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.

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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.

If everything you play works on the steam deck already then you shouldn’t have any issues just using steam on Linux. Some things will be more difficult to set up and there are compatibility issues with a lot of games, but since everything you play works on the steam deck I would say you should be fine there with the games you currently have

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’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.

FANTASTIC! I love that 100% of the games I want to play work great without issue but what I love even more is the conveniences that Linux provides over Windows:

• It is trivially easy to sync my configs/saves/game data across my network to different PCs with rsync -ave ssh (i.e. if I want to play on the big screen via the HTPC).
• I can do the same with my phone using the FolderSync Android app (which supports sync over SSH just like rsync).
• I can script stuff! Example: A lot of games (especially those with 3rd party mods) can be buggy AF and as a result of that, increase the possibility of corrupting my saves/game/world data. For these games I use rdiff-backup right there in the save/game/world directory every 10 minutes with say, 100 backups. Put that in a cron job and the worst that happens is I lose 10 minutes.
• If the game has a server, chances are there’s already a native Linux version which means I can run it locally on my PC in the background or just sync my whole game over to another of my Linux PCs and run it there. No need for complicated setups where you have to manage things across two completely different operating systems (like Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 ahahaha; that’s a joke poking fun at the Windows ecosystem if you don’t get it 🤣).
• I actually have the power to control where my sound goes on the fly and it actually fucking works (unlike Windows where you get to pick one device at a time and good luck keeping that one active if you have a Bluetooth audio device that likes to lose its connection from time to time… Ugh). You can actually do weird shit like send your audio over the network to a whole home’s worth of PCs (or stream it over the Internet I guess) but I only ever did that once and man was it cool, haha. Still, it’s nice to have the option (some open source dev worked really hard to make sure that works; and fantastically well too).
• Multiple applications can use the GPU at the same time (if you’re using Wayland) and that actually works properly. Unlike in Windows—where if you enable “hardware acceleration” in an app like Discord it can suddenly become slow AF scrolling when you’ve got a game open in the background.
• You have vastly more control over gamepad/controllers in Linux than you do in Windows. In Windows—if your controller is detected properly (which hopefully doesn’t require that you download a ~4GB of driver/bloat app bullshit)—you can test the buttons in the Settings/Control Panel. But that’s all you can do. The X button is the X button is the X button. You want that button to send something else? You need sketchy proprietary 3rd party software for that! In Linux, you can do whatever TF you want with that button and there’s several ways to do it (qjoypad gives you a nice GUI—right there in your distro’s repositories for quick install).
• No “You need to reboot your computer” popups in the middle of gaming/streaming!
• You don’t need sixteen bloated system tray/processes running at all times (slowing down your PC) to keep all your stuff working! If you use a Linux desktop for a few weeks then go back to Windows you’ll get annoyed AF pretty fast at all those pop-ups, “Why did I put up with this BS?” 🤣
• Privacy by default: HP, Nvidia, Dell, Logitech, Razer, and Microsoft can’t see that you’re playing that game that just got banned by MasterCard/Visa 🤣

Also—generally speaking—Linux is just more fun to use! Customize TF out of your desktop experience. The only thing stopping you is… you.

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.

Switched last year from Win 11. Had some previous experience with Ubuntu and Mint but wanted to try Arch. I ended up with EndeavourOS, which is Arch based. At that time I had some things to learn about making my Nvidia GPU run and run properly. But there were some new drivers coming out alongside Nvidia partially opening up to the Linux crowd. Together with further advancements in Proton it’s been mostly smooth sailing I’d say.

Games on Steam mostly run out of the box. There might be some, that need another Proton oder GE-Proton version but those are easily switched/installed. You can always look up if games need certain tweaks on protondb.com I’ve even got Fallout 4 with 300+ mods (managed by Nexusmods / Vortex) to run. Currently playing Stalker 2 with some mods and “it just works”. I even managed to manually inject DLSS 4 to Stalker 2 so the really bad ghosting is far less.

Lutris or Heroic Launcher work for GOG, Uplay and EA Access (or whatever it is called nowadays).

There are a few games, like Icarus, that run like shit generally but even worse on Linux. Also, when using Steam / Proton, every time you change shaders they need to be pre-rendered. Usually that also happens when there’s been an update. Most of the time that doesn’t take long but I had singular games where that took 30+ minutes. And then there is an increasing number of games that run kernel level anti-cheat. Games like CoD 7 (I think), Valorant or the upcoming Battlefield 6. They straight out can’t be played on Linux. It sucks, because I wanted to play BF6 with friends but I just have to pass this one. Anticheat shouldn’t run on kernel level anyways. Speaking of anticheat: I think (please correct me if I’m wrong) BattleEye also doesn’t run on Linux. EAC does, but it needs to be enabled by the devs for Linux. Squad or Hell Let Loose run EAC and have it enabled for Linux and it runs fine. SCUM and Rust don’t have it enabled so you either have to play on servers that don’t use EAC or on specific linux compatible servers (there are some in Rust).

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.

My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.

I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.

On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.

I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.

There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.

I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.

Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.

One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)

Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.

Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.

Switched my main gaming computer in 2023, never going back.

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.

Configuring and maintaining nvidia drivers on Linux continues to be a pain. I recommend using an amd-based gpu because their drivers are open source and more well integrated.

I stopped dual-booting 5 years ago and I already was able to play most of my library back then. It gets better every day and I even almost forgot about adding launch options now, as they mostly run out of the box.

Anti-cheats might be a problem, especially the devs of the game refuse to use its Linux version. Or the anti-cheat is kernel-level. I also run into some games that use weird custom-made engines that won’t run. They were niche Japanese games, so I kinda understand.