Thinking of switching my gaming desktop to linux. Should I?
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
nvidia shenanigans aside this should be fine for linux gaming.
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FYI: I have a rig similar to yours. I’m currently running Mint and have had no issues. I used to run Pop OS, but even after a fresh reinstall of their LTS, updates stopped working, so I recommend avoiding Pop OS.
I use Mint too and I've never had any trouble running my games.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Surprised I haven't seen Bazzite or Nobara recommended here, those are full desktop experiences with built in features for gaming. I use nobara because it has a version with pre-packaged Nvidia drivers.
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Take Fedora, as you're already used to it. Steam handles Windows games for you. In 99% of cases they just work. Only games that do not run nowadays are games with unsupported kernel level anti cheat. Look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/ to see if your games are supported. A VM won't help you as that is usually blocked by such anti cheat as well.
If you do have a problem with a non-multiplayer game look at https://protondb.com/.
For games from GOG, Epic or Amazon use Heroic. For every other store you can add the launcher or just the game itself to Heroic.
I just want a VM for my 10 year old cracked version of photoshop and some other apps. I never intended to game on a VM.
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Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.
You absolutely can use VMs, but you don't need a VM to run windows software and you won't have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.
Honestly the biggest headache is with the "linux native" stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they're all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it's far from transparent to the user. Maybe I've overthinking it but in my opinion it's a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don't know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.
I will try just normal fedora and if stuff does not work I will try bazzite. VM would be used for stuff that does not work through WINE like photoshop (10 year old cracked version).
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means...
- out of the box support for Nvidia cards
- ships with a lot of useful gaming utilities
- very hard to break as you should primarily be installing Flatpaks and can do rollbacks
Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.
https://bazzite.gg/ if you're interested.
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IMO, basically any distro with fairly modern (fairly often updated) packages should do. Apart from some build/packaging differences it's all same software anyway. The gaming side of software gets updated fairly often, so that's why you'd probably want frequently updated packages.
"Gaming" distros are basically just selection of gaming specific packages installed as default, instead of lets say productivity apps. You can run VM's in gaming/studio/whatever distros
FWIW, I got 5800x3D, RTX3090 - so, "close enough" same system as you. At least same series cpu/gpu. Running Arch, and gaming has been pretty easy, haven't yet found a game which didn't work - that said, some occasional game has had odd stutters (Darktide, for one. But I haven't tested in months).
Getting things to run did get a bit more involved than "just click it". Some extra compatibility stuff (proton-ge-custom), launchers (lutris, heroic, because GoG Galaxy just refuses to work). Steam & steam-games tend to "just work", although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.
But overall, stuff works, and in case of issues it now just seems to be either disabling ntsync and/or wayland for specific games and gaming away.
I already installed fedora but games just don't get stable framerates. might have to do a clean install and try again.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
I recently made the switch. Running intel ultra 5 and nvidia rtx 5060. Bazzite and Pop!_OS were advertised as working, out of the box. I couldn't get either to work, following the wiki setup guides. I tried Ubuntu, couldn't get that working, either.
I switched to Nobara, and learned that I was messing up gamemoderun in Steam. So I have no idea if Nobara fixed my issues, or if I was messing something up the whole time, or maybe a little of both. It was fun, though! Absolutely glad to be done with windows.
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I just want a VM for my 10 year old cracked version of photoshop and some other apps. I never intended to game on a VM.
Of you're going foss for your OS why not take a look at Krita and gimp for your image editing needs?
I've not tried either in years at this point hut can't hurt to check them out if you haven't already.
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I just want a VM for my 10 year old cracked version of photoshop and some other apps. I never intended to game on a VM.
Any distro will do tbh. If youre missing something you just install it.
But since youre used to Fedora may as well stay on that tree. You can always play around with other Desktop Environments like Plasma if you want, its what I've been doing once I get an install going.
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Take Fedora, as you're already used to it. Steam handles Windows games for you. In 99% of cases they just work. Only games that do not run nowadays are games with unsupported kernel level anti cheat. Look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/ to see if your games are supported. A VM won't help you as that is usually blocked by such anti cheat as well.
If you do have a problem with a non-multiplayer game look at https://protondb.com/.
For games from GOG, Epic or Amazon use Heroic. For every other store you can add the launcher or just the game itself to Heroic.
Is heroic overtaking lutris now?
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IMO, basically any distro with fairly modern (fairly often updated) packages should do. Apart from some build/packaging differences it's all same software anyway. The gaming side of software gets updated fairly often, so that's why you'd probably want frequently updated packages.
"Gaming" distros are basically just selection of gaming specific packages installed as default, instead of lets say productivity apps. You can run VM's in gaming/studio/whatever distros
FWIW, I got 5800x3D, RTX3090 - so, "close enough" same system as you. At least same series cpu/gpu. Running Arch, and gaming has been pretty easy, haven't yet found a game which didn't work - that said, some occasional game has had odd stutters (Darktide, for one. But I haven't tested in months).
Getting things to run did get a bit more involved than "just click it". Some extra compatibility stuff (proton-ge-custom), launchers (lutris, heroic, because GoG Galaxy just refuses to work). Steam & steam-games tend to "just work", although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.
