Linux for gaming?

[mapegl]

On 4/6/2024 at 12:26 PM, EdoTensei said:

I was wondering if there's any well made Linux, which is great for gaming? 

 

Windows has lots of unnecessary poop, and if MC would someday made Windows Gaming Edition, that would be great. But meanwhile, is there any good Linux which would perform better? 

 

My experience with Linux ends by knowing that Android is made on Linux Kernel .. 

 

But the question is, if there is some Linux, and I know there's lots of those, how about compatibility? 

 

My sys:

Ryzen 9 5900X

32Gb Ram 3600cl16

RX7800XT 

B550 Asus F-Gaming

1Tb M.2 

Seasonic PX750

NZXT H9 Flow 

 

Are those specs (except PSU and Case ) 

Would they be compatible? 

 

As far as I've seen, GPU drivers for Ubuntu they are much older, and not much support for newer games. 

 

Any thoughts? 

 

Hey. Lots of thoughts have been presented here, but as a Linux noob (at least in comparison to many others) and trying a bunch of distros for their ease of use and compatibility:

 

I would suggest PopOS! 

I know, there are some things that might be better elsewhere, but it is very easy to get into. It just runs after a few minutes without any driver installation for AMD and all you have to do is type a few commands from the PopOS! website to get steam running. Additionally, you should switch to KDE from cosmic, again using the instructions from their website. That basically makes PopOS! feel almost like SteamOS without any weird quirks and increases compatibility - looking at you, Helldivers 2. Helldivers 2 only works in fullscreen with KDE afaik.

 

One recommendation from me: get a small SSD for Linux and a second drive for your steam games. I did it that way to have the possibility to very quickly reinstall Linux if I mess something up or change the distro. Has saved me twice in the two days that I am running Linux now as my gaming distro. I have dual booted etc. before, but now I made the switch completely. 

 

 

I am by no means saying that any suggestion here was wrong or worse, just what I experienced over the last few days myself. I absolutely love my PC with Linux now and have completely gotten rid of windows as well.

 

Final note: Arch is just a bit more difficult. Not impossible for a beginner, but if you dip your toe in for the first time, I would suggest something that is friendlier to a beginner. 

 

[Olgyd]

On 4/13/2024 at 12:14 PM, goatedpenguin said:

You my friend don't know anything. Linus and Luke were idiots when doing that challenge. 

A perfect demonstration of the fact that Linux evangelists are, as Muta puts it, the vegans of the PC world, though. Maybe worse actually, because once you're vegan other vegans are petty chill towards you. So @ilovecats7715 is right, don't use Linux - not because the OS is bad, but because the community is.

 

Somebody should make a TV show where a Linux user has to pass a human factors in engineering course and an engineering student pass a computer science course and see who succeeds first.

[wasab]

4 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

A perfect demonstration of the fact that Linux evangelists are, as Muta puts it, the vegans of the PC world, though. So @ilovecats7715 is right, don't use Linux - not because the OS is bad, but because the community is.

I only see bad behaviors among those who daily drive arch. They have a pretty elitist mentality. 

[Olgyd]

1 minute ago, wasab said:

I only see bad behaviors among those who daily drive arch. They have a pretty elitist mentality. 

 

Probably because you didn't take a psychology or engineering course in college. As someone who did, I strongly believe Linux's RTFM mentality is the biggest thing holding it back. Ever needed to read a manual to figure out how to operate a door?

Most people are blind to the amount of thought put into every object we use every day to make them straightforward to use. Like how (well-designed) doors meant to be pushed don't have handles so it's blatantly obvious you don't pull them because it's physically impossible to do so. Ever noticed that? Probably not, because nothing prompted you to think about how to open a door.

[wasab]

28 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

 

Probably because you didn't take a psychology or engineering course in college.

Because I asked how to use yay and instead have an asshat tell me to learn to use pkg build from an aur package before even consider using a helper. Should I also learn to skin my sheep and milk my own cow when I want to make a sweater and eat cheese? 

