Not the original poster, but my experience was fairly smooth. I had minor issues with wifi drivers, and I got a new GPU that had some driver issues because it was pretty recently released (I guess the open source drivers didn’t have time to be updated?).
In terms of actual gaming, basically no issues. I mainly use steam and proton has been bliss, I’ve bought multiple games without even checking compatibility, and it just works. To my knowledge there is only one old game where the multiplayer doesn’t work, but everything else has been seamless.
Mint cinnamon is what I’m currently running.
The main setup went smooth. I can recommend nobara which is what I used. I tried garuda as well, but it wasn’t my style. Personal preference, no hate :).
Most steam games work pretty good ( see protondb ).
( make sure to set your steam settings > compatibility to all games ).
Any game with invasive anti-cheat will likely not work. LoL and valorant come to mind. I think some of the cs2 ones like faceit won’t work on Linux. But standard cs2 and competitive work fine.
Battle.net gave me some issues on lutris until I forced it to proton.
Overall I’ve had a good experience. Sometimes a weird issue if I alt tab ( hots ) that it comes back super tiny. I worked around it by running it windowed fullscreen.
Overall I’ve no regrets so far. I installed nobara and it’s quite user friendly. I’ve never used a fedora distro before ( more extensive experience with xubuntu/Ubuntu/pop ).
Helldivers 2, heroes of the storm and ff crisis core worked flawlessly.
Hots needs to run full screen ( windowed ) or alt-tab will make the screen tiny for some reason.
So far: no regrets.
When you first play a game it needs to compile the shaders first. So on your initial game there’s a few minutes ramp up time. But any next times you start the game should be fine.
Thank you for mentioning hots, because that’s like the ONE steam game I couldn’t live without. Good to know it’s possible, even if I have to play true full screen vs windowed.
For hots: install lutris through the nobara app store.
Start it and leave it for a few minutes while you run other updates or something ( only the very first time ).
Go to the settings/preferences, ( three dots top right ), click runners, scroll all the way down to wine.
Click the cog and change the runtime from wine-… to proton-GE. Thrn you can just install the battle.net app through lutris. From the battle.net app you can install hots.
Using the built in wine-… Runtime I got errors like missing Microsoft arial or unable to validate certificate.
with proton it just instantly worked.
You can also add the battle.net installer as an external steam app and run/install it that way. The only downside would be that you can’t play a steam game AND have bnet running ( which you can through lutris ).
Exiting battle.net doesn’t seem to be enough to stop lutris running it. So you might have to click the stop button in lutris if you want to restart it.
Battle.net is a bit wonky. But once you’ve got it IP and running it’s okay.
If you primarily game using Steam then it’s easier than ever on most popular distros. Biggest hassle is likely still GPU drivers. I’ve never had any issues there but depending on what card you have you may be better off with either proprietary or FOSS drivers depending on what your distro of choice likes to provide by default. After that most games tend to just work, a handful may require you to pick a beta version of proton or something.
If you want to try it and don’t want to do a lot of tinkering check out PopOS. It’s probably the friendliest distro for gaming out of the box.
Driver installation is really only a hassle for NVIDIA users. AMD and Intel GPUs simply work out of the box on most Linux distros these days (with the main issues being related to using slow moving distros that lack support for the newest hardware). Use a fast moving distro such as Arch and you likely won’t have any issues even with recent GPUs. Hopefully NVK will make the situation for NVIDIA cards better too, been testing it on my laptop and it’s starting to be viable for gaming.
Arch?!? lol. Terrible advice for a newbie. You are one update away from fscking your system. Better go Fedora/Nobara way. The kernel and drivers will be updated frequently enough. Also, no, propiertary NVIDIA driver installation is not a hassle, Ubuntu/Manjaro and some other friends literally have “wizards” that let you click->click->next the driver.
I’ve heard a lot of people reference PopOS and Garuda as of the last few months but I’ve never heard of them. When you say popular distros I immediately think Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Suse, etc. Does your comment include those as well or when you say popular do you mean “popular for gaming”? Also how is the Linux support for external controllers?
To be fair outside of Proxmox and some Debian containers with Docker I haven’t spent much time in the Linux space for the last 7 or 8 years. I’m thinking about finally making the switch.
What was your experience switching over to Linux and getting it set up for gaming?
