I installed Debian + KDE on my mom’s laptop. She hasn’t had a complaint since. How tech-savvy is she, you ask? I’m sitting with her right now, so out of politeness she put on headphones to watch her favorite soap opera. Mind you, the headphones weren’t plugged into the laptop. She was sitting there, headphones on her head, sound coming through the speakers, watching her soaps like this is how it’s meant to be done.
Personally, a solid 8/10. Steam is probably the best experience if you are playing Steam games but there are also other third party launches that can handle Epic games and GOG and others.
Some games run natively but most will be using Wine, or Steam’s implementation Proton. If you have issues, you can check out tinker steps on https://www.protondb.com (and also check there before buying a game to see if others have been running it fine).
The vast majority of games work out of the box, some need some tweaks, and I don’t think I’ve come across any that I wanted to play that don’t work at all.
Steam Deck and Steam’s investment in linux has really been a game changer in this space.
No joke. I’ve been blown away by what my old used Steam Deck is capable of to the point that I’ve already decided that I’m done with Windows. I’ll probably build a new PC soon (my 2015 laptop is only about as powerful as the Steam Deck) and I’m currently favoring Nobara as my replacement OS when I pull the trigger on parts and get started building. As somebody else pointed out, some games like Call of Duty use kernel based anticheat so only Windows will work for those games, but the only competitive online multiplayer game I ever play is Rocket League and that works pretty well on my Steam Deck as is. If you’re already a PC gamer, you’re used to having to do some troubleshooting here and there, and it seems like it’s maybe 1-5% more work to troubleshoot those occasional issues when you’re running Linux. I’m not a computer whiz or anything, just semi decent at eventually figuring out logic. If you can figure out how to get a Lemmy account and use an app for it on your phone, you can figure out gaming on Linux.
The main ones that don’t work are the ones with kernel-level Anticheat. The one exception is Easy Anticheat. They made a way for that one to work.
So that will mostly be multiplayer games like COD, Destiny 2, Overwatch, etc. And EA is making a push to switch their games to their proprietary anticheat which doesn’t work on Linux. So I think Battlefield is now on that list as well.
If those games aren’t the types of games you play, then you should be mostly fine.
Yeah I’m too old for twitch games 😆
I normally buy games without even looking whether they support Linux. On the extremely rare occasion that a Steam game doesn’t run on Debian, I’ll just get a refund. Sometimes I feel like I should stick to Linux native games on Steam, to send a message that Linux gamers exist - but then there’s sure to be something that I just can’t live without on the Windows side.