I have now been playing games only on Linux for a year, and it has been great.
With the GPU shortage, I had been waiting for prices to come back to reasonable
levels before buying a new GPU. So far, I had always bought NVIDIA GPUs as I
was using Windows to run games and the NVIDIA drivers had a better “reputation”
than the AMD/Radeon ones.
With Valve’s Proton seriously taking
off thanks to the Steam Deck, I wanted to get rid of the last computer in the
house that was running Microsoft Windows, that I had kept only for gaming.
But the NVIDIA drivers story on Linux had never been great, especially on
distributions that move kernel versions quickly to follow upstream releases
like Fedora. I had tried using the NVIDIA binary drivers on Fedora Kinoite but
quickly ran into some of the issues that we have listed
in the docs.
At the time, the Universal Blue project did not exist yet (Jorge Castro started
it a bit later in the year),
otherwise I would have probably used that instead. If you need NVIDIA support
today on Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, etc.), I heavily
recommend using the Universal Blue images.
Hopefully this will be better in the future for NVIDIA users with
the work on NVK
So, at the beginning of last year (January 2023), I finally decided to buy an
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
GPU card.
What a delight. Nothing to setup, fully supported out of the box, works
perfectly on Wayland. Valve’s Proton does wonders. I can now play on my Linux
box all the games that I used to play on Windows and they run perfectly. Just
from last year, I played Age of Wonders 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 without any major
issue, and did it pretty close to the launch dates. Older titles usually work
fairly well too.
Sure, some games require some little tweaks, but it is nothing compared to the
horrors of managing a Windows machine. And some games require tweaks on Windows
as well (looking at you
Cyberpunk 2077).
The best experience is definitely with games bought on Steam which usually work
out of the box. For those where it is not the case,
protondb is usually a good source to find the
tweaks needed to make the games work. I try to keep the list of tweaks I use
for the games that I play updated on
my profile there.
I am running all of this on Fedora Kinoite
with the Steam Flatpak. If
you want a more console-like or Steam Deck-like experience on your existing
computers, I recommend checking out the great work from the
Bazzite team.
Besides Steam, I use Bottles,
Cartridge and Heroic Games
Launcher as needed (all as Flatpaks). I have
not looked at Origins or Uplay/Ubisoft Connect games yet.
According to protondb, the only games from my entire Steam library that are not
supported are mostly multiplayer games that require some specific anti-cheat
that is only compatible with Windows.
I would like to say a big THANK YOU to all the open source graphics and desktop
developers out there and to (in alphabetical order) AMD, Collabora, Igalia, Red
Hat, Valve, and other companies for employing people or funding the work that
makes gaming on Linux a reality.
Happy new year and happy gaming on Linux!