Gaming

I've been on NixOS for a little over a year, and have been absolutely delighted at how well gaming works now. I initially thought I would dual boot until Windows 10 EoL, but have had no reason to use Windows in that time and a couple months ago I converted my storage disk from ntfs to ext4.

Steam is nearly seamless; there have been one or two titles where I've had to switch the Proton version to experimental or GE, but nothing more than that. Heroic and Lutris have been similarly easy for non-Steam games. There has been nothing that I have tried to play that hasn't worked, but I don't play multiplayer games so YMMV there.

That said, this is not my first rodeo with Linux. I used it extensively in the late '00s and early '10s, which probably helped to sand some of the rough edges off of my recent experience. Though back then wine was not really suitable for gaming. I also have an AMD GPU, which I understand has an easier setup process than Nvidia. (I literally haven't had to think about graphics drivers at all.)

I started out using an old Nvidia Geforce 1060 TI and an i5 whose model number now escapes me. My experience was terrible, on Mint, Ubuntu, and Bazzite. Most games didn't work, and researching the error messages I found in my logs just directed me to Nvidia forum posts from 6 months to a year ago where a user described my exact issue and received no response.

Then, I purchased a new pre-fab computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D processor and a Radeon RX 9060 XT GPU. I still had a handful of issues on Ubuntu, so I switched to Bazzite and it's been smooth sailing ever since. I can run the vast majority of games through Steam, and use Bottles for anything else.

The lesson I learned was fuck Nvidia. Team Red 4 lyfe.

I'm a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there's no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.

So far I haven't had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn't display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.

As for distro side of things, I don't know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what's happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.

Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don't change the language to a certain language because it'll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I've played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that's more or less thanks to the devs.

It works great for most games. Steam makes it really easy to enable proton for all games in your library. However, one caveat I would add is that certain intro/cutscene video formats didn't play for me out of the box. I fixed it by using ProtonUp-QT or ProtonPlus to download the newest GE-Proton and selecting that to default in my steam compatibility settings.

For the loooonnnnngest time, I had issues running VR on Linux. And for a few years when I started off (many years ago), most games wouldn't run. Things have changed since then however. Now I'm finding all the desktop/handheld based games I want to play; I can just play. In addition, the issues I've constantly had with VR now have been alleviated (albeit with some manual tinkering).

Desktop games without anticheat will just work 99/100. VR takes some effort to work, but is worth it. VR on Linux still isn't exactly perfect either. You sometimes press something in a game, the screen will freeze and you can see/feel it for sure. But, that happens maybe once every 10 mins or so, so it's workable since all I use VR for is VRChat anyway.

Life's good on Linux now. Besides college, I don't think I'll be needing to switch to Windows at all anymore. Oh, actually, now that I remember. I run World of Warcraft through bottles. Every so often WoW updates and kills functionality. I have to rebuild my Bottle, shift my files over and then it runs again, but that's also outside of what Steam does, so.

Besides all of the above, I think I can stick full time to Linux now. It feels wonderful having an operating system that doesn't own you anymore.

I use CachyOS (Arch) and NixOS and haven't had any problems. Modding on NixOS is a bit more of a headache but it's not a deal breaker. Everything just works. Sure I can't play League or Valorant or EA multiplayer games but not like I was playing those anyways. IF you do enjoy those games then your linux gaming experience isn't going to be great.

As far as distros go? hell you can play on whatever one you want. Like I said I sometimes game on NixOS. I know a guy that even play games on Kali when he's not doing his pen testing stuff.

Even for older games with Emulation it's great. NixOS is my defacto remote emulation machine because it's so painfully easy to set up retroarch on it. Otherwise I have Ubuntu on my private server and I run RomM on it and it has all my roms on there.