 

28 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

Most people are blind to the amount of thought put into every object we use every day to make them straightforward to use. Like how (well-designed) doors meant to be pushed don't have handles so it's blatantly obvious you don't pull them because it's physically impossible to do so. 

It won't change the muscle memory and habits of people who have been pulling doors all their lives. They might be as much annoyed at the designers stupid choice to create a handle-less pushing door as much as you are at their "stupidity". It is one of the reason why Windows people have such trouble with Linux. Some design choices are simply counter intuitive to people who have done things in a certain way. 

 

[Olgyd]

8 minutes ago, wasab said:

It won't change the muscle memory and habits of people who have been pulling doors all their lives. They might be as much annoyed at the designers stupid choice to create a handle-less pushing door as much as you are at their "stupidity" 

 

Hence... why there's no handle in the first place. Muscle memory and habits are irrelevant if you can't do what you want to do.

You're suggesting the existence of people who pull doors open by default that, when encountering a door with no handle, would get upset there's no handle to open the door? That'd be impressive. Moving things by colliding our bodies against it is a biological instinct far older than using opposable thumbs to manipulate objects.

 

And for the record, I don't think push doors with handles are "stupid". I know why they exist: aesthetics. I don't particularly like them, but I begrudgingly accept them because I acknowledge a push plate on certain doors are ugly.

[goatedpenguin]

5 hours ago, wasab said:

I only see bad behaviors among those who daily drive arch. They have a pretty elitist mentality. 

[goatedpenguin]

5 hours ago, Olgyd said:

A perfect demonstration of the fact that Linux evangelists are, as Muta puts it, the vegans of the PC world, though. Maybe worse actually, because once you're vegan other vegans are petty chill towards you. So @ilovecats7715 is right, don't use Linux - not because the OS is bad, but because the community is.

 

Somebody should make a TV show where a Linux user has to pass a human factors in engineering course and an engineering student pass a computer science course and see who succeeds first.

What? The community is not bad its just that the community gets mad at ppl who are using linux the wrong way. I mean to be fair Linux was never designed for the average joe or for gaming. If people rlly start saying that they are fed up of windows and want to move to Linux and play games then just dualboot for the love of god not all games can be played on linux due to anticheats and the market share for linux gaming is not big enough yet.  

 

[Olgyd]

1 hour ago, goatedpenguin said:

What? The community is not bad its just that the community gets mad at ppl who are using linux the wrong way.

I beg to differ. People do try to make Linux do things it isn't made for and it is indeed unfair to the OS. But you also get incidents like Linus and the "Do as I say" prompt and people saying it's 100% his fault for not reading. Even Apple with their legion of fanboys got flak with Antennagate and their response people are just holding it wrong.

 

Air France 447 is a great example of doing things right. It crashed because the pilot forgot the literal first rule of flying: how to recover from a stall. 100% pilot error. But Airbus didn't simply shrug and say "Well, tough. Nothing to fix here." They identified places where they could minimize the chances of it happening again, because they long ago realised telling people to not touch footguns isn't a viable solution.

 

[goatedpenguin]

51 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

I beg to differ. People do try to make Linux do things it isn't made for and it is indeed unfair to the OS.

They try to make it do things that it was not made for but can still do and it actually has an impact.  Gaming on Linux will never be "complete" unless the devs decide to port their anticheats/rootkits to Linux which I think the community will be VERY welcoming about. So for now imo the correct way is to dualboot. Don't just use Linux cuz its "Light", I have debloated my windows installation and there are things like AtlasOS which makes windows extremely lightweight too.  

 

 

[Paul17]

On 4/6/2024 at 6:41 AM, OhioYJ said:

As someone who uses Linux as their primary OS, and has for a very long time, I'm still of the opinion, gaming is the wrong use case for Linux. Everything else, yes I'd prefer to do in Linux.

 

Your hardware won't be an issue. For me hardware support has honestly been better than Windows. Heck I'm sitting next to a brand new HP laser printer that only works in Linux for some reason.  I'm typing this from a 13900k / 4090 machine right now running Linux.

