Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Do you mind losing access to most features on your GPU, including (but not limited to): RTX HDR, Shadowplay, the Nvidia App, the Nvidia Control Panel and everything it offers, including the 3D Settings page?
If any of this matters to you, you may want to consider switching to an AMD GPU first before you consider Linux. Nvidia does not support it nearly as well as they support Windows. You get a driver that lets you run games, and that's about it.
Yeah I only kinda really use shadowplay anyway. I don't have a hdr monitor at all. Firstly I just want to see if my games run well enough. If not I will wait a couple years and then upgrade to an AMD card and then switch for good.
Afaik AMD isn't fully supported either
And you lose the ability to run tensorflow if you like to do AI
DO IT.
JUST DO IT.
The only thing that kept me booting windows for gaming was destiny 2, which choses not to support running on linux.
The current expansion "edge of fate" is terrible though, so it's full time linux gaming for me.
I really hope Bungie changes their stance at some point. The new portal in Edge of Fate seems perfect for quick sessions on a Steam Deck, if nothing else.
the portal is a good idea, but how they tied (or rather didn't) it to the rest of the game is currently terrible.
the whole game feels like a broken plate that someone glued together again..
So, i would not expect great things from them currently...
Linux Mint Cinnamon was is my first Linux distro coming away from Win10, and I have no issues with it. Mint uses Ubuntu as its codebase, so it's essentially Ubuntu with a different desktop presentation/look/feel.
Agreed. Mint is a very 'new Linux user' friendly distro, and has everything you really need. I've got some recent converts from Windows and even the gamers I've set up are happy with it.
linux mint.
Nobara is good, it's fedora but with better nvidia driver stuff out of the box.
Of course you should - Do a dual boot as a test on whatever rig you're currently using. Easy to undo and it costs you exactly zero.
I use Nobara on my laptop which has rtx 3060 6gb with ryzen 7 5800h. Sure Nvidia sucks on every linux distro, but you will get many quality of life improvements when using linux instead of windows.
Btw, Nobara is just Fedora with some good gaming related chages.
Oh you have Nvidia ? Try out PopOS, they have a special ISO file with Nvidia drivers
Give it a try and you most likely wont regret it. Linux has come a long way since the general statement what you want game on it. I purchased a Asus ROG laptop about a year ago and installed Manjaro Linux on it (spare the hate) and its been working flawlessly. With that said. I'm not a hard core gamer and been sticking to Steam and console emulation so others with more time to play games should flank in.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means...
Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.
https://bazzite.gg/ if you're interested.
Take Fedora, as you're already used to it. Steam handles Windows games for you. In 99% of cases they just work. Only games that do not run nowadays are games with unsupported kernel level anti cheat. Look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/ to see if your games are supported. A VM won't help you as that is usually blocked by such anti cheat as well.
If you do have a problem with a non-multiplayer game look at https://protondb.com/.
For games from GOG, Epic or Amazon use Heroic. For every other store you can add the launcher or just the game itself to Heroic.