this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Linux Gaming

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Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 5 points 4 days ago (13 children)

Hah. Nope.

Man, I would look like much less of a hater if people didn't keep making demonstrably incorrect claims.

No, installing Nvidia drivers wasn't a one line affair for me last time I tried (which was just this year, btw), and even after I got things set up it was a toss-up whether features would work, work but perform horribly or not be available at all. That includes HDR, VRR, DLSS, DLSS transformer model, DLSS frame gen and Ray Reconstruction. On Windows some of the newer versions of those can be a hassle to set up in old games and necessitate forcing in dlls using third party applications, but at least official support works reliably.

Some distros do come with Nvidia drivers prepackaged and that's fine, but all the feature issues remain. If you want a gaming-first distro there still isn't semi-decent game mode support for SteamOS or Bazzite.

Intel GPU support is slightly better but a bit short of hassle-free. You probably don't have an Intel GPU anyway, so we can let that one pass.

HDR support in applications is still sub par. That includes gaming and is true regardless of GPU brand, as far as I can tell.

Anticheat support is still poor and it still prevents many very popular games from running. At this point nobody has anything close to a solution to this, even conceptually. Yes, some anticheat providers have some degree of Linux support, but there is nothing close to kernel-level anticheat from Windows. Yes, this is a genuine problem.

Performance is... trading blows, I'd say. In some games you can get much better frame pacing and better overall performance. In others, particularly when using newer functionality it can go the exact opposite way. This is very situational. If you want cutting edge stuff and paid to get the hardware to run it, Linux is probably not for you. Salvaging weaker or aging hardware for older games is a better use case.

Gaming on Linux is much better than it was and it likely will keep getting better. That's good news in itself, getting hyperbolic just triggers flamewars and negativity on something that should be a pretty clean net positive. It really doesn't help.

[–] djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 days ago

Yeah at this point I'm tempted to swap back to Windows until I can ditch my Nvidia graphics card. Driver support is such a pain in the ass, it is absolutely not a single line. Getting games to run often includes installation of i386 drivers as well as vulkanlibs, because all the "easy" installations of Nvidia drivers only grab the 64 bit ones, and that's before even starting to get into all the tweaks and fixes you'll need to add for some games.

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[–] Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Can someone recommend a distro that will be used exclusively for gaming?

I've not used Linux in like a decade and only know I dislike Ubuntu for reasons I can't remember (pretty sure it's apt fucking up my system related) I'm between Mint, PopOS, and Bazzite.

[–] greylinux@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago

Coming from someone who gamed only on a steamdeck for a few years (i.e I have no other console or PC) and then switching to a desktop with a better GPU/CPU. I can't believe how easy Bazzite was to install use and get gaming. Simply amazing what this team is doing to make it easy for the average person to get gaming on Linux.

[–] chaosmarine92@reddthat.com 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I can only speak to PopOS as that's what I chose when I switched last year. It's been mostly fine but there have definitely been pain points. If you use a hard drive other than your os install drive then you need to go to the steam website to get the installer and not use the one in the built in app store. Getting mods working for games has been incredibly annoying anytime I have to use protontricks.

Non gaming related I've had numerous issues trying to manage permissions for my hard drives. Not sure if this is a Pop issue or general Linux issue.

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