Not the original poster, but my experience was fairly smooth. I had minor issues with wifi drivers, and I got a new GPU that had some driver issues because it was pretty recently released (I guess the open source drivers didn’t have time to be updated?). In terms of actual gaming, basically no issues. I mainly use steam and proton has been bliss, I’ve bought multiple games without even checking compatibility, and it just works. To my knowledge there is only one old game where the multiplayer doesn’t work, but everything else has been seamless. Mint cinnamon is what I’m currently running.
The main setup went smooth. I can recommend nobara which is what I used. I tried garuda as well, but it wasn’t my style. Personal preference, no hate :).
Most steam games work pretty good ( see protondb ). ( make sure to set your steam settings > compatibility to all games ).
Any game with invasive anti-cheat will likely not work. LoL and valorant come to mind. I think some of the cs2 ones like faceit won’t work on Linux. But standard cs2 and competitive work fine.
Battle.net gave me some issues on lutris until I forced it to proton.
Overall I’ve had a good experience. Sometimes a weird issue if I alt tab ( hots ) that it comes back super tiny. I worked around it by running it windowed fullscreen.
Overall I’ve no regrets so far. I installed nobara and it’s quite user friendly. I’ve never used a fedora distro before ( more extensive experience with xubuntu/Ubuntu/pop ).
Helldivers 2, heroes of the storm and ff crisis core worked flawlessly.
Hots needs to run full screen ( windowed ) or alt-tab will make the screen tiny for some reason.
So far: no regrets.
When you first play a game it needs to compile the shaders first. So on your initial game there’s a few minutes ramp up time. But any next times you start the game should be fine.
Thank you for mentioning hots, because that’s like the ONE steam game I couldn’t live without. Good to know it’s possible, even if I have to play true full screen vs windowed.
For hots: install lutris through the nobara app store. Start it and leave it for a few minutes while you run other updates or something ( only the very first time ).
Go to the settings/preferences, ( three dots top right ), click runners, scroll all the way down to wine.
Click the cog and change the runtime from wine-… to proton-GE. Thrn you can just install the battle.net app through lutris. From the battle.net app you can install hots.
Using the built in wine-… Runtime I got errors like missing Microsoft arial or unable to validate certificate.
with proton it just instantly worked.
You can also add the battle.net installer as an external steam app and run/install it that way. The only downside would be that you can’t play a steam game AND have bnet running ( which you can through lutris ).
Exiting battle.net doesn’t seem to be enough to stop lutris running it. So you might have to click the stop button in lutris if you want to restart it.
Battle.net is a bit wonky. But once you’ve got it IP and running it’s okay.
Damn appreciate the details. I’ll def give it a go!
If you primarily game using Steam then it’s easier than ever on most popular distros. Biggest hassle is likely still GPU drivers. I’ve never had any issues there but depending on what card you have you may be better off with either proprietary or FOSS drivers depending on what your distro of choice likes to provide by default. After that most games tend to just work, a handful may require you to pick a beta version of proton or something.
If you want to try it and don’t want to do a lot of tinkering check out PopOS. It’s probably the friendliest distro for gaming out of the box.
Driver installation is really only a hassle for NVIDIA users. AMD and Intel GPUs simply work out of the box on most Linux distros these days (with the main issues being related to using slow moving distros that lack support for the newest hardware). Use a fast moving distro such as Arch and you likely won’t have any issues even with recent GPUs. Hopefully NVK will make the situation for NVIDIA cards better too, been testing it on my laptop and it’s starting to be viable for gaming.
Arch?!? lol. Terrible advice for a newbie. You are one update away from fscking your system. Better go Fedora/Nobara way. The kernel and drivers will be updated frequently enough. Also, no, propiertary NVIDIA driver installation is not a hassle, Ubuntu/Manjaro and some other friends literally have “wizards” that let you click->click->next the driver.
I’ve heard a lot of people reference PopOS and Garuda as of the last few months but I’ve never heard of them. When you say popular distros I immediately think Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Suse, etc. Does your comment include those as well or when you say popular do you mean “popular for gaming”? Also how is the Linux support for external controllers?
To be fair outside of Proxmox and some Debian containers with Docker I haven’t spent much time in the Linux space for the last 7 or 8 years. I’m thinking about finally making the switch.