Linux Gaming

There's never a bad time to switch to Linux! The best time may have already passed, but the second best time is now!

I believe your last Linux experience in 2015 predates DXVK which has been transformative for Linux gaming. Wine used to have to implement its own DirectX replacement which necessarily lagged behind Microsoft's implementation, and IIUC didn't get the same level of hardware acceleration due to missing out on DirectX acceleration built into graphics cards.

Now DXVK acts as a compatibility bridge between DirectX and Vulkan. Vulkan is cross-platform, does generally the same stuff that DirectX does, and graphics cards have hardware acceleration for Vulkan calls the same way they do for DirectX calls. So game performance on Linux typically meets or exceeds performance on Windows, and you can play games using the latest DirectX version without waiting for some poor dev to reimplement it.

If you are using Steam with Proton, Lutris, or really any Wine gaming these days you are using DXVK. It's easy to take for granted. But I remember the night-and-day difference it made.

If you're tired of Windows spying on everything you do, this is a great time to switch to Linux. If you believe it's ok that Windows spies on you because you have nothing to hide, then you need to do some more growing up lol.

If you can handle there being a few games that you just can't play, the time to switch to Linux began a couple of years ago.

I switched last year and kind of was in a similar spot to you - I had tried to switch in the past but something didn't work so I went back to windows. But that last attempt has stuck. So I'd just do it. Proton is in an amazing state, old games and even most new singleplayer games will work - some modern multiplayer games with anticheat even work. I'd just check your library on protondb (you can sign in to see your library), see what doesn't work, if you care about it, or if there are workarounds.

What I also did is make a list of stuff that doesn't work and then find alternatives or workarounds. If some games don't work, you can hold off on switching, check protondb occasionally and see if something changes. But if it's all good, I'd just make the jump.

It's always the right time to switch to a free os.

Proton works very well for me. I don't play any games that use anti cheat though.
A lot of games that use anti cheat middleware don't work, but I've heard support is improving.
I use Debian Testing. I recommend using Testing as well if you want to use Debian, or at least a custom kernel like xanmod to get newer drivers.

@mouse
Im using manjaro for 2 years now.
Didn't do any special to it.
Just steam, libre office and some smaller apps.
No problems so far.

I decided to try exclusively gaming on Linux for a few months as a "new year's resolution" back in 2019, see if I could stop dual booting just for games. Never went back, deleted my Windows partition completely that Summer.

There's a couple of important things to note, which you didn't have in your post:

• which graphics card you have. If you're AMD / Intel, the drivers are integrated into most distros, and they just work. NVidia is a bit of a ballache - once you know how to install their proprietary ones and disable Nouveau, they're reasonably trouble-free. Reasonably.

• what kind of games you're into. And really, the question is 'are you into MMOs / online shooters' that are likely to have troublesome DRM, because mostly everything else works.

ProtonDB has an entry for nearly every game on Steam with some compatibility notes, but really, Proton, DXVK, and the advent of the Steam Deck have really pushed things forwards - gaming on Linux seems less troublesome to me now than gaming on Windows used to be

Someone above mentioned 'trouble with Lutris'? Works pretty damn well with my non-Steam games, but then, those are mostly from GOG, so a bit older and DRM free.

iv moved to linux for over a year now when proton started getting rlly good and iv enjoyed it so much i started a small youtube channel lmao. software has gotten rlly good aswell in the foss universe with package managers like flatpak and some amazing gtk4 apps

gaming on linux is a breeze and with valve making more deals to get companies to support proton for linux/steamdeck

its going to continue to get better and better until windows will not be required anymore

IMHO it depends on what kind of gaming you do. For me, I play all the big tentpole AAA games on console. My PC gaming is mostly indy stuff and things that suck on console like 4x strategy games. For my uses, gaming on linux has been... surprisingly good.

I would definitely recommend trying it out with dual boot.

A lot has changed since 2015 thanks to Proton. However, it's not a magic pill. Some tinkering might be required, with how much and how often depends on what you play. So just give it a try and see it for yourself, dual boot is a viable option. Pick some user-friendly distro that handles Windows detection and offers easy video drivers installation. Are you sure that Debian is that distro given your struggles with Arch Linux? I'm not that familiar with it myself, I thought that Debian comes in a relatively raw state.

I would ask myself "What are the games I play and how important is it to be able to play the latest AAA games when they come out?"

Proton is doing a wonderful job with compatibility, but it will likely always be behind by a bit.

If gaming is your primary focus and you play a lot of new games when they first come out, dual booting might be the best option.

On the other hand, if you are more patient and don't have to play things on release day or just like going through the catalogue of older good games, you can probably get away with a full switch.

Personally, I'm in a more privileged scenario. I have a laptop with Linux and a desktop with Windows for gaming. I do most of my gaming on the steam deck, PS5, or switch but any first person or games that benefit from good reaction time with a mouse get played on my desktop. Some of my games just won't work on proton because they are too intensive to run through emulation or just in too early a state to consider trying.

With all of that, if I could only have one machine it would likely be running Windows in some capacity.

I recommend you evaluate that question for yourself and go look at ProtonDB to figure out what state you'll be in.

Might as well. I'm a linux guy, running various distros on a few machines, depending on the machines function. My gaming laptop runs Linux Mint, and I find that to be a pretty good choice. Almost everything works out of the box (I just had to install a newer kernel to make the newest nvidia driver work, as my GPU is pretty new as well).

I have a Win10 install, but I haven't used it in ages. Everything I play plays just fine in Linux.

For gaming either go Pop!OS, Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Debian is always far behind on drivers. Check protondb first though.

I'm a month or so into switching from Windows 10 to Ubuntu. I've never lasted this long in prior attempts to switch over.

Gaming has been quite good. Steam just works for 99% of the games I've tried, with the 1% being one or two minor bugs in games that otherwise worked fine. Lutris, on the other hand, did not work at all. 0% success rate installing or running games.

Linux does still seem brittle and/or unnecessarily complicated, though. For example, I have a super common nvidia card, and my first post-install experience was having to boot into safe mode to fix the drivers. Then Ubuntu updated the drivers and my screens didn't come back up. I had to hard-reset to get them back. And I have yet to get NUT installed and configured correctly so I can have the PC power down gracefully when the UPS runs low, something which is trivial in Windows.

Is all the frustration worth it to have an OS that isn't selling me ads and trying to move me to a cloud account? Probably.

As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it's easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I'm using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it's usable. I've found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it's still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven't had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren't displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn't know what a display server.

I do this exactly. I have a Pop Os installation on its own drive and the original win 10 drive, plus they each have their own secondary storage drives. I switch using the BIOS but honestly I find myself doing that less and less.

I used to have a larger NTFS storage drive both systems could see but it kept getting marked as read-only so I gave up and just got a fourth one for Pop Os.

Sometimes when I boot up Pop Os after having been in Windows it can't see any USB devices until after login or until I plug and unplug them.

So there's some minor annoyances to this setup but at least windows doesn't overwrite the bootloader every couple updates.

I'm very much considering never getting windows 11 (or 12 lol). The only games I have issues with are some AAA multiplayer games - like Borderlands - and even then they run they just don't play nice with other players.

I would say yes. I wanted my desktop to run linux in 2015, but the gaming situation was the biggest hurdle. I had been running linux on my laptop since ~2013, but I was constantly trying new games and couldn't tell friends "sorry, I can't run that, we have to pick something else". These days, 99% of everything I want to play runs fine using proton on arch. There are occasional times that I need to try a different build of proton, or suffer a bit of pipeline compilation, but that's about it. I don't do a lot of modern competitive games though, so anti-cheat might be a deal breaker for you. I've been able to do some EAC games without issue though (ex. Hunt: Showdown runs fine).

Been running Arch exclusively on my gaming rig for 3 months, now, with no issue. Thanks to Proton, the only blocker is games that use anti-cheat solutions that don't work properly. Everything that's relied on VAC or EAC work fine, though.

This is my third attempt at making this move on my gaming rig. The first try was back in 2016. The second was in 2018. This time, I think I'm here to stay. The Steam Deck's success was the final ingredient.

I am in doubt about running Linux on my gaming system. As I need it to be as close to 100% compatible as possible for running games. Because I still have a lot of games on Steam that I haven't finished. So I don't want to lose the ability to play some of them.

Imo the only thing better about windows is its support for gaming. But Linux has been getting better and better about that.

I'd bet that Linux will be almost completely caught up when support ends for Windows 10 in two years. That's probably when I will make the switch for my gaming PC.

To provide a different perspective to everyone else, I would say that it's not the right time if you want everything to "just work".

I tried out Ubuntu 22.04 just a couple of months ago, and only one game of the several I tried "just worked". Everything else either didn't work at all, or required hours of searching and troubleshooting and problem solving, with mixed success. And I'm not a technophobe, I'm a software developer with experience in system support.

People keep saying there's lots of guides out there for most things, and that's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean the guide will work for you. I tried multiple "guides" to get my games working and most of them didn't help. Either they were too old, or there was a step that I couldn't complete, or I completed the guide and there was an error that isn't mentioned in the guide. Or any number of other problems.

Regardless of what people say, it may not be as simple as "switch to Proton and install Lutris". In the end I just got frustrated with having to work so hard to get my own computer to do the things I wanted it to do, and so I reverted back to Windows and had all my software working as expected within a couple of hours.

Astrologically speaking? Probably not, no. I'd consider waiting until the time is better.

If you dual boot on separate drives it should be fine to use grub or systemd boot (or sth else), most Linux bootloaders can detect Windows installations and boot them. On the same drive it is fine as well, but windows tends to overwrite the bootloader with updates (which would be the same even when not booting Windows from the "Linux" bootloader).

As you said, just do it and try it out. In my experience basically any game runs on Linux these days, with some exceptions, most of them caused by anti cheat (like Fortnite, valorant and some others)

To answer the title of this post... Yes, yes it is.