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Nowadays, what are the drawbacks and limitations of using Linux for gaming? What distro would you guys advise? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by hydroel@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2287056

I feel like this is a question that might have been asked around and maybe there are guides around, but that's a discussion that I'd like to have with the lot of you.

The context

Using Linux on both my work laptop and the Steam Deck has made me quite interested in a full switch to Linux - my other computer is a gaming desktop, which I use a lot for many things, but mostly for gaming. Getting used to Linux has made me quite more intolerant to all the BS Microsoft is pushing than I used to be, the latest one being forcing the users to switch from the older email client to the new Outlook, which has a big, nice ad banner that looks like an unread email. So I've began wondering: after all, why not? Why shouldn't I embrace the penguin? Well, the answer is that I should not if there are too many hinders and drawbacks in using Linux, which would make me need a dual boot instead of a single OS install.

We all know gaming has long been one of the main limiting factors in switching, but the Deck has changed the whole landscape on that front. We've basically switched from "Windows is the only OS suitable for gaming" to "Linux is also viable", and the Deck has been made that available to the general audience. Therefore, nowadays, how viable is Linux for a gaming computer? What are the limitations users will encounter? Would I be able to play all the games from my Steam, Epic and GOG library with a bit of tinkering, including the new releases?

The drawbacks of using Linux (or those that I can think of)

Other gaming launchers support on Linux suck: GOG and Epic will work through Heroic Games but Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar games will all be a pain, or even not work at all. Is is true? Is there any way around that?

No Microsoft GamePass. Or none that actually matters, as the only solution is to pay for the higher tier and stream the games - so no game actually runs on the desktop. No, thanks.

Some DRM will prevent games from working, and this is especially true for games with heavy online content.

NVIDIA support for Linux is far from being on-par with that on Windows, especially the open-source drivers. Is this still true?

Many devices, especially those for gaming, might not have good (or even working) compatibility drivers for Linux. I know my UWQHD monitor works flawlessly on Windows, but requires quite a bit of tinkering on Ubuntu

Newer games might not be optimized for Linux in the first place

Tinkering is inevitable (as with any Linux computer, really)

What can we add?

The advantages (I can think of)

It's free

It's ad free

Customization on Linux is awesome, and I might end up spending more time ricing, breaking it all and reinstalling than gaming (see also, previous section's 7.)

I will no longer be sending data to Microsoft

What else am I not thinking about?

What distro?

And finally, let's say I make the switch. What Linux distro should I use? I've read a bit about Drauger, Ubuntu GamePack, or even Pop! OS with some manual setup. What do you guys think, and advise?

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[–] d3Xt3r@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No Microsoft GamePass. Or none that actually matters, as the only solution is to pay for the higher tier and stream the games - so no game actually runs on the desktop. No, thanks.

Why "no thanks"? I use GamePass with xCloud and it works pretty well on Linux, and it's a perfectly viable option - unless you've got really poor internet, or you're into competitive FPS games or something that requires ultra-low latency.

NVIDIA support for Linux is far from being on-par with that on Windows, especially the open-source drivers. Is this still true?

Yes. If you're planning to game on Linux, I'd highly recommend getting an AMD card instead, the AMD open-source drivers are excellent and see frequent improvements - both in terms of features and performance.

Many devices, especially those for gaming, might not have good (or even working) compatibility drivers for Linux. I know my UWQHD monitor works flawlessly on Windows, but requires quite a bit of tinkering on Ubuntu

"Many" -> citation needed. In my experience, depending on the hardware, you may find a better out-of-the-box experience with Linux compared to Windows. For instance, on my ThinkPad Z13, everything worked out-of-the-box on Nobara (Fedora) - including Fn keys, Wi-Fi, accelerated graphics/video drivers... everything. Same with my AMD desktop, didn't have to install any special drivers or anything. But when I tried to install a fresh copy of Windows on my Z13 (dual-boot), there were almost no drivers - I had to manually install the Wi-Fi drivers first, and then grab the rest of the drivers via Windows Update, which was painful - took like 3 reboots to get everything installed, with long reboot times cause of updates. Painful.

In saying that, I'm surprised that your monitor - of all things - needed tinkering, when they're usually mostly dumb devices that need no drivers or anything. But then again, it's Ubuntu so... ¯\(ツ)/¯. FWIW, I have a fairly recent QHD monitor from AOC and it worked just fine on Nobara, no tinkering required.

The advantages: What else am I not thinking about?

