linux gaming is...good?
i’ve had a single windows machine that i’ve kept around exclusively for gaming, for the 2-3 times a year when i get in the mood to play games (usually around the holidays and my yearly mid-year burnout). seeing as i have no other reason to ever punish myself by using windows, that machine spent most of the year powered off. with windows 10 going eol a few months ago, that box was destined to remain that way for a long while; having been a fervent windows-hater for many years, windows 11 was just never going to be palatable to me, so it was looking like that machine would eventually get refurbished into a server or dev workstation. but 64gb of ram and an rtx 3090 just sitting around gathering dust was starting to bother me so i thought it might be a good time to check out where things are in the linux gaming space. that way i’d at least have a system i could use for general media-related stuff.
i’m not much of a gamer but i’ve been using linux for almost 20 years now (oof). throughout that time it’s been a widely accepted thing that you just don’t recommend linux to anyone who wants to be able to play modern games on their machines. gaming was never really the thing that made linux popular or useful anyway so this was generally fine. linux fills a different niche and it does it well; personally, it would have been just as fine with me if linux never managed to make itself a viable gaming platform. but then valve came along with the steamdeck and finally did something to move the needle. and…it’s good? at least, good enough that there’s been a noticeable wave of new linux users coming over from windows.
i decided i would try out the two main contenders i’ve been hearing about over the past year or so: bazzite and cachyOS. i’m familiar enough with linux to know that the distro ultimately doesn’t really matter if you know what you’re doing but since this machine would probably only ever be used for gaming/media stuff anyway i figured why not try to get as much of that stuff working out-of-the-box. thankfully, being not-much-of-a-gamer, the handful of games i do play are all at least a couple of years old now (elden ring, dark souls, elder scrolls oblivion, metro, factorio) so i’m not at the bleeding edge of triple-a games where real gamers tend to have the most issues when it comes to linux.
bazzite
i started off with bazzite, mostly on a whim since i’d heard so much about it. i really don’t know much about it beyond the fact that it’s fedora-based and atomic; having never used one of these atomic environments, i was also curious to see what that looked like in practice for desktop use. within an hour of installing i had booted up elden ring and was playing it fine without any extra configuration or tweaking.
now look, maybe its just the fact that i haven’t really kept up with linux gaming that closely, but i honestly couldn’t help but be impressed. i guess i never really thought we’d get to the point where you could actually go from fresh install to real gaming on a linux box without any real work required. that’s big.
cachyOS
after a couple of hours with bazzite i did feel a bit stifled by the atomic-ness of the distro and reliance on flatpaks for basically everything so i started itching for something else. having at least proven that it was possible to get things running in a linux environment (and recognizing that the real meat-and-potatoes is proton, which is a distro-agnostic layer as far as the runtime environment for games is concerned), i figured i could accomplish the same thing with any other distro with good repos. i was initially leaning toward using nixOS since that’s already my daily driver distro on all of my other machines and i’ve managed to do all kinds of stuff with it but ultimately decided it would be best to go with a “normal” linux system to avoid some potential edge-cases i figured would be more common on the gaming side of things (namely the shipping of precompiled binaries that would be incomptabile with nixOS’s special linking setup). i went with cachyOS since my next choice after nixOS was going to be arch anyway and cachy is just arch with compiler+kernel optimitizations and a graphical installer; the fact that it already has some clout in the linux gaming space also helped.
again, the installation was painless and only marginally more involved than it was on bazzite, but only because i chose to make some of my common system customizations along the way. i got steam installed, along with a few tools packaged up into a gaming meta-package on cachy, and within an hour i was booting up the elder scrolls oblivion remaster. no tinkering, no weird issues, nothing. it just worked; i played for about an hour and got good performance (~80 avg. fps in the open world), comparable to the performance on windows.
conclusion
so now here i am, writing this from cachy, feeling good with where things are. for the first time, i feel like i can actually drop windows completely and not feel like i have to miss out on anything. sure, i barely used it anyway but now i don’t have to put up with it for even a second and thats always good. of course, your mileage may vary – my requirements are pretty low when it comes to gaming so i’ve probably had a much easier time than most. i also don’t have huge games library and basically everything is in steam already so i haven’t really had to deal with launchers. although, i was able to get the battle.net launcher installed and working with barely any work! proton and wine have come a long way since i last touched them over 10 years ago (fuck i’m old).
anyway, it’s pretty good if you ask me.