 

I'm not saying Linux can't game, many games will run on your Linux. However you'll come across games you have to tinker with to get running. You'll come across games that just plain don't work at all in Linux. If you want to run Linux for other reasons that's great. However if you want to game, I'd dual boot and still use Windows for gaming. Trying to only run Linux and expecting it to be your gaming machine is setting yourself up for frustration.

I agree with this - and if someone still wants to try and game in Linux, I support that, too - BUT!!!! - I would still dual boot like you suggest - especially, noobs.

Let's face it, the majority of games are produced with Windows in mind and they're most tested with Windows in mind.   There's a few websites out there that has 'rated' the game for use on Linux - some gaming developers and companies have actively 'sabotaged' their game or made it difficult to use with Linux.   Or in other words, optimized it for Windows and consider Linux an afterthought - so, ppl should know that if trying to use their Linux OS for their gaming needs.

 

I think you can use almost any Linux distro for gaming but if you use an OS with older software and software versions - e.g. Mint, you can anticipate some frustration and headaches.   However, you can probably update your system so that you can run the games.   For instance, you can take a Debian system and update/upgrade it so it uses newer software versions - you can take Debian stable and upgrade it to Testing or sid.

 

However, in saying that, it's probably easier to use a rolling release distro and already have most of the software relatively up-to-date - examples:   OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora (technically, not rolling release but still pretty recent), Arch - I'd try one of those before going into the more obscure and less common distros. 

[OhioYJ]

2 hours ago, Paul17 said:

OS with older software and software versions - e.g. Mint

Most of the time I see people bring up Mint, it's due to the Kernel it's "shipped" with. However newer kernels are easily installed in the update manager under the Kernel option. I always had to do this running newer hardware. 

 

Also don't they have some new version "edge" or something these days that just includes the newer stuff out of the box? 

[Paul17]

5 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Most of the time I see people bring up Mint, it's due to the Kernel it's "shipped" with. However newer kernels are easily installed in the update manager under the Kernel option. I always had to do this running newer hardware. 

 

Also don't they have some new version "edge" or something these days that just includes the newer stuff out of the box? 

It's not just the kernel, most of the software is outdated or older versions - afaik, most Linux gaming systems often need or ultimately use newer software versions.   Why would you want to make yourself do more work updating and upgrading everything in Mint when you can have most of it set up already in other distros that are already shipping software that is already more recent or up to date?

Mint is just using Ubuntu's or Debian's base - so pick one of those - Debian testing or sid or most recent Ubuntu and then tweak whatever software you need for your gaming stuff.   

[The Hope]

Calculate Linux is nice for gaming.

 

I would say Calculate Linux, Devuan and Clear Linux have the fastest system startup times of all the Linux systems. (on modern hardware)

 

Calculate Linux is rolling release, which can be an advantage for gaming.

 

You can use native Steam or the Flatpak app. Both work well.

[Brian McKee]

The only issue I've ran into Linux gaming are games with obtrusive anti cheat. Otherwise Linux gaming is on par if not slightly behind windows.

 

For less popular titles it'd help if you're decent with Wine, but it's not a requirement. You also do not need a gaming focuses OS. I use vanilla Debian and gaming is fine. If you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons it's trivial to upgrade it, you don't need unstable rolling release OSs for gaming.

[Brian McKee]

On 4/24/2024 at 10:11 PM, Olgyd said:

I beg to differ. People do try to make Linux do things it isn't made for and it is indeed unfair to the OS. But you also get incidents like Linus and the "Do as I say" prompt and people saying it's 100% his fault for not reading. Even Apple with their legion of fanboys got flak with Antennagate and their response people are just holding it wrong.

 

Air France 447 is a great example of doing things right. It crashed because the pilot forgot the literal first rule of flying: how to recover from a stall. 100% pilot error. But Airbus didn't simply shrug and say "Well, tough. Nothing to fix here." They identified places where they could minimize the chances of it happening again, because they long ago realised telling people to not touch footguns isn't a viable solution.

 

Are we really going to compare gaming on Linux to an aviation catastrophe? Linux is just as made for gaming as Windows is, the only difference between them is commercial support. The only thing more annoying than people who use Linux for everything are people who hate people for saying they use Linux for everything.