5. Performance. Thanks to no bloatware like unnecessary background services/Defender/telemetry/Cortana/Bing etc, Linux in general would perform better, at least in theory. YMMV of course, depending on the game/hardware/distro. The good thing is if you use the right distro, or are willing to go the extra mile with tweaking, you can eke out way more performance, such as by using custom gaming-optimised kernels, fstab mount option tweaks and more. Using a gaming-optimised distro means most of these tweaks are built-in, saving you some time.

6. Arguably, a better gaming-focused experience, when you go for a gaming-focused distro like Nobara, or if you want to go the full mile and make an exclusive gaming box, you could install something like ChimeraOS, which is basically a community Steam OS. Imagine your PC booting straight to Steam, in the fastest possible time, with no distractions like Windows Update, Defender or other nonsense. Basically a console experience, with the power and flexibility of PCs and Linux.

What distro?

Nobara. It's based on Fedora but optimised for gaming, made by the same guy who makes Proton-GE and Wine-GE (GloriousEggroll), so you know it's the good stuff. Obviously comes with ProtonGE/Steam/Lutris etc out-of-the-box, custom kernel, patched Discord, codecs, nVidia drivers and more. Definitely give it a go if you're considering Linux for gaming.

[–] hydroel@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't understand why, but I don't see your message on the post, only in my notifications. Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

Why “no thanks”?

Because I have a powerful enough desktop to run games that I would be streaming then. It takes away some of the rights I have regarding my collection of games and creates a need that I did not have. I also just bought an NVIDIA GPU, I won't buy a new one to be able to switch to Linux.

“Many” -> citation needed.

On two different computers running Ubuntu, my DELL monitor was not correctly recognized. I had to switch from Wayland to Xorg and define the actual monitor resolution through xrandr - not impossible, just quite annoying. Similarly, my Logitech G403's buttons to change the sensitivity never have never worked correctly on Ubuntu, and there is no official Logitech software to make them work. Those buttons are just not seen by an Ubuntu computer.

Performance.

That's one I didn't think of! Although I don't think backgrounds services impact that much performance nowadays on a higher end PC, it leaves that much more headroom to be used on the game instead. On the other hand, isn't performance on a non-native software already impacted negatively? So all in all, which would have the greater impact?

Nobara

Thanks for the recommendation! I know have examples of Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch based distros optimized for gaming. As for which to choose, I will probably get as many answers as persons I ask. And ChimeraOS seems to be a nice project, it just doesn't fit my needs.

[–] hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used Nobara for the past year or so and liked it for the most part but it had too many issues. Most annoying is every update broke my controller it was something to do with their Xbox configs. Then there were a few games that wouldn't work despite working on my steam deck. Most notably it was uncharted. Finally I'm just done with RH and needed to move away. I switched most of my machines to Debian but the TV gaming rig is on Solus now that they finally updated their image. It boots way faster than nobara and uncharted and controller work flawlessly. So far I've been happy with it.

[–] hydroel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good to know! Which version of Solus are you using? Although it doesn't seem to really matter as I don't think any of them are really dedicated to gaming.

[–] hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

4.4 budgie it was just released. Not a gaming distro but they do have a custom steam runtime app that used to work wonders but I find breaks things more than helps now that proton is a thing. So make sure to turn that off if you go that route. I like it for the TV PC as I don't want to do as little maintenance on I as possible. Just launch steam or some light web browsing but i didn't want to go the steam os route.

[–] wfh@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

For your screen, try a live ISO of another distro that's not based on Debian. I struggled for years with my 1440p monitor on Wayland when plugged in to my laptop. Turns out, there's something wrong with the way Debian's kernel decodes my monitor's EDID. On Fedora, it worked out of the box.

About Nobara, I'm not sure it's better than vanilla Fedora for a beginner. Sure, there are a lot of nice things baked in and rpmfusion enabled by default, but the dual system update thing is... not great. I'm still running my gaming rig on Nobara tho. YMMV.

About nVidia and their drivers... yeah, they suck. And they will continue to suck for the foreseeable future. That's why I built my system around an AMD GPU from the start. People like to complain about Wayland and that it's not ready for prime time and that Wayland sucks. Well, nVidia drivers are to blame. I've been running Wayland almost exclusively for the past 4 years on Intel iGPUs and AMD GPUs, it's always been nice and reliable.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 4 points 1 year ago

I was using linux for gaming until recently. I need to repair it, and also have been using some windows centric software. So booting mainly into windows right now.

