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.
As other people noted, Bazzite/Fedora Silverblue can absolutely bite you in the foot if you leave the “normal use cases” — and if you’re not just gaming on the device, you sooner or later will. All of this is solvable and IMO worth it, but probably not great for a beginner trying to become more knowledgeable.
Tldr good for absolute beginners, good for “experts” (in both cases because it very rarely gets in your way/breaks)
I second Bazzite
Always seeing the Bazzite recommendation. Just converted my kid over, 2 weeks ago. 0 complaints which is pretty amazing.
I loved bazzite, it was my first out of the box success with Linux gaming, but if you plan to do anything outside of gaming installing stuff can get a little difficult. It was invaluable for teaching moments, but I’ve moved on to cachyOS and it has been just as seamless and less difficulty installing things after installing yay
My 2c
I switched to bazzite a couple of months ago and read so much about catchyOS so I tried that too about 2 weeks ago. I couldn’t install shit. Never had any problem installing anything I needed except one thing on bazzite but catchyOS just had me give up. I am not sure what I did wrong but after 2 hours of reading and trying to figure out AUR or whatever I just gave up and booted bazzite again. I just want to play my games with the little time I have but maybe I boot it up again sometime in the future.
Were you installing stuff with pacman or yay?
No clue to be honest. First I used the cachyOS guide installer then I found something else when I didn’t find what I wanted and not sure what that was.
Install cachy, install yay, learn how to use yay, profit. It’ll handle regular pacman installs too
Someone more educated than I may step in and correct me but that’s what I’ve done and its going pretty well.
I can’t believe that no one has asked you this question yet (fucking fanboys…):
Do you mind losing access to most features on your GPU, including (but not limited to): RTX HDR, Shadowplay, the Nvidia App, the Nvidia Control Panel and everything it offers, including the 3D Settings page?
If any of this matters to you, you may want to consider switching to an AMD GPU first before you consider Linux. Nvidia does not support it nearly as well as they support Windows. You get a driver that lets you run games, and that’s about it.
Afaik AMD isn’t fully supported either
And you lose the ability to run tensorflow if you like to do AI
Of course you should - Do a dual boot as a test on whatever rig you’re currently using. Easy to undo and it costs you exactly zero.
Hi I recommend against using an Arch based distro like manjaro or cachyOS ( arch by nature demands active maintenance ) also depsite the brand name ubuntu is a very bad place to start ( due to them forcing snap packages ). Go for something like fedora kde or bazzite, most of the app you need can come from flathub.
For games you got Steam, Heroic ( for epic games ), lutris ( for everything else ). You will have to quit the habit of hunting .exe file online, most of your apps will come from your store ( discover in your case ).
Vms will not let you bypass anti-cheat stuff so keep that in mind. Check for game compatibility on protondb if needed. Don’t be afraid to ask question ( even dumbs one ).
If you have to ask someone else whether you should switch then you should not switch.
They’re asking based on their specs whether Linux will run fine for them. Not whether they should switch based on usability. Having to ask if your specs can run Linux fine is not a reason not to switch.
They’re asking based on their specs whether Linux will run fine for them.
The post does not ask that.
Fine, I’ll add to my sentence for clarification, but (no offense) it should be obvious I’m referring to gaming since the whole topic is about… gaming on Linux.
They’re asking based on their specs whether Linux will run fine for them, with Gaming.
The title was “Thinking of switching my gaming desktop to Linux. Should I?” In the post, they said:
My main question now is just what distro works best for gaming (considering my specs).
So therefore they’re asking whether they should switch to Linux (for gaming) based on their specs. OP even told you that’s what they were saying, but you said “I disagree”…
You can’t with any sound reasoning disagree that OP asked something, when not only is there the OG post as proof, but they also told you (in implication) that you misunderstood. OP knows what they meant by what they said - you can’t tell them they don’t know what they meant, when they’re literally the person who said it. I get it that you’re having a hard time understanding how what they said, means what they said it does, but you’re allowed to accept that you misunderstood. You’re allowed to be wrong.
not only is there the OG post as proof, but they also told you (in implication) that you misunderstood
I did not tell OP that I disagreed with them, you misunderstood.
/s to make a point
OP knows what they meant by what they said - you can’t tell them they don’t know what they meant
I haven’t commented on what they meant, only on what they said.
I get it that you’re having a hard time understanding how what they said, means what they said it does, but you’re allowed to accept that you misunderstood.
LOL
I did not tell OP that I disagreed with them, you misunderstood.
Didn’t you?.. Did I?.. What’s this then?:
You (rah):
If you have to ask someone else whether you should switch then you should not switch.
OP (WIZARD POPE):
I am asking if my hardware will enable me to have a good experience since I know nvidia has issues on linux. (Note: Exactly what I thought OP was asking)
You (rah):
Your post doesn’t ask that.
OP (WIZARD POPE):
The main text kinda does. Maybe I worded it a bid badly.
You (rah):
I disagree.
Please explain to me what part of the two-word sentence “I disagree” is not you disagreeing.
I haven’t commented on what they meant, only on what they said.
Yes, and you wouldn’t have commented on what they said if you didn’t first interpret what you thought they meant. OP clarified to you what they meant, and you disagreed with them, that they meant what they said they meant, which is what was so stupid about your “I disagree” response. I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand for you.
Please explain to me what part of the two-word sentence “I disagree” is not you disagreeing.
No no, that’s what I said, that’s not what I meant. You misunderstood.
/s to make a point
OP clarified to you what they meant, and you disagreed with them
I disagreed with their assertion that the main text “kinda does”, I didn’t disagree with their clarification of what they meant. You can tell because I quoted precisely what I was disagreeing with.
I didn’t disagree with their clarification of what they meant.
Isn’t the clarification of what they meant, also the exact same thing as what they originally said? They clarified what they meant by what they said, not by the context that you think they didn’t provide in the original text, so in my eyes they did say the same thing as what they clarified to you. You just didn’t seem to understand the original text, when in it, they specifically said they wanted to know what Linux distro would work best based on specs for gaming… Which brings us back to your original reply to OP. Why did you say “If you have to ask someone else whether you should switch then you should not switch.”? Because the only reason I can find, is if you misunderstood and thought they were asking if they should switch to Linux in a general sense, rather then specifically based on their specs for gaming. Many people downvoted your comment including myself (because I felt you were misunderstanding OP’s question), and I think most other downvoters did so for the same reason… so it would be good to know if we just misunderstood your point. But it doesn’t seem so when OP had to clarify to you what they meant and everyone else commenting already seemed to get it.
/s to make a point
I don’t get what you mean. I know what /s means but I’m very confused what you’re trying to say. That “I disagree” what sarcastic?
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.
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.
God damn I literally just did a clean install of fedora 42 and I cannot even get past the stupid setup stage. They changed it so now you choose everything after installing and I cannot get past the timezone select screen. It just freezes
I seem to recall a bug (but maybe it’s only Fedora Silverblue) but anyways try not selecting the option to install 3rd party software, and see if the set up lets you continue. You can then make the selection to enable 3rd party software the first time you open the Software app.
I don’t recall that option being available in the setup
It is, I was playing around with it in a VM just the other day.
Where in the setup was it?
What about Bazzite? It’s fedora based and made for gaming. I’ve only tried it on handheld like steamdeck and rog ally but it’s awesome, even better than steamdeck os.
linux mint.
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.
It actually doesn’t really matter.
