I’m planning on switching to Linux on my main PC as I don’t want to move to Windows 11 and was curious about other people’s experiences doing so.
I have a Steam Deck and everything there works out of the box, but I imagine that’s a more curated platform compared to standard distros.
What are your experiences, good or bad?
It works great for most games. Steam makes it really easy to enable proton for all games in your library. However, one caveat I would add is that certain intro/cutscene video formats didn’t play for me out of the box. I fixed it by using ProtonUp-QT or ProtonPlus to download the newest GE-Proton and selecting that to default in my steam compatibility settings.
I switched from Windows to Linux last year. I’m typing this on Ubuntu 25.04. All the games I have ever tried to play work, and work well, with very few exceptions.
Steam just works, all I had to do was go into its settings, the Compatibility, and enable Steam Play for all titles. I set the default compatibility tool to “Proton Experimental” and haven’t needed to change it. Even for the titles that say they don’t work on Linux.
Heroic Games Launcher handles my Epic and GOG libraries, and again, everything just works. Epic is not friendly to Linux users, and the only exceptions have been a couple of free games on Epic where the developers have gone out of their way to break Linux compatibility. Red Dead Redemption is the only game I would like to play, but haven’t figured out how to get it to work. Most of my Epic games work, including complicated ones like Train Sim World 5. All of my GOG games work without exception.
I use a program called Bottles to handle edge cases. It’s a little trickier to get set up, but once you’ve got it running, again, stuff just works.
Hope this is helpful. I’m happy to answer questions.
Thanks. I didn’t know about Bottles, that seems useful (mostly for non game software I guess).
It works well for games that just come as EXEs too, but I mainly use it for non-games, yeah.
All my games work, however I avoid games that require kernel level root kits to run so your mileage may vary.
If you ever have an issue with a game running under proton. Look up the game in ProtonDB and make sure to use the filter to match your hardware.
I get avoiding those games on principal… but is there any harm that can come from playing those through Linux?
Its a kernel level rootkit, so if you have that installed your computer is no longer yours. They could in theory, read your RAM and use it to read encryption keys and have full access to your system and you would never know.
A kernel level rootkit for windows though. What is it going to have access to in Linux? Isn’t it just reading Proton’s windows files that are created for each game ran through it?
They won’t run on proton. “Kernel-level” means it’s well below the level that Proton runs at.
Helldivers 2 runs fine through Proton with it’s anti-cheat. It was claimed to be kernel level.
My understanding is that actual kernel-level software would have to at least have a Linux-specific driver included. Otherwise if it really is running entirely through Proton, it’s somehow faking the ring 0 access. I’m not entirely sure, but I do think that anti-cheat must work differently from the big ones like FACEIT and Valorant.
You may be right, but I don’t know enough about proton to say it’s a well isolated sandboxed environment. I’d rather not have it on my PC at all.
Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.
It’s been remarkably unproblematic.
I’ve been running Nobara on my machine for like a year and it’s been a really easy experience! The creator also maintains a popular build of proton and designed it to be pretty hands off.
Switched my main gaming computer in 2023, never going back.
I use Arch and its fantastic! Sure some of the multiplayer games with bullshit DRM won’t work (only because the companies will ban you even though the tech is working as expected FU EPIC)
Once you get your system functioning the way you want it, you almost never have to worry about a patch breaking your shit. That is unless you customized your video drivers or the kernel.
I’ve been gaming exclusively on desktop Linux for more than a decade.
All my games work, either natively or (more often) using some variant of Wine. Most Steam games work with very little tweaking or none at all.
I occasionally have to apply workarounds for broken Battle.net updates (I run Blizzard games without Steam) but this doesn’t happen very often and usually only takes a couple days for the community to figure out a workaround. The last few updates haven’t broken anything new.
Games with certain anti-cheat systems, especially kernel-mode ones, are known not to work. I don’t care, because I wouldn’t allow such invasive and dangerous things to run on my hardware anyway.
Welcome to the party!
Very good experience to the point that I hate to use Windows at work because I just love the Gnome way of navigating my PC. Windows just sucks now 😅
Looks like I’ll be the negative one. I gave it a solid try dual booting for about 6 months before I went back to Windows.
I think I took for granted how much is abstracted away in Windows when it came to being my daily driver for my computer. Wrapping my head around things that “just worked” in Windows proved to be more difficult than I anticipated and I dealt with more friction. Trying to learn new concepts stood in my way of fully embracing it as well as not understanding what the “Windows equivalent” was for a given feature/function/action so I could wrap my head around it better. I also had a couple of workflows that I never got working in Linux despite all my attempts at searching for answers.
And I know people will come out of the woodwork with all sorts of questions or input on how if I just tried it again I’ll get it. For the record, I tried out Pop OS since it bills itself as a dead simple. I know the problems for me were more around my knowledge, years of built up muscle memory with Windows, and limited time to game so messing with whatever my current problem was made it more frustrating and soured me on the experience.
Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.
For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.
Honestly, it’s my assessment of turning my only PC, which is primarily gaming, into a Linux machine and the struggles there with day-to-day usage. I have no idea what OP’s comfort level with Linux or tech is in general but my assumption is it’s enough to think “Yeah, I could install Linux and do this.” which was where I was at too. Nothing I’m doing was exotic but the investment required in finding suitable alternatives that worked nearly out of the box was too high at the time.
