259
Linux is now the best gaming system. ｜ fernvenue's Blog
blog.fernvenue.comWhen it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS and Windows. I know I know…whenever I mention this, there are always some old-school individuals who come out to say that Linux’s driver configuration is complex, its game support is not rich enough, and its compatibility issues are significant, among other problems. In this article, I will directly address these issues and let everyone understand how much the gaming experience on Linux has developed by 2025.
On the one hand, there absolutely are some places where Linux has so dramatically improved it’s insane. Apps like Lutris have really blown me away, it’s incredible how some popular multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft which used to take me hours to get running back in high school can now practically run out of the box.
On the other hand, one of the major gpu manufacturer’s still has terrible driver support. Systems like Proton are imperfect, and seem to be depressing interest in making native Linux clients. Even though some things work out of the box, you can just as easily spend months failing to get a modern title running. To argue it’s the best gaming system is just laughable. In some respects, it hasn’t progressed at all in the last decade. When it gets to a point where users can run literally any game out of the box without any additional hassle, then it will be the best gaming system. Until then, this is a gross exaggeration at best.
Major PC GPU manufacturers:
Major phone GPU devs:
On my rog ally X no man’s sky runs far better on bazzite than windows. On windows, it’s unplayable
It’s quite easy. Just don’t buy NVIDIA…Consoles aren’t using NVIDIA either and with the tariffs they make even less sense
My experience with Linux is that a lot of games tend to run better than windows these days
Not everyone wants to play AAA stuff
The main game I’m having problems with is an indie online title whose recent update peaked at less that 150k players. I don’t care for AAA either, indie games also break on Linux.
You can definitely say “Oh just don’t support Nvidia,” but I bought my card nearly 10 years ago, and at the time it was the best I could afford. Upgrading to an AMD card would be great, but absolutely not happening any time soon in the current economic climate. If your response to that is “oh well get fucked ig,” pretty hard to argue Linux as a universal gaming solution.
On top of all of this, it seems like everyone in this thread who’s had success with gaming on Linux is saying run Bazzite, an OS I’d never heard of prior to reading responses here. That’s cool if there’s a distro that’s actually solved a lot of gaming issues, but if I haven’t heard of it, the average user is never going to find it. Maybe the title of this article should have been “Bazzite is now the best system for gaming.”
I second your feelings on bazzite. Last year when I switched to Linux I spent a while researching the best distro for gaming and what I could find pointed to PopOS or Mint. Never even heard of bazzite.
Bazzite is just a spin of Fedora…
People know about it, because a lot of people use it on handhelds like the Rog ally and Steam decks
Which indie game are you having trouble with though? The only game on my Rog Ally I have trouble with is Goat Simulator 3 (and, I think that might be broken in general now), and I seem to recall canabalt was broken (but may be wrong… There was definitely a second game)
Even with Nvidia though I wasn’t having issues last I tested, but that was a while ago
Last Epoch, which recently had a major update. I’ve been flatly unable to get it running in two different operating systems now, and haven’t even bothered to try tinkering with it for the last two days. It even mocks me with a Platinum rating on protondb…but all the reviews on Ubuntu are at least 9 months old and that was back when the game had a native Linux version. My biggest worry is that the latest patch has broken something for Ubuntu, but what’s most likely is that my configs are just borked in a unique way that I’m too stupid to fix.
That’s fair enough then. Did they maybe do something like switch to vulkan?
Maybe worth sending a new rating to wine appdb? That way they could isolate if it’s a regression.
Last epochs been bad for me too. I had lots of graphical issues last I tried but that was a year or so ago.
Average users don’t install OSes. They don’t care about OSes. Nobody would ever expect an average user to even think about looking for a gaming distro. I think you need to retune your idea of what an average user is.
My idea of the average user is a complete idiot who doesn’t know how their computer functions. I know they don’t know how to install an OS. My point that if I was unable to find Bazzite, they have no hope of doing so still stands.
Nobody is expecting them too. That’s all in your own head.
