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.
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.
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.
How do you get Bluetooth controllers to connect. I’ve got an Xbox One controller and for the life of me I cannot get the damn computer to see it. I ended up just hooking it up to my steam deck so I got some use out of it
Valve really has contributed to Linux gaming so heavily. It felt insane playing through GTAV on my steam deck and it ran really well. I honestly don't think anyone expected it to ever get this good. I certainly didn't.
I've been waiting for such a long time for this. Late 90's I think? I've finally made the switch and it's great to not have to worry about the little annoyances that were always present.
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton's contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
I feel people are often not positive enough. I mean, in my experience, I think that in most cases, running games on Linux with Proton is as good as Windows. The exceptions are unsupported and not-enabled-for-Linux anti-cheat engines and some exceptions, like updates to certain non-Steam launchers breaking things.
Because of the brouhaha over 2B’s butt, there are loads of rude drawings and whatnot being uploaded [online]. And since going around and collecting them is a pain, I’d like it if I could get them sent in a zip file every week.
I didn’t bother because I got plenty of playtime from it and got it through the Steam Controller/Link bundle as well. But I did consider it since I was ticked about losing Linux support.
That’s how I’ve been for a few years now. Windows has serious bugs that I encounter all the time that I never encounter with Linux.
Just this week alone… screenshots stopped working, usb microphones were stuck on mute, and the taskbar crashed preventing me from using any touchpad gestures or even accessing the start menu to restart.
The task bar was fixed with a restart but the other two issues required a reinstall of the os. I troubleshot those for like an hour without any solution.
I know! I have to use windows at work (IT Admin) and using powershell always makes me wish the software we need ran on Linux. Just today I needed to extract a partition image with dism and it just did nothing for half an hour before the progress bar even came up. People say that Linux is buggy but gnome gives me way less headaches than windows 11.
Windows unfairly gets the reputation of being more reliable than linux. I’m just waiting for my work to make one app available on Linux and then I’m switching.
I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
I played for a lot of time Elder Scrolls Online on linux without any problems (except some addons) but in generally it works really well, without performance problems or something else. I used the official launcher with lutris and had a lot of good time playing it.
Yeah, I’d be worried about Apple if they ever got serious about gaming other than mobile games. Netflix and Amazon are medium concerns, though there’s a good chance they’d go for mobile games for any sort of gaming push. Google just lost any trust they ever might’ve had with game developers by killing off Stadia.
Yeah, the mess Google made of Stadia pretty much guarantees that, even if they try to get into the games industry again, nobody will have any trust or goodwill towards them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's wild to me how native proton feels in so many games. Though, I'll still have a special place in my heart for Super Tux Kart, Warsow, Armagetron Advanced, 0 A.D. et al. Not to mention all the ports Feral Interactive has done over the years.
Many games even run better on linux with proton than on windows, due to package bundling and stuff. Though the games I play the most already have native linux support.
I keep hearing this, but I personally have yet to see it. Definitely most of my games run just as well on linux, but otherwise some of them are still glitchy.
Don’t get me wrong, I'll never go back to Windows, I love Linux, but what are these games that run better on Linux?
was on windows getting about 30fps and struggling to run, so I used a ported dxvk dll someone mentioned, it is on github (I'll post the link when I find it)
straight to 60fps, no more frame drops. it was crazy.
edit: I was on an AMD gpu, iirc I don't think people on nvidia had the same problem
As I understand, it’s not common, but when it does happen it’s really because vulkan is just that much better than the original directx implementation, even with DXVK working to translate all the system calls.
Yep, with Linux being able to play most games (and growing) and Microsoft’s latest transgression, Linux seems like the logical bastion for anyone tired of features nobody asked for.
Bridgman is an extremely talented dude who’s contributions bettered the entire industry. I really hope he enjoys his retirement, and continues to post in the forums over at Phoronix. The guy is extremely thick skinned but laidback and incredibly friendly despite all the flame wars and trolling.
Heck of a nice guy who did some really great work for Linux, Linux Gaming, and gaming overall. nVidia users benefitted greatly from AMD’s surge in competitive software.
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For anyone interested in this awesome concept, but isn’t a Hyprland user, there’s a great flatpak app called Nyrna, which basically does the same thing.
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