51
What are your experiences using Linux for gaming?
(discuss.tchncs.de)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
51 points (98.1% liked)
Gaming
32351 readers
81 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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.