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).
Nobara is good, it’s fedora but with better nvidia driver stuff out of the box.
I can’t believe that no one has asked you this question yet (fucking fanboys…):
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
Removed by mod
linux mint.
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
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.
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.
Coming from a Steam Deck, I was really happy when I learned about Bazzite. I tried installing it and stuck with it for a few months now and I’m excited to have gotten rid of Windows. It’s fast and works well out of the box. Plus I have the SteamOS experience without fuss.
Bonus points for you, it’s Fedora based and easy to install on top if Fedora.
Notably I had tried Ubuntu before this and had issues with VRR and a couple of other things. Bazzite is built for this, and it works well.
i love bazzite, just got a new app store too
Does the rockstar launcher run? I’d like to move over but always wonder about losing access to quite a few games in the process
I think I got to install & launch GTAV without modifications or additional software. I’ll confirm and get back
From my experience on SteamOS, I’m launching RDR2 through the steam app but I own RDR2 on Rockstar game launcher. I used these steps to get it running: https://expertbeacon.com/can-steam-deck-run-red-dead-redemption-2/
I can only assume it’s similar on Bazzite but I haven’t tried.
I just went straight with a bazzite install since fedora literally did not want to work on my pc
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…
- out of the box support for Nvidia cards
- ships with a lot of useful gaming utilities
- very hard to break as you should primarily be installing Flatpaks and can do rollbacks
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.
Always seeing the Bazzite recommendation. Just converted my kid over, 2 weeks ago. 0 complaints which is pretty amazing.
As other people noted, Bazzite/Fedora Silverblue can absolutely bite you in the foot if you leave the “normal use cases” — and if you’re not just gaming on the device, you sooner or later will. All of this is solvable and IMO worth it, but probably not great for a beginner trying to become more knowledgeable.
Tldr good for absolute beginners, good for “experts” (in both cases because it very rarely gets in your way/breaks)
I loved bazzite, it was my first out of the box success with Linux gaming, but if you plan to do anything outside of gaming installing stuff can get a little difficult. It was invaluable for teaching moments, but I’ve moved on to cachyOS and it has been just as seamless and less difficulty installing things after installing yay
My 2c
I switched to bazzite a couple of months ago and read so much about catchyOS so I tried that too about 2 weeks ago. I couldn’t install shit. Never had any problem installing anything I needed except one thing on bazzite but catchyOS just had me give up. I am not sure what I did wrong but after 2 hours of reading and trying to figure out AUR or whatever I just gave up and booted bazzite again. I just want to play my games with the little time I have but maybe I boot it up again sometime in the future.
Were you installing stuff with pacman or yay?
This is why I personally think Bazzite should only be installed on devices you intend to only game on, especially if you have any intention of learning any more about Linux than the absolute basics. It’ll be fine for a while for beginners, but you’re bound to bump into some things that are a hassle to install and/or keep updated. Perfect examples being for consolafying a PC for playing on a living room TV, or installing it on a handheld PC (Steam Deck etc.)
Agreed - bazzite being immutable (which I only recently learned) means its perfect for gaming only devices. Not even your kid could screw it up.
Yeah, it forced me to figure out why, which was a net positive, but definitely just not feasible in the long run outside of gaming, at least not yet.
Cachy. So hot right now.
My selling point was being able to use the arch documentation.
You can kind of do that with bazzite/fedora, but to a way more limited extent because fedora package installers are disabled.
Mugatu.gif
I second Bazzite
I see bazzite mentioned a lot here, but wasn’t there a post here a while ago saying that it might stop existing if fedora pushes through with the decision to ditch 32bit support? Did they decide not to do it after all?
The proposal to ditch 32 bit support was withdrawn
I think they decided not to, with some (IMO fairly) snarky comment on how that was just a proposal and people were getting needlesely outraged.
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.
ProtonDB is a godsend. People will even post config tweaks for games
I believe you meant to type protondb.com
Yes, thanks!
Is heroic overtaking lutris now?
For me it is. I’ve been using Lutris for years, but they’re just stagnating. The design is all over the place, they still don’t have a unified library, their native integrations break so often that I have to add my games manually anyways. And I cannot fathom why they don’t adopt the same library integrations for GOG, Amazon and especially Epic as Heroic. They are much faster and have much less hassle.
At the same time Heroic has been adding the same tools I originally missed from Lutris. Like the Wine handling and using external wrappers like Mangohud or Gamemode or your own wrappers and variables.
Lutris’ installation scripts are still often nice for figuring out a game’s dependencies. I just wish they were in a git repo where people could add comments because some of the scripts are needlessly complicated.
If someone made an itch.io command line client that Heroic could tap into it would have most of the things I could wish for.
heroic overall seems to work better for installing games from gog, but the odd issue I have is that I seem to be always online on gog’s service when I’m playing games. Do you happen to know if there’s any way to set myself invisible? I don’t want everyone to know how often or late I play games :P
I guess technically signing out of the storefront would do that, but then I’d have to re-login to install/update games, eh
edit: oh derr, it dawned on me that it might be the Cyberpunk launcher which I had to login as well, which shows me online
I still struggle to get Heroic to install pretty much anything, while Lutris usually works. I would want to use Heroic, but a prerequisite is that installed games actually launch and I have yet to understand why they don’t…
If you installed it from flatpak theres probably some permissions you need to set. Otherwise I dunno.
Luckily you can just skip the Cyberpunk launcher. Just configure Heroic to use the normal exe. That’s how I play the Steam version so that I can play when my son is playing on his PC as well.
Yea I have done that, but logging into the launcher (and it apparently keeps it logged in as well) unlocks in-game items - they are entirely non-essential, but… you know, hoarding.
I haven’t tested yet if that’s even the thing which is showing me in-game to my friends. I was kinda amazed to hear they saw me playing cyberpunk to the early morning hours :D
I just want a VM for my 10 year old cracked version of photoshop and some other apps. I never intended to game on a VM.
Of you’re going foss for your OS why not take a look at Krita and gimp for your image editing needs?
I’ve not tried either in years at this point hut can’t hurt to check them out if you haven’t already.
I tried GIMP but just cannot get used to it. Heard there are some ways to make the tools and shortcuts behave like PS though just never tried it.
Have you tried the newest release? It seems to be more PS leaning, at least that’s what I hear from PS experts.
I last tried it like a year ago.
Didn’t try it but FYI maybe PhotoGIMP could make GIMP usable for you!
Peobably what I heard of before. Thanks for the link, will take a look.
Any distro will do tbh. If youre missing something you just install it.
But since youre used to Fedora may as well stay on that tree. You can always play around with other Desktop Environments like Plasma if you want, its what I’ve been doing once I get an install going.
