this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Linux Gaming
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On the one hand, there absolutely are some places where Linux has so dramatically improved it's insane. Apps like Lutris have really blown me away, it's incredible how some popular multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft which used to take me hours to get running back in high school can now practically run out of the box.
On the other hand, one of the major gpu manufacturer's still has terrible driver support. Systems like Proton are imperfect, and seem to be depressing interest in making native Linux clients. Even though some things work out of the box, you can just as easily spend months failing to get a modern title running. To argue it's the best gaming system is just laughable. In some respects, it hasn't progressed at all in the last decade. When it gets to a point where users can run literally any game out of the box without any additional hassle, then it will be the best gaming system. Until then, this is a gross exaggeration at best.
On my rog ally X no man's sky runs far better on bazzite than windows. On windows, it's unplayable
It's quite easy. Just don't buy NVIDIA...Consoles aren't using NVIDIA either and with the tariffs they make even less sense
My experience with Linux is that a lot of games tend to run better than windows these days
Not everyone wants to play AAA stuff
The main game I'm having problems with is an indie online title whose recent update peaked at less that 150k players. I don't care for AAA either, indie games also break on Linux.
You can definitely say "Oh just don't support Nvidia," but I bought my card nearly 10 years ago, and at the time it was the best I could afford. Upgrading to an AMD card would be great, but absolutely not happening any time soon in the current economic climate. If your response to that is "oh well get fucked ig," pretty hard to argue Linux as a universal gaming solution.
On top of all of this, it seems like everyone in this thread who's had success with gaming on Linux is saying run Bazzite, an OS I'd never heard of prior to reading responses here. That's cool if there's a distro that's actually solved a lot of gaming issues, but if I haven't heard of it, the average user is never going to find it. Maybe the title of this article should have been "Bazzite is now the best system for gaming."
I second your feelings on bazzite. Last year when I switched to Linux I spent a while researching the best distro for gaming and what I could find pointed to PopOS or Mint. Never even heard of bazzite.
Bazzite is just a spin of Fedora..
People know about it, because a lot of people use it on handhelds like the Rog ally and Steam decks
Which indie game are you having trouble with though? The only game on my Rog Ally I have trouble with is Goat Simulator 3 (and, I think that might be broken in general now), and I seem to recall canabalt was broken (but may be wrong.. There was definitely a second game)
Even with Nvidia though I wasn't having issues last I tested, but that was a while ago
Last Epoch, which recently had a major update. I've been flatly unable to get it running in two different operating systems now, and haven't even bothered to try tinkering with it for the last two days. It even mocks me with a Platinum rating on protondb...but all the reviews on Ubuntu are at least 9 months old and that was back when the game had a native Linux version. My biggest worry is that the latest patch has broken something for Ubuntu, but what's most likely is that my configs are just borked in a unique way that I'm too stupid to fix.
That's fair enough then. Did they maybe do something like switch to vulkan?
Maybe worth sending a new rating to wine appdb? That way they could isolate if it's a regression.
Last epochs been bad for me too. I had lots of graphical issues last I tried but that was a year or so ago.
Average users don't install OSes. They don't care about OSes. Nobody would ever expect an average user to even think about looking for a gaming distro. I think you need to retune your idea of what an average user is.
My idea of the average user is a complete idiot who doesn't know how their computer functions. I know they don't know how to install an OS. My point that if I was unable to find Bazzite, they have no hope of doing so still stands.
Nobody is expecting them too. That's all in your own head.