But one thing I noticed was that on nvidia blob drivers at least (cannot attest to amd), in FPS games, where every millisecond does count. There's definitely a bit more latency on linux compared to windows. Enough to feel it for sure.

Otherwise almost everything (windows store games being mostly the exception) worked fine or could be made to run fine in linux and performance aside from what I am feeling as added latency was on par and sometimes better than windows.

[–] Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:

Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu's approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don't care about or are already religiously opposed to), but... for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then... that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.

Which kind of gets to the general "religion of linux" as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows... 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.

Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now...). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD's CPUs... you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).

But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally "just work" outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.

But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.

But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr...), and... updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can't be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.

[–] hydroel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you for the recommendations! I don't mind having some proprietary blobs here and there - as you pointed out, with Steam and the games I was going to run on it, it's basically necessary anyway, especially with a NVIDIA GPU. However...

I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play.

All in all, that, the drivers being a bit behind on NVIDIA and the few annoyances that happen with external devices (like you pointed out, with a 3rd party controller) are unfortunately exactly the reasons I might not to switch just yet: while it seems to be more convenient to go full Linux for a few things here and there, but if I am going to need Windows, should I really bother keeping both installations? I'd have to buy a new, larger NVMe because my system doesn't support that for now, reinstall everything anyway... And so far, I've been able to do everything I need without needing two parallel systems.

[–] Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If that was sufficient to make you not want to use linux as a primary desktop: Cool. You would probably have been miserable the first time you had to use a terminal to fix a problem (which very well might be installing steam). It isn't for everyone

But also: If you don't think you have a need for windows (no gamepass, no VR, etc) then don't bother keeping a drive. In my case? I know there is work to get WMR headsets working in steamvr on linux but I use mine maybe once a year at this point so it isn't a priority to debug. And 8bitdo firmware updates are similarly rare (and I could probably get it working in wine if I cared enough). That basically just leaves gamepass PC for me and time will tell if I even bother to use the PC version of starfield or if I check it out on my xbox and then buy it on sale on steam if I like it.

At the end of the day: you know your needs and use cases. I personally like knowing that I can switch OSes at the speed of a quick reboot, mashing delete, sitting through 5 minutes of updates running, and then switch back in about 60 seconds when I am done. Good 2 TB nvmes have been going for about 100 bucks these days so storage is cheap. I could also have futzed around with partitions to share a drive but... why bother?

[–] hydroel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I'm a software dev, so I'm already quite used to using the terminal routinely. My current plan is to reconsider if I see an interesting enough NVMe sale - and there are constantly a few these days, so I just might, in the next few weeks.

After all the advice I've been getting thanks to this thread, it appears that I would almost be among the best candidates to switch: I mostly play single player games, nothing with anti-cheat and no VR, I'm having heavy doubts that I still need anything Windows-centric. The main downside I still see is the performance hog with an Nvidia GPU.

[–] ZIRO@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I have an Nvidia GPU and have had no problem playing BG3 or Diablo IV, for instance. Nvidia drivers are a lot better than they used to be, at least by my estimation.

[–] LinusWorks4Mo@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Garuda is aimed specifically at gaming

[–] style99@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As an nVidia user, I can confirm that it does suck quite a bit at times. I've had to fix a broken upgrade twice now (not fun), and attempting to use the Nouveau driver initially was just painfully slow. The nVidia devs are the main problem with Wayland progress, and AMD video hardware is starting to look much more tempting from the Linux side.

Customization is awesome. That's the main thing keeping me in Linux rather than Windows.

[–] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

On one side my experience with Wayland and gaming couldn't be smoother since I switched to AMD.

However anything related to ML and tensorflow has been an immense PITA, not only to have it working but performance-wise the alternative to NVIDIA's CUDAS is not matching by far its competitor.

I'm starting to wonder if I should consider having two cards.

[–] nogrub@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

i have linux running for about 1 year on my main pc and laptop. often when buying games i forget to check protondb because most game I play work fine. but i like to play bethesta games, farm sim and older ones also Cyberpunk runns fine on my system. some games may require you to tinker to get them running smooth. and i thankfully never ran into problems with the nvidia drivers for my 2080 super. all in all i would say the linux experiance is quite good overall for my case. as for distro i only have used arch for a longer period but from my tests and what i heared fedora(i tested it on an old laptop worked gread out of the box), PopOs(i tested on my old system (amd fx6300 ,gtx980) ran fine), mint(never tried it myself but people say it's quite good) and EndeavourOS(same as mint)

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