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Valve launches the Steam Next Fest right on Windows 10 EOL because they hate me, specifically.
(lemmy.ml)
Like, why Valve? I was so close to clearing out all the games I was partway through, now I need to add some demos to my backlog (not many, this Next Fest is kinda weak).
~~Probably could've made it but I haven't picked a distro. I'm planning on turning my desktop into a dedicated gaming computer and not daily driver, because of the malware risk. I wanted something not finicky, something devs would test on as a known quantity, and preferably something Arch-based like SteamOS.~~
- ~~Garuda (Arch-based)~~
- ~~Bazzite (Known quantity, immutable, Fedora-based, I don't trust it for some reason)~~
- ~~Nobara (Proton-adjacent distro, Fedora-based)~~
- ~~CachyOS (Super fast, Arch-based, presumably finicky?)~~
- ~~Windows 7 (Based, unsupported by steam, insecure)~~
~~BTW I have an AMD CPU and GPU. Figured I should've mentioned that.~~
Doesn't change the fact that you will have a great experience from any of these distro when it comes to gaming. Most of the changes in UX come from the Desktop Environment (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc...). Other difference are packages availablility but beside Steam which is on most distro package you will probably use Flatpaks anyway. Also you should be able to swap distro without loosing files and games.
So beside some minor changes you won't notice much else. If it's your first time on Linux I would suggest you Bazzite (or Mint).
I'm experienced using Linux (Kubuntu daily driver), but not gaming on Linux.
In terms of desktop environment I'm definitely not going with GNOME (or a GNOME derived distro) for gaming because that'd feel so wrong. Meaning KDE ... or KDE. Was gonna say COSMIC but that's based off a GNOME fork too.
I get the sense that Steam will work better with the Arch base because that's what SteamOS is based on. But also Bazzite is built basically specifically to work with Steam so that's probably not a concern.
It's not the game files I'm concerned about so much as adding them to the launcher (i.e. Steam or Itch io). I'm planning on installing them all on a separate partition but I don't imagine it'll do much good. Maybe I shouldn't jump straight into installing everything right on day one.
Bazzite is probably inevitable.
Well if you're daily driving Kubuntu and wants an Arch-based distro go for it, CachyOS is really popular these days.
I think it made sense for Valve to go with Arch for a custom Hardware with console-like experience cuz they can tweak it and optimize it in depth but for a desktop PC you won't have big difference from a gaming perspective.
I'm not 100% sure about this but I think you could copy/backup the file that create all the non-steam link and metadata if you make the switch to another distro. But you'll have to do some research I guess.
I looked it up and as far as I can tell there's no way to get the itch io launcher to recognize games restored from a backup. Though even on Windows that launcher is garbage and buggy, I'd almost rather use my browser if not for the updates.
I'll look into CachyOS on YouTube, but it seems very finely tuned with not a lot of room for error. Or maybe give up and go with Bazzite like a normal person. With my outdated PC (especially CPU) I could, very rarely, need the performance boost.
I never tried CachyOS but I know it's popular.
COSMIC, the new desktop in beta, is written from scratch in Rust. Cosmic the older version was a fork of Gnome. 2 different DEs, made by the same company with the same name. Different codebases.
COSMIC feels a lot like GNOME based on the images I've seen. Given it's in alpha it is probably also similarly uncustomizable.
It's in beta as of a couple weeks ago and it looks quite customizable, in fact. Lots of themeing options and an optional tiled mode. If it lives up to its espoused design philosophy, it looks to me like it'll be awesome but I haven't tried it yet.
I should dabble with it at some point. No idea when though.