I am buying a friend’s PC for games. I want to avoid windows if at all possible, and I’m wondering what people’s experience using Proton in Linux for gaming has been. Are there certain publishers who use libraries Proton doesn’t handle well? Are there distros to avoid using with proton? Any other notes I should be aware of?
I’m using proton + Arch for over a year and I have no issues running any games (Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3060 Ti). Only issues I had were with anti cheat.
I spent a weekend configuring a gpu passthrough setup to run windows on my arch machine. I haven’t needed it yet.
Generally any popular distro should be fine. SteamOS is arch (btw) but that doesn’t mean its necessary.
That said, i don’t play a ton of FPS, and when I do I have 0 interest in being competitive. Right now i don’t really play any games with anti-cheat for online play. When i do play shooters i tend to play on xbox anyway, so if you also have a console you should be covered for any edge cases, esp when cross-play is available.
Once you pick the right proton version for a particular game things tend to just work. Protondb usually has enough info for solving any annoyances. ProtonTricks is helpful for annoyances.
For anything non-steam, Bottles is excellent. Bottles can also run games with Proton, but also supports wine (which as an upstream to proton gets many of the features of proton anyway). Bottles is also great for running windows programs.
If you’re doing it for a friend make sure you ASK if they want Linux, don’t force it on them man that’s not cool. Most normies just want to use Windows for the compatibility and ease of use (call it handholding and restrictive all you want).
Nobara is probaly a good choice, never used to be but looks good.
Only issue about linux gaming is anti-cheats, like if your friend wants to play valorant, r6, fortnite, or any new call of duty game, hes kinda screwed. You also have games like apex which work now because EAC supports proton, but ever since EA made their own anti cheat, its only a matter of time.
Others have already answered the questions you asked, so I’m going to answer the one you didn’t. If your friend’s PC has an NVIDIA you will need to use the proprietary drivers to get the best performance. This also means that you probably should avoid distros that use Wayland as default since NVIDIA can be a bit hit or miss there.
As for distro all of them will play nice with Proton, but you don’t seem to be very Linux savvy so I would also stay away from complicated distros such as Arch or Gentoo (or their derivates) which assume the user knows their way around. I used to recommend Kubuntu, but recently I read a post about a guy complaining because his PC was thermal throttling under Kubuntu. So my recommendation would be either Pop_OS! or Linux Mint, both are very beginner friendly and should work mostly out of the box. The more you know about Linux, the less difference the distro makes, but you don’t want to jump to the deep end without knowing how to swim first.
