Last time I tried Linux for gaming was over 10 years ago. I know there is proton now which makes it easier etc. But even then I would constantly have issues with sound or drivers or some other thing that made it less “plug and play” than windows. Has this been improved in that time?
I have a laptop thats 16gb ram and Intel iris xe but has chugged since it was forcibly upgraded to windows 11. I want to try Linux to see if day to day things would be more performant, but I dont want to add a bunch of headaches because of it
Edit: thanks all for the great responses. It sounds like I should give it a go
Edit2: I dove into pop os and really happy so far. Better performance doing regular browsing etc. Had to mess around to get Linux howdy to work, but otherwise very seamless. Much much improved since the last time i used Linux.
I recently switched from windows to fedora for my main pc, only had one issue with nvidia drivers (most likely due to user error, it was my first Linux experience), but since fixing its been almost flawless with gaming. I’ve only had 1 instance of mouse bindings not working properly, but a quick restart of the software that controls it fixed the issue
nVidia can still be a bit flakey. But overall gaming on linux has come leaps and bounds from a decade ago.
It depends on the games you like to play. I’m mostly single player or co op, so my biggest issue was actaully because nVidia put out broken drivers earlier this year. Luckily it was pretty easy to roll back to a version before that and wait for a fix. You may need to learn a few terminal commands for that sort of thing but I just searched the internet to learn how, wasnt too hard.
If you play things like battlefield, CoD, etc., their anti cheat stuff does not play nice with linux. I have not tested these waters. I am currently playing Clair Obscure and Hollow Knight (OG) without issue. Also went through plague tale requiem, split fiction, the alters, everspace, lies of P, outer wilds, tempest rising, steam world build, valheim, path of exile 2 this past year. Lies of P and Tempest Rising are where I ran into issues on nvidia drivers but rollback fixed it. Path of Exile 2 had some other weird issue on boot, I think I had to find a config file to force it to dx12 instead of vulkan to boot. Really these are similar sorts of random issues I have always associated with PC gaming when I was on windows, sometimes shit doesnt work on my hardware and I gotta fiddle with it. Protondb.com can be helpful for troubleshooting when that happens.
I am using Bazzite which mimics the steam deck OS. I think the hardest part for me was choosing a distro. Bazzite works well for me since 95% of my PC use is gaming, but there are many others to consider if you want to do other things. Some light internet browsing and word processing are about all I do otherwise. You can load a distro onto a USB stick, boot from USB to try it out, and switch around that way to check out some other options. Then install to hard drive for a more permanent decision.
Same, early 2000’s was the last time I tried to run Linux for gaming and just recently moved to Bazzite and pretty much everything worked out of the box for me outside of some minor nits like suspend not working quite right but outside of that and of course my keyboard not having access to macros anymore but outside of those minor things have been more than solid for gaming and most everything else.
do yourself a favor and search your laptop model with Linux install and you’ll get a good idea of what to expect. There are some vendors who don’t play nice with Linux.
Dont be tempted too hastily by promise of grandeur my lige.
