Switching to Linux as a Gamer
from BobDendry
My first experience using Linux was probably around twenty years ago, when I installed Ubuntu on my laptop (thanks to the people over on the Transport Tycoon IRC channel waaaaaayy back in the day).
Using Linux was a very different experience back then to how it is now. It didn't look the best, and getting non-native games to work was a pain. Of course Wine was still a thing back then and WineHQ's AppDB provided the same resources and reviews as it does today, but compatibility was far more limited then it is today. So it was an interesting experience trying it for the first time, but I fairly quickly switched back to Windows.
Over the years I've switched back and forth between various Linux distros, Windows versions and even a short period running with OSX on a Mac mini.
Regardless, I've still used at least one Linux-based PC consistently through the years – usually a lightweight laptop I use sitting on the couch in front of the TV of an evening (like I'm doing right now, in fact).
But over the years the proposition of Linux as the basis of a gaming PC has changed markedly. Wine's capabilities have continued to grow. Valve's contribution to the Linux gaming ecosystem through Proton (and the follow on upstreaming of a fair amount of their work into Wine itself) has allowed the ecosystem to develop in leaps and bounds.
When the current generation of gaming handhelds hit the market, I was immediately interested. The AMD chips that power these devices are pretty amazing – plenty of CPU cores and very capable iGPUs as well! I decided on the Lenovo Legion Go – it seemed to me like the best balance of price, performance, features and availability in Australia at the time.
But despite the device coming loaded with Windows 11 by default, it never even entered by head to run with Windows on the device. In fact, I never even booted to Windows. Straight away I decided to go with a Linux install, using Bazzite.
If you're unfamiliar with Bazzite, it comes from a broad family of community developed immutable Fedora flavours under the banner of Universal Blue. I'll talk about why I love Universal Blue in more detail in a future post, but to put it simply, it provides simple desktop images that make managing your install simple, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an expert. I firmly believe they're the future of increasing mainstream Linux adoption.
Bazzite was originally a bit weedy on the Lenovo Legion Go (as can be expected on a new piece of hardware, running an OS it wasn't specifically designed for). But over the last 18 months it's grown into a first class device, support wise.
And for a while I watched my last Windows device, my desktop gaming computer, continuing to grind slower and slower starting up and running, despite being (both when I put it together and still today) a fairly top end piece of tech. It's frustrating watching a device get slower and slower for seemingly no reason, so I thought why not, let's give Linux a go.
For the most part, using Linux (via Bluefin, Aurora and finally onto Bazzite) on my gaming computer has been almost entirely a pain-free experience. The vast majority of the games run with fairly similar (or better) performance, and as a whole it's a pretty set-and-forget experience, in comparison to how it was all those years ago when I first gave Ubuntu a try.
Don't like Steam? Use Lutris to integrate all of your other gaming services into your PC. There's Heroic Game Launcher for managing your GOG, EGS or Amazon libraries. There a whole ecosystem of (mostly) open source software to do pretty much anything you want to do with your games.
But there's the one thing that prevents Linux from being the perfect gaming operating system. If you guessed I'm referred to Kernel-level anti cheat, you'd be absolutely correct. And unfortunately, the big publishers are relying on it more and more. That's another conversation for another day, but there's a great resource available at Are We Anti-Cheat Yet to tell you if a game in your library (or one you're considering purchasing) is supported from an anti-cheat point of view in Linux.
So, as a whole, I'm pretty happy with my experience switching to Linux as a gamer. There's limitations of course, but overall I think Linux provides a very well designed and performant experience for the gamer these days.