But overall, stuff works, and in case of issues it now just seems to be either disabling ntsync and/or wayland for specific games and gaming away.
Happy cake day!
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Bazzite is made for gaming and it's worked for me pretty flawlessly for about 6 months BUT I had a lot of issues getting it to run a VM. I'm certainly not a Linux expert but I eventually gave up trying.
There's a ujust script to set up virtualisation on Bazzite.
ujust setup-virtualizationin the terminal should get you going. Alongside the background stuff it sets up, it installs a GUI virtual machine manager. -
I will try just normal fedora and if stuff does not work I will try bazzite. VM would be used for stuff that does not work through WINE like photoshop (10 year old cracked version).
I'd give WINE a go before messing with a VM, I know some versions of photoshop do actually work: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41345
You can get cracked versions of the CC 2023 version, but if you wanna use your current version then yeah, just give it a go. Worst case you waste 30 minutes and have to install a VM anyway.
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
I am still very happy with CachyOS. That'd be my recommendation.
Nobara / Bazzite are good options, too, but I never tested them. -
Is heroic overtaking lutris now?
For me it is. I've been using Lutris for years, but they're just stagnating. The design is all over the place, they still don't have a unified library, their native integrations break so often that I have to add my games manually anyways. And I cannot fathom why they don't adopt the same library integrations for GOG, Amazon and especially Epic as Heroic. They are much faster and have much less hassle.
At the same time Heroic has been adding the same tools I originally missed from Lutris. Like the Wine handling and using external wrappers like Mangohud or Gamemode or your own wrappers and variables.
Lutris' installation scripts are still often nice for figuring out a game's dependencies. I just wish they were in a git repo where people could add comments because some of the scripts are needlessly complicated.
If someone made an itch.io command line client that Heroic could tap into it would have most of the things I could wish for.
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I already installed fedora but games just don't get stable framerates. might have to do a clean install and try again.
make sure first that it isn't issue with specific games, some may require some proton flags to be set for them to behave properly. Or just newer/older proton/wine.
in general worth a try to switch the compatibility thingy (technical term),
steam, in game's properties:
but similar option is in lutris/heroic too.
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IMO, basically any distro with fairly modern (fairly often updated) packages should do. Apart from some build/packaging differences it's all same software anyway. The gaming side of software gets updated fairly often, so that's why you'd probably want frequently updated packages.
"Gaming" distros are basically just selection of gaming specific packages installed as default, instead of lets say productivity apps. You can run VM's in gaming/studio/whatever distros
FWIW, I got 5800x3D, RTX3090 - so, "close enough" same system as you. At least same series cpu/gpu. Running Arch, and gaming has been pretty easy, haven't yet found a game which didn't work - that said, some occasional game has had odd stutters (Darktide, for one. But I haven't tested in months).
Getting things to run did get a bit more involved than "just click it". Some extra compatibility stuff (proton-ge-custom), launchers (lutris, heroic, because GoG Galaxy just refuses to work). Steam & steam-games tend to "just work", although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.
But overall, stuff works, and in case of issues it now just seems to be either disabling ntsync and/or wayland for specific games and gaming away.
It's not all the same. A key thing you want is to get the latest graphics drivers (mesa or proprietary) as soon as possible after release. Same day or at least week. For that you probably want a rolling release like Tumbleweed, or something based on Arch, like CachyOS. I'm running Pop OS, and I still don't have the drivers needed for Doom: The Dark Ages. Seems to take like a month or so for Pop OS to update Mesa. Seriously considering trying CachyOS for this reason.
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For me it is. I've been using Lutris for years, but they're just stagnating. The design is all over the place, they still don't have a unified library, their native integrations break so often that I have to add my games manually anyways. And I cannot fathom why they don't adopt the same library integrations for GOG, Amazon and especially Epic as Heroic. They are much faster and have much less hassle.
At the same time Heroic has been adding the same tools I originally missed from Lutris. Like the Wine handling and using external wrappers like Mangohud or Gamemode or your own wrappers and variables.
Lutris' installation scripts are still often nice for figuring out a game's dependencies. I just wish they were in a git repo where people could add comments because some of the scripts are needlessly complicated.
If someone made an itch.io command line client that Heroic could tap into it would have most of the things I could wish for.
wrote last edited by [email protected]heroic overall seems to work better for installing games from gog, but the odd issue I have is that I seem to be always online on gog's service when I'm playing games. Do you happen to know if there's any way to set myself invisible? I don't want everyone to know how often or late I play games
I guess technically signing out of the storefront would do that, but then I'd have to re-login to install/update games, eh
edit: oh derr, it dawned on me that it might be the Cyberpunk launcher which I had to login as well, which shows me online
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So I was thinking of switching my desktop to linux. I have been running fedora on my laptop for 3 years and I really like it. My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs) and can I use VMs in any of the gaming oriented ones (mostly because I don't wanna keep dual booting).
Edit: I have gone with Bazzite for now and it seems to be working fine. Some games don't rrally work acceptably (I expected that) so I will keep dual booting for a while.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I'm a simple man who use Mint on my gaming PC. No issues. Everything worked out of the box.
