I’m on Linux full time for programming and gaming. I play battle.net games (WoW, hearthstone, overwatch, HoTS, WoW classic), League of Legends, and a lot of steam games. I have virtually no issues. I have a ryzen 5900x and a RTX 3080.

The key to Linux gaming (outside of steam) is Lutris. You just search the game you want to install, and it installs all the dependencies needed automatically and you can launch the game from one place. They even have a simple 1 click button for adding steam games too if you want a single launcher for every game you have (this is what I do).

The only issues I really have are with EAC, like DKO didn’t work for a bit after it came out (but does now), and Valorant/Fortnite don’t work (they can easily enable Linux EAC but choose not to). I happen to not play these games so it’s a non-issue for me, but worth mentioning.

League of Legends is also worth mentioning as having more issues than the rest. Usually I can run the game for months or even a year+ with no issues, but earlier this year the game was virtually unplayable on Linux for about 6 days due to a bug Riot Games added. This bug also effected Windows users, but to a much less extent. They would get disconnected once every couple games, while Linux users would get disconnected once every couple minutes. The League of Linux community is amazing though, and people were troubleshooting it constantly and making it more and more playable (getting to Windows parity on the bug), until Riot Games fixed it on their end.

I even helped my brother swap from Windows to Linux recently. He isn’t super into Linux or anything, but he was having consistent issues on Windows with his monitor turning off in games, specifically League. We tried reinstalling drivers, watching temps, reinstalling League (since it didn’t happen in other games), and uninstalling certain apps that can add overlays (though they were disabled). Some of these issues seemed to fix it until it returned usually hours or days later. Eventually we gave Linux a try and the issue is entirely gone. It’s likely that resetting windows would work too, but he dual boots and it’s easier to not have to reinstall everything.

I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I like it, but it’s not perfect.

Experience

Pros

• 1st-class developer experience.
• I don’t have to deal with MS’s increasingly insane OS design. No fucking with my preferences. No baked-in junkware. No invasive telemetry. No dark-pattern mindgames.
• No fighting with the Windows compositor. Better system performance more generally.
• Better filesystems. Better package managers. No driver nonsense (AMD user btw). Total customization.
  • Yes, really! The miracle of Linux is that almost every driver you’ll need comes baked in. I’ve installed exactly one device driver in 5 years and even that one is technically preinstalled for most people (I manually installed it because I was customizing it)

Cons

• Some games simply will not work. Usually for anticheat reasons, but this is also true for obscure stuff more generally. Part of gaming on Linux is just accepting that some games are not for you anymore.
• Outside of Proton, you often feel like a 2nd-class citizen. Wading out into the weeds when you just wanna game sucks.
  • FWIW: Lutris helps. The experience still isn’t great, but it’ll gets you 90% of the way there. I’ve successfully used it to play games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, and MTG Arena with minimal tinkering.
• Wayland/X11 shenanigans. It’s a total quagmire. Your issues with that ultrawide were almost certainly related to this in some way.

Picking a Distro

There are a lot of pitfalls when choosing a distribution. I can’t personally tell you which one to pick, so instead I’ll give targetted advice.

Things to avoid

Avoid Ubuntu. Avoid Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. Avoid any distro with less than 5 years of active development history. Avoid niche single-purpose distros, including gaming ones. Probably also avoid NixOS until you’re more comfortable with Linux in general.

tl;dr: Pick something that’s very popular, but not Ubuntu. Ideally, the project should have multiple full-time donation-supported maintainers and a detailed wiki.

Rolling Release vs. Point Release

A “point release” distribution is one which guarantees a certain level of stability out-of-box. It achieves this by partially freezing the available packages at well-tested & known working versions (explanation simplified for brevity). This way, when you install the distro, there are very few or even no “gotcha” moments where one niche part of the system randomly breaks during daily usage.

The downside of this strategy is that, over time, the packages on your system get more and more out of sync with the rest of the world. Eventually, you have to sit down and do a big, fat upgrade to the latest version. This has the effect of potentially breaking lots of things all at once, which makes upgrading these systems comparatively onerous.