But it’s not like Windows is necessarily better! I’ve spent far longer trying to get some games to work on there than I do on Linux. I’ve spent more time on random driver issues in Windows than I do on Linux. I’m quite technical, and Windows has been far more frustrating in the bad cases - especially when talking about older games.
No, that’s ridiculous. It will be the best gaming system when it can run more games out of the box without any additional hassle than Windows can. I’m not sure we’ve reached that point, but we’re damn close - since I switched to Linux full-time, there’s been a handful of games that I’ve had trouble getting to work, but all of them were niche (or modded) games. All the big titles have worked flawlessly, and better than on Windows (since all the additional crap like launchers, background services etc. are contained to when the game is running).
I’d honestly be interesting to hear why this is, because it’s the exact opposite for me. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve experienced driver issues on Windows. Now, I typically only use stable updates, so I generally avoid the dreaded “new update breaking driver compatibility” or “new driver incompatible with old version” issues, but compared to working with Nvidia drivers on Linux? literal night and day difference. even trying to stick to the stable 535 drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 has been a huge nightmare, and many of my favorite titles are still unplayable after weeks of tinkering.
On Windows, I’ve had countless instances where a game wouldn’t start after updating NVidia drivers (updates recommended by Geforce Now, to simplify/streamline the process). I’ve also had cases where game A wouldn’t start with driver X, and game B wouldn’t start with driver Y, so I had to uninstall & reinstall when I wanted to play either. This has also bricked Windows installs before.
Compared to that I haven’t had any NVidia driver issues on Linux, apart from (and since) the Wayland sync issues last year. But I also chose a distro that handles it all for me (first Fedora Kinoite through Ublue, later Aurora). It just works, especially since I’m not doing any driver installs or anything myself. It’s just handled for me, I get a new image, and everything works.
The worst I’ve had were issues that were solved by doing a Flatpak update.
It’s so wild, it’s like we’re in different mirror universes. That being said, I’ve never used either of the two distros you mentioned, which might honestly be my biggest issue; saying you have a problem with Linux, or trying to claim Linux as the best gaming system, is such a meaningless sentence because of the variety of distros available. I can absolutely believe that you’ve never had an issue with the distros you listed, but you have to also understand I’ve persistently experienced issues every time I’ve tried Mint and Ubuntu.
Oh, I definitely believe you regarding Mint/Ubuntu. I’ve had plenty of issues with Ubuntu (not with gaming, but regular applications). Inevitably, every install turns into a Frankenstein monster of deviations and abnormalities, especially after updates. While I’ve had good experiences with Debian, I’m still scared every time there’s a big system update.
That’s why I immediately jumped on the Atomic Fedora train when I first heard of it, and I couldn’t be happier. That’s because it actually fixes the issue by ensuring everyone has the same system. My Aurora install is pretty much exactly the same as anyone elses (except for 2-3 packages I’ve layered on top). That’s because it’s literally the same Docker image running on everyones PC, with the system itself being immutable. All my actual dev stuff, my application-specific things and everything non-default is running nicely contained inside distrobox containers, so my system isn’t different from anyone elses install. It dramatically cuts down on the possible incompatibilities.
And if there’s an issue, I just boot into an earlier version. That works even when there’s been a major version update. It’s amazing, I can’t recommend it enough if you want stability.
I’m planning on looking into them now, thanks. Will probably test both Aurora and Bazzite this week based on the recommendations I’m seeing, hopefully I’ll have more success with one of them.
Good luck! Bazzite is basically a different version of Aurora, they build on the same basis and just include different software (and are developed by the same organisation, Ublue). You can even switch between the two with a couple of commands: https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Updates_Rollbacks_and_Rebasing/rebase_guide/
But I’d recommend trying one and sticking with it if it works for you, not sure if there’s some possible incompatibilities when doing the rebasing.
If you have questions or issues, feel free to hit me up. I’m no expert, but I’ve used Atomic Fedora for more than a year, so I have some idea how things go.