 

[EdoTensei]

On 5/2/2024 at 8:55 PM, Brian McKee said:

The only issue I've ran into Linux gaming are games with obtrusive anti cheat. Otherwise Linux gaming is on par if not slightly behind windows.

 

For less popular titles it'd help if you're decent with Wine, but it's not a requirement. You also do not need a gaming focuses OS. I use vanilla Debian and gaming is fine. If you need a newer kernel for hardware reasons it's trivial to upgrade it, you don't need unstable rolling release OSs for gaming.

Well, I run into other issues, such as bugs, black screens after second boot, and few other things like settings app won't open etc.. 

 

I tried few distros: 

EndeavourOS (arch based) and installing anything was a black magic

 

Bazzie (based on fedora) installing things was easy enough for my Linux knowledge (since born only Windows user ), also after second boot it was getting only black screen with mouse on screen, system settings won't open sometimes.. 

 

Regata OS (openSUS) looks good, but terrible buggy. 

 

Pop OS (Ubuntu), seems okey as far as I've tested, because GNOME is not my thing, and even after few attempts I couldn't change it. 

 

I've heard that Mint or Debian are most stable, but not sure if Linux is for me. Windows lately is also buggy, but Linux from my experience isn't that better , I mean is faster, more responsive, and for my needs would be good enough, but lack of Game Pass, Adrenaline Software (I know LACT or CoreCTRL, but I was able to run LACT only on Bazzite), HWinfo64, so I would have to keep windows and Linux, and most of the time using Windows, so yeah I guess Linux is not for me

[Brian McKee]

8 minutes ago, EdoTensei said:

Well, I run into other issues, such as bugs, black screens after second boot, and few other things like settings app won't open etc.. 

 

I tried few distros: 

EndeavourOS (arch based) and installing anything was a black magic

 

Bazzie (based on fedora) installing things was easy enough for my Linux knowledge (since born only Windows user ), also after second boot it was getting only black screen with mouse on screen, system settings won't open sometimes.. 

 

Regata OS (openSUS) looks good, but terrible buggy. 

 

Pop OS (Ubuntu), seems okey as far as I've tested, because GNOME is not my thing, and even after few attempts I couldn't change it. 

 

I've heard that Mint or Debian are most stable, but not sure if Linux is for me. Windows lately is also buggy, but Linux from my experience isn't that better , I mean is faster, more responsive, and for my needs would be good enough, but lack of Game Pass, Adrenaline Software (I know LACT or CoreCTRL, but I was able to run LACT only on Bazzite), HWinfo64, so I would have to keep windows and Linux, and most of the time using Windows, so yeah I guess Linux is not for me

I mean, this is generally why I suggest a Debian flavor for basically anyone looking to "try" Linux. It's very stable and will just continue to work. Ubuntu, Mint, Vanilla Debian, Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE). Ubuntu/Kubuntu especially are just very complete and refined experiences.

 

I've never been a distro hopper. I picked stable cause I got work to do and haven't regretted it.

 

But yeah, Linux isn't for everyone and that's fine. But I implore people who can use it DO use it. The more market share that Linux gets the more software parity that will be achieved, making it possible for more people to switch over.

[xAcid9]

51 minutes ago, EdoTensei said:

Bazzie (based on fedora) installing things was easy enough for my Linux knowledge (since born only Windows user ), also after second boot it was getting only black screen with mouse on screen, system settings won't open sometimes.. 

What is your system spec?

52 minutes ago, EdoTensei said:

EndeavourOS (arch based) and installing anything was a black magic

Install pamac if you need GUI for software installation. 
pamac-aur if you need AUR support or pamac-all  for AUR + flatpak + snap + appstream support. 

[EdoTensei]

4 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

What is your system spec?

R9 5900X, 32Gb ram, 7800XT, B550 Asus F Gaming, 1Tb M.2 (with 250Gb partition for Linux) 

 

Also I have 4K TV connected by HDMI, for playing games, and unused for few months now, 1080p monitor, but it's unplugged.