A “rolling release” distribution has no numbered versions. You just upgrade your packages and presto: you’re rolling the latest code. Yes, there are more day-to-day difficulties, though you generally experience fewer cascading catastrophic failures, since usually only one thing will go wrong at a time. The risk of day-to-day issues is then addressed by splitting the distribution into time-gated “channels” where new package releases are intentionally delayed for days/weeks based on which one you’ve opted into. This gives you as a user flexible control over how current vs. stable you want your system to be.

tl;dr: For most newcomers, I recommend using a rolling release set to the safest available release channel. It offers most of the day-to-day stability of a versioned release with none of the upgrade headaches. These days, I feel that versioned releases are mostly only preferable in corporate/institutional usecases (this is a controversial, personal opinion and not a statement of fact, but I welcome flamewars down below…)

Wayland vs. X11

Wayland replaces X11 (which is old and bad)… but it also breaks compatibility with stuff. If you use Wayland, you will have more issues, so I generally recommend newcomers choose X11 if the installer gives them an option.

With that being said, sometimes you have to choose Wayland because you need its modern features, such as display scaling. If you have a >1440p monitor or use monitors with mixed refresh rates, this probably includes you. It’s not the end of the world, but you’ll have to deal with learning to troubleshoot Wayland’s various quirks as you go.

tl;dr: Use X11 if you can unless you have big/weird monitors. Wayland’s still very workable though, despite what reputation would otherwise suggest.

Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other

Gnome/KDE are what we call “Desktop Environments”. I won’t dwell on the terminology too long because it’s a mess, but basically these are the two major “all-in-one” kits that distros tend to bundle for their sytem GUIs. Gnome is the usershare king, so it’s generally the most well-supported by other desktop software and therefore my default recommendation. KDE is mostly interchangeable with Gnome, though it’s a pretty distant second usage-wise.

There are many alternatives to Gnome/KDE, such as the lightweight LXDE, but I generally don’t recommend these to newcomers unless there is a strong reason. This is because desktop apps can have all sorts of weird bugs if they can’t find a specific Gnome or KDE version of a certain components (e.g.: polkit).

You can also build your own desktop environment from scratch, which is actually what I do. This allows for maximum ricing, but obviously isn’t a great starter situation. Even if you eventually do want to roll your own environment, I recommend newcomers start with either Gnome or KDE as a base and then slowly replace individual pieces as they go, ship-of-theseus style.

tl;dr: Just use Gnome and eventually rip out the parts you don’t like. KDE is a good alternative if you really like it, though.

No Microsoft GamePass. Or none that actually matters, as the only solution is to pay for the higher tier and stream the games - so no game actually runs on the desktop. No, thanks.

Why “no thanks”? I use GamePass with xCloud and it works pretty well on Linux, and it’s a perfectly viable option - unless you’ve got really poor internet, or you’re into competitive FPS games or something that requires ultra-low latency.

NVIDIA support for Linux is far from being on-par with that on Windows, especially the open-source drivers. Is this still true?

Yes. If you’re planning to game on Linux, I’d highly recommend getting an AMD card instead, the AMD open-source drivers are excellent and see frequent improvements - both in terms of features and performance.

Many devices, especially those for gaming, might not have good (or even working) compatibility drivers for Linux. I know my UWQHD monitor works flawlessly on Windows, but requires quite a bit of tinkering on Ubuntu

“Many” -> citation needed. In my experience, depending on the hardware, you may find a better out-of-the-box experience with Linux compared to Windows. For instance, on my ThinkPad Z13, everything worked out-of-the-box on Nobara (Fedora) - including Fn keys, Wi-Fi, accelerated graphics/video drivers… everything. Same with my AMD desktop, didn’t have to install any special drivers or anything. But when I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows on my Z13 (dual-boot), there were almost no drivers - I had to manually install the Wi-Fi drivers first, and then grab the rest of the drivers via Windows Update, which was painful - took like 3 reboots to get everything installed, with long reboot times cause of updates. Painful.

