionally exists on linux that I’ve been able to find yet.
Nvidia has historically dragged its feet when providing support for its GPUs, and I definitely noticed alot of issues when running an Nvidia GPU back in the day, though I can’t speak for how much of that is explicitly Nvidia and how much that’s linux Dev lag.
Discord is even worse. It was news to me when switching back this year, but Discord has altogether stopped maintaining audio for game streaming. It’s closed source, though, so there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Overall, a not insignificant blow for gaming on linux.
I still get bad vibes from PopOS and have steered clear of it because of it. I would recommend you try Linux Mint at some point, since I’ve had a good experience with it and I regularly see others who equally recommend it.
