I’ve been incredibly skeptical of Linux gaming for a long time now. But more than that I’ve been fed up with windows. I finally bit the bullet and bought some new ssd’s. Burned a bazzite iso and booted from the thumb drive. Honestly? The setup was flawless. The only thing I could see a non-technical person struggling with is burning images and booting from a drive. If a shop starts selling pre-builts with Linux configured for gaming then this might actually be the year of the Linux desktop
Now excuse me I’m gonna go play Arx Fatalis
You’ll likely run into some problems eventually but yes, for the most part things work very well now. My only significant problems are typically cause by anti-cheat software.
When you start playing Factorio, all will be forgotten.
oh for sure. I dont really play a lot of high budge games anyway. I’ve already talked my partner into it and literally her only reaction was
oh so I can stop getting those windows 11 notifications? thank god
After tinkering with it a bunch this morning I will say that all the things that I can see normie’s struggling with are:
- drive management (renaming, mounting, etc)
- grub, or as they might call it “that menu thing that shows up for 5 seconds”
- setting up the thumb drive itself
That said I still think pre-builts with good defaults could smooth most of this out
- I much prefer how Linux does it, hopefully others agree
- easy to disable if it bothers you
- balenaEtcher is pretty easy to use, I’m not really familiar with the options anymore
I’m happy to walk anyone through the process, and I’m guessing most other Linux users would as well.
Oh man i love Arx Fatalis, have you seen Monomyth? It’s basically a love letter to Arx
That’s literally why I started playing it lol. I ran through all the content and wanted more
I run a fairly standard arch setup and have had very few issues with games. I’ve done a bit of tinkering with bottles, lutris, etc, but pretty much everything just works first time with steam.
I’ve only had to set a few launch flags, usually for a game to use directx instead of vulkan or vice-versa. Sometimes you can’t play a game on launch, but usually one of the first few patches will get things in working order. Steam deck popularity has done wonders for this aspect.
The most common issue I run into is a game update that will break or degrade the experience. But usually those get fixed fairly quickly in follow up patches. A lot of developers will skip testing in proton (mostly because itll “just work” these days) but i imagine theyll start doing so more often before pushing updates as steam decks and Linux become larger shares of players.
“…btw”