Gaming was decent by all accounts. I think I had a few compatibility items that will iron out as developers support Linux more and the technology that enables gaming on Linux just gets better and better. I have an AMD card and from what I gather that’s better for switching to Linux. A lot of my frustrations were not related to gaming and I recognize the issue is time and knowledge on my part. If those are in short supply when something breaks, you could have a bad time is all I’m saying. Everyone’s got to start out somewhere and if you’ve had Windows forever, it can be a mental shift.
If that was more than a year ago it might be tine to try again with Bazzite or Nobara; the latter being my personal choice.
Both were on my radar as well. I want to say I tried Bazzite before Pop but one of those workflows I could not solve was a problem on Bazzite (some virtual kvm switch software I’ve used forever). Nobara was almost where I went after Pop before retreating back to Windows :)
Could you give some examples of things that worked for you on Windows but couldn’t port over to Linux? I’m interested if they’re related more to games or just using Linux in general.
I am playing almost exclusively in linux since 2012 (diablo3 came out, it worked on Linux, i sank an ungodly amount of hours into it.) the only thing that made me reinstall windows was to play counter-strike go on faceit, because their client did not work on linux.
proton made so much, so much easier that it almost became frictionless to play on linux. wine made huge strides before, but it never was so smooth before proton.
what often was a problem where laptops with dedicated and integraded graphics cards, or nvidia cards on rolling release distribution often having issues after kernel updates, which is why i was on fedora for a long time, because there the akmod stuff worked better in my experience.
overall: when it works on the deck its almost guranteed that it runs just as easy on other linux distributions, maybe don’t pick a rolling release distro if you have an nvidia card, and most of the time you can forget about the fact, that you are gaming on linux.
I’ve only had problems with two games.
A game called OneShot, which has some meta things as part of the game. Like, it’s supposed to change your wallpaper and such “outside the game” things. No biggy, just had to run an executable with a specific version on Wine and it worked as intended.
The other was Vermitide 2, never got around to finding a solution for that one, as I honestly didn’t care enough to find out what the problem is.
Everything else has worked splendidly.
Addendum: getting Blizzards Launcher work was a bitch though. Thankfully, Steam provides.
So far, everything mostly works. Occasionally I have to tinker with some environment variables to get some games working, but so far everything I have tried has been playable.
I have ryzen 5800x3d, 32 GB ram, rtx3090, 1440p 120hz gsync screen, nvme + bunch of other drives. Running Arch (wayland, kde plasma), games installed from steam/gog + few standalones from regular installers. Mostly I use proton-ge, but some games run fine with just wine. ntsync + wayland enabled.
some games (eg. PEAK) have MASSIVE flicker unless I explicitly disable wayland support for them (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0), and then it’s fine.
Only thing really lacking is performance, eg. Cyberpunk 2077 with RT is slower than on Win10. It still does about 60 fps, but the dips below are way more harsh. AFAIK this is a thing accross the board with DX12 games with current nvidia driver, supposedly there’s a fix cooking, but we’ll see.
I don’t play competetive pvp games at all, so I can’t speak for those. But so far friends only co-op & single player games have worked just fine.
Hmm, I haven’t had this issue with Peak and I’m running Wayland… But I do run AMD.
are you using the env variable to enable it for the game? AFAIK it’s not enabled by default, and It dawned on me that I have it enabled on
/usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-ge-custom/user_settings.py(the config file for proton-ge). But it could still be nvidia issue, wouldn’t surprise meAhh okay no I’m pretty sure that isn’t being explicitly enabled.
I think it very much depends on what games you’re looking to play, but I’ve been having a wonderful experience ever since I fully switched to Linux earlier this year.
I’m currently on Kubuntu and for games I’m using Steam, Heroic Games Launcher (GOG & Epic Games), and Lutris (Battle.net).
My experience with Steam has been pretty much flawless, Heroic Games Launcher was fairly straightforward to setup, and Lutris was pretty easy as well – mostly took some extra time due to bad reading on my part.
I mostly play singleplayer games (e.g. Baldur’s Gate III, W40K: Rogue Trader), with the occassional multiplayer game thrown in there (e.g., The Planet Crafter, Guild Wars 2). So far, I’ve had no issues besides having to install Proton-GE in favor of Steam’s Proton layer due to some iffy cinematics in games, but that seems to be par for the course when following many guides online.
The main games that don’t seem to work are those that require kernel-level anti-cheat, think PUBG or the upcoming Battlefield. Which is unfortunate, but I can personally live without. ProtonDB is an excellent website to check out before you make your switch, so that you can see which games won’t work.
If you use steamdeck I’d check out bazzite. You can use the deck image for your steamdeck and desktop image for PC and then you won’t have to worry about big differences.
I switched to Linux about 2 years ago now and its been fine. The only games that don’t work are ea games like battlefield or Activision like cod
I don’t really like to mess with it so I just use the default settings on almost everything unless there is an issue then I check protondb to see if there are any solutions, usually all you need to do is go to the game properties in steam and select for use a different version of proton and it runs fine
I wouldn’t recommend replacing your steam deck os with bazzite… What’s the expected benefit?
