I took the dive into Linux gaming at the start of the year and never switched back to windows. It’s so much better for everything and Steams work on big picture has let me turn my PC into the Linux console of my dreams since the steam machine vaporware days.
Additionally the ease of use of using Linux vs windows for gaming has gotten me to start using my pc for local coop a lot more. I’ve had so much more success using multiple controllers with Linux than windows.
My biggest worry, like anyone’s, was that I would feel limited by the games I can play. I’ve honestly started to try even more games since I’ve had better experiences with switch emulators on Linux (Yuzu my baby). Sometimes a newer game won’t let me use the latest version of DLSS my GPU supports but that doesn’t make a game unplayable, I just don’t get max graphics/ performance.
The only game I can’t play is rocket league. But I can only blame Epic for actively breaking the game on Linux.
Welcome to the club! Linux gaming is light years better than it’s ever been before. I don’t miss Windows at all and 95% of games I try seem to work now with only modest tinkering at most. Tell your friends!
I finally plan to wipe my Windows PC and install SteamOS on it after the forced push to Windows 12. The requirement to have a connected account just to login is a complete dealbreaker for a machine that I only play games on. I don’t need OneDrive. I don’t need to be connected to Microsoft’s portals. I’ll never need to recover anything on here via the web.
RIP to the local admin account. You were awesome. Thanks for making the switch easy, Microsoft.
I’ve been trying to help my roommate get games working on pop_os via proton / lutris because his windows install broke, and we just cannot make any game work. Games that say they should work on protondb just won’t start no matter what we try. I wish I knew what we were doing wrong. Would love to play Baldurs Gate 3 with him again.
Yesterday I went and got a pcie nvme adapter (my two motherboard slots are taken up by windows+gaming drive). Added in a 2TB to the adapter and installed Garuda linux - based on Arch.
So far it has been great. A couple little things popped up, like adding panels to the other two side monitors. But quick searches online and everything has been working very smoothly. I even put chrome on for work stuff so I don’t have to use the company-given laptop. – Side note, if anyone knows of a way to container that chrome install so work stuff is super separate, please share. –
Like another comment mentioned, some games won’t work either because of anti-cheat that isn’t enabled for linux, or just not good proton support. But for the most part I can still play 90% of the games I normally do: DRG, CS2, Darktide, battlebit, etc. Hopefully the times I need to reboot into windows are rare, because this has been a great experience. Way better than years ago when I tried to make the switch but gaming support just wasn’t where I needed it.
I have a couple games that don’t work, but yeah, these days it’s very rare for something not to work. I don’t bother checking ProtonDB any more to see if there are any known issues before buying something.
The only one I care about much that doesn’t work is Command: Modern Operations; there’s not really much by way of competition out there for it.
One other benefit – I don’t know if this is still an issue on Windows – but there are historically a couple of fullscreen games that dealt very poorly on Windows with being alt-tabbed out of, because the game needs to restore context when things come back, and some games didn’t do well at that. Steam doesn’t explicitly expose this as a feature in the UI, but you can just fire up winecfg on a Proton prefix and then ask that a virtual desktop be emulated for that prefix, and the application will be unaware of it if you go switch to another workspace or something. As far as it knows, it’s still in the front and running fullscreen.
