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PC Gamers Abandoning Windows 11 for Linux with Higher FPS & Fewer Interruptions
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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
Huh, most people actually like Flatpak, and for good reasons too.
If you know what flatseal is and how to set permissions, it gets a lot better.
I am super thankful for flatpaks. I do wish I understood things a little better in flat seal though. can do some basics but I don't know or understand what 95% of the flat seal options are for a given piece of software or why some of the fixes I've put in from when I'm googling a problem actually work.
i could not get them to play nice with the hardware, pipewire, or each other. and they don’t like being messed with
Exact opposite experience here, coming from using Linux as toy desktops for the past few years. My main PC is EndeavourOS, and my gaming laptop is Bazzite. Bazzite has been a really good hands off "just works" distro that I don't have to think about.
i think the real issue is my computer has been silently suffering for all these years as windows just didn’t tell me my hardware is borked and old. and just has a shot gun full of code that fixes whatever it can stick to. and Bazzite either does not have that, or i fell into an exception in use due to hatred and old hardware.
but getting into the weeds was very difficult, and my desk is not as flat as it once was
Literally every time im gonna go play a game with friends my computer decides to bw stupid, and it puts them all off linux even more lol.
nano is the Fishcer Price's My First Text Editor and you're expected to quickly graduate to something that sucks way more
I know I'm supposed to go that way, but I went the other 🙃. I've been using micro and it has been awesome working with my mouse when I want. What is more basic than Fisher Price? A teething set of plastic keys?
I tried to like vim. But nano just works.
i can only imagine the horrors of what button combination i need to save and close and get my terminal back on the next one…
This is actually an ancient UNIX trope.
from what i gather that means you reach for the 9mm when you don’t know how to say please?
Kill all 9 lives
I just installed cachyos after using mint for a year. Overall, was smooth until i tried to use VLC. Video played fine, but an hour of settings later and i could finally hear the movie. I was an inch from saying fuck it and going back to mint. I debug software for a living, last thing i want to deal with is debugging my personal computer when I just want to watch a movie.
May go back at some point, mint really is so easy and just worked, but the performance and aur are pretty great.
My sound doesnt work on cachy either.
That sucks! At least for me, mint just worked.
Interesting. I've been using Linux for nearly 6 years now, and I can definitely relate to pipewire and audio related issues (I'm a musician so I've suffered much in that area), but I can't say I've struggled so much with devices. I wonder if those are Bazzite specific issues or if our setups are just different.
i’m my case i am using apparently old hardware, i ran into the following issues with my set up:
won’t lie i had to use AI to RTFM though chat GPT bricked my stuff more then i should have let it. gemini was better at this
Wow you certainly learned a lot trouble shooting that.
I haven't had something that annoying happen, usually it's been install and use.
BUT putting Linux on an ancient dell box was a learning experience. I installed the system on the HDD. After shutdowns the aystem would wake back up. The solution was adding kernel quirks line to grub boot with a numeric code, which told the hardware to ignore the self wake up event from the USB bus.
Then when I wanted speed the bios didn't support NVME boot. So I had to add a small ssd for boot partition , but have rest of system on the NVME drive. I didn't want to reinstall and resetup so I was learning a lot about gparted and copy pasting partitions and editting fstab to cobble together a replicated set of partitions. It was a great way to understand how formatting, partitioning and mounts all worked.
mine it set to never let the usb sleep. the hub or device ubs controls HATE going to sleep only to wake up on time
Another data point to add. I've started using Bazzite and introduced it to my brother. The only hitch I've noticed is not being able to play stuff like the new Battlefield.
It is by far the easiest operating system to install, keep updated, and run basic apps and play games on. Flatpaks are great. Brew is good for CLI tools. AppImages are another alternative to Flatpaks that work well. Steam comes pre-installed, and most games run well.
There are no ads, no AI, no dark patterns. It's just a simple operating system that keeps itself updated.
Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with
rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite). But my examples of these are installing GhosTTY (non AppImage), Paretto Security, and 1Password SSH Daemon/op. Most people will never need to do these.I'm a software engineer, and I've found that for the most part, Bazzite is good enough to run on my gaming pc and work pcs.
I'm sorry you had such a bad first experience with it.
i think i learned that there was a lot wrong with my set up that windows just shoved under the rug. and maybe windows is right to do so, figuring i was willing to dig in deep this time, but my friends… not so much, and i don’t think i have the capability to help them if they run into issues like i did.
the reason ‘I’ learned to dislike flat packs is that it puts the software in its own little isolation bubble from what i understand. and i get where people are coming from. but they REALLY don’t like connecting to hardware, or sharing nice with other apps.
keep in mind i am a fairly adroit user of windows, diving in head first, so a lot of this is learning the hard way (nano anyone?) and i learned a lot. but yea bumpy.
When I was trying to use discord, my friends were confused why I was having issues getting my mic to work and were sorta teasing me for using linux. When they found out what I was trying to do (something I couldn't figure out how to do in Windows despite looking into it multiple times over the last decade or so), they were more just confused why I'd even be doing what I was and they would have never even considered trying to do that. But I finally have my audio pathing set up the way I've always wanted to and I love qpwgraph.
very same with me, yea. though i was having so many problems with easyeffects i was gun shy using another program to manage the speakers when i just wanted the one change. so i baked in a rule for that named speaker only into the os
Sometimes, I just want to be able to easy switch some things to one playing from one speaker or another. Being able to do left/right separately is wonderful. Or use a virtual mic and feed a soundboard into it along with my actual mic. And easily being able to do monitoring each of the individual parts is wonderful. ^_^
Agreed with having issues with EasyEffects in my limited experimenting with it. Was hoping it would be more intuitive to be to be able to add into my workflow to modify specific sounds (ie: modify my actual mic before it feeds into the virtual mic and leave the soundboard uneffected).
"Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite)."
I've had a similar complaint about bazzite. Some obscure things are just harder to install because of it being immutable. But I also haven't managed to accidentally break it, like I have with other OS's. Also, sometimes my problem has simply been looking up instructions for fedora and assuming they'd apply to bazzite instead of just looking up the bazzite instructions (which actually existed and were fairly distinct and didn't involve rpm-ostree stuff).