In saying that, I’m surprised that your monitor - of all things - needed tinkering, when they’re usually mostly dumb devices that need no drivers or anything. But then again, it’s Ubuntu so… ¯\(ツ)/¯. FWIW, I have a fairly recent QHD monitor from AOC and it worked just fine on Nobara, no tinkering required.

The advantages: What else am I not thinking about?

5. Performance. Thanks to no bloatware like unnecessary background services/Defender/telemetry/Cortana/Bing etc, Linux in general would perform better, at least in theory. YMMV of course, depending on the game/hardware/distro. The good thing is if you use the right distro, or are willing to go the extra mile with tweaking, you can eke out way more performance, such as by using custom gaming-optimised kernels, fstab mount option tweaks and more. Using a gaming-optimised distro means most of these tweaks are built-in, saving you some time.

6. Arguably, a better gaming-focused experience, when you go for a gaming-focused distro like Nobara, or if you want to go the full mile and make an exclusive gaming box, you could install something like ChimeraOS, which is basically a community Steam OS. Imagine your PC booting straight to Steam, in the fastest possible time, with no distractions like Windows Update, Defender or other nonsense. Basically a console experience, with the power and flexibility of PCs and Linux.

What distro?

Nobara. It’s based on Fedora but optimised for gaming, made by the same guy who makes Proton-GE and Wine-GE (GloriousEggroll), so you know it’s the good stuff. Obviously comes with ProtonGE/Steam/Lutris etc out-of-the-box, custom kernel, patched Discord, codecs, nVidia drivers and more. Definitely give it a go if you’re considering Linux for gaming.

Garuda is aimed specifically at gaming

Flightless Mango has some comparisons for ‘newer’ games, in case you were concerned about performance. Short answer is that you might expect to lose a percent or two on frames vs. Windows, which is not really worth fretting over. Some games are worse, usually until the underlying issue is fixed. Some games are substantially better - usually Vulkan-based ones. The additional Linux efficiency is real, when it doesn’t have to translate all the DirectX calls.

https://flightlessmango.com/

I was using linux for gaming until recently. I need to repair it, and also have been using some windows centric software. So booting mainly into windows right now.

But one thing I noticed was that on nvidia blob drivers at least (cannot attest to amd), in FPS games, where every millisecond does count. There’s definitely a bit more latency on linux compared to windows. Enough to feel it for sure.

Otherwise almost everything (windows store games being mostly the exception) worked fine or could be made to run fine in linux and performance aside from what I am feeling as added latency was on par and sometimes better than windows.

As an nVidia user, I can confirm that it does suck quite a bit at times. I’ve had to fix a broken upgrade twice now (not fun), and attempting to use the Nouveau driver initially was just painfully slow. The nVidia devs are the main problem with Wayland progress, and AMD video hardware is starting to look much more tempting from the Linux side.

Customization is awesome. That’s the main thing keeping me in Linux rather than Windows.

Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:

Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu’s approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don’t care about or are already religiously opposed to), but… for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then… that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.

Which kind of gets to the general “religion of linux” as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows… 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.

Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now…). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD’s CPUs… you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).

But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally “just work” outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.

But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.

But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr…), and… updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can’t be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.

i have linux running for about 1 year on my main pc and laptop. often when buying games i forget to check protondb because most game I play work fine. but i like to play bethesta games, farm sim and older ones also Cyberpunk runns fine on my system. some games may require you to tinker to get them running smooth. and i thankfully never ran into problems with the nvidia drivers for my 2080 super. all in all i would say the linux experiance is quite good overall for my case. as for distro i only have used arch for a longer period but from my tests and what i heared fedora(i tested it on an old laptop worked gread out of the box), PopOs(i tested on my old system (amd fx6300 ,gtx980) ran fine), mint(never tried it myself but people say it’s quite good) and EndeavourOS(same as mint)