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PC Gamer: "I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop" (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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[–] 115 points 8 months ago (24 children)

I was so reluctant to transition to Linux for gaming. I've been using Linux since 2007, so I'm not new to the OS.

I took the plunge a handful of months ago, and it is an amazing experience. The games I like to play actually saw performance gains when switching over.

I still dual boot a Win 10 partition for outliers, but so far the only game to get installed there has been BF6, due to the requirements of their anti-cheat.

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I also have a spare windows drive for BF6, but it's so unbelievably mid that in practice I don't really even play it

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    How easy was it to do the signed boot?

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    Not OP. I'm dual booting Windows and Fedora. Fedora supports secure boot, so everything works out of the box. The only thing that annoys me are the Nvidia drivers. Those need a kernel module that you need to compile yourself. And all kernel modules need to be signed for secure boot.

    In theory, it's still easy: At first, Fedora boots with a precompiled and signed nouveau driver, that supports secure boot - so you can use your PC after the install. When you install the NVidia Driver, akmods etc gets setup automatically. Also they automatically generate a key pair for you and mokutil allows you to send that key to your UEFI, so that you can install it on the next boot. So it's just reboot, load the key once in the UEFI and after the reboot the official driver is running. After every kernel upgrade akmods should automatically recompile the module, sign it with your key (now known by your UEFI) and it just works.

    In practice... For me it's a 50:50 if the akmods auto build works. So, after a kernel upgrade, I usually reboot, wait for the build to fail to a Desktop in 1024×768 and then have to open a terminal and type akmods --rebuild --force. After the build and an additional reboot everything works again.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    Lmfao it's a piece of shit, basically I have all three of my drives hanging out of the 5.25 bay on the front of my machine. That way I can easily unplug my 2 Linux drives when I enable secure boot. Otherwise my Linux won't boot, which fucking sucks to fix. So basically it's a pain in the ass and BF6 just isn't good enough for me to spend that effort.

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  • [–] 42 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    It's funny. I also was very hesitant to make the jump from Windows, but finally did in 2025. I was dual booting for a while until I realized I hadn't been into the Windows one in months because it was a pain in the ass for various reasons. So I just got rid of it.

    I've made peace with the fact that I won't be able to play certain games. Their loss; there's plenty of other games to buy with my money.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss; there’s plenty of other games to buy with my money.

    Same.

    I have a backlog of games years long, the fact that I can't put Battlefield or Valorant on that list doesn't diminish my ability to play amazing games 24/7 if I wanted.

    Expedtion 33, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight, Silksong, Hades 2, ARC Raiders, Helldivers 2, Path of Exile 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etcetcetc.

    I have over 200 games in my Steam library and every single one works on Linux. I'll worry about the 5 kernel anti-cheat games once I get to the end of my list...

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    I was dual booting for a while until I realized I hadn’t been into the Windows one in months because it was a pain in the ass for various reasons. So I just got rid of it.

    A very old familiar story over the past couple decades or so.

    I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss

    Yup.

    It shall continue being good to see other people get this, taking their power back, ceasing being their games dealer's bitch.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    Same experience here. I've used Linux for decades. Always on my servers. Occasionally on a desktop here or there. Tried to daily-drive it on a single computer or laptop many times. Got close a couple times, but ultimately always fell back to Windows when the going got tough, when hardware support wasn't available or the errors and misconfigurations became too convoluted or I simply fell back into the habit of regularly using programs that simply didn't work or weren't available in any form on Linux.

    When I came back to it a year or two ago? That experience totally changed. The tables have flipped completely. Linux is now the compatible, straightforward, quickly-fixed, and often even user-friendly option while Windows has turned into a frustrating shitshow of blocking and opting-out of misfeatures and reconfiguring shit that breaks all the time with Microsoft's ideological "updates".

    Switching to Linux on my grandma's computer was a breath of fresh air for both of us. Then I switched one of my laptops. I remained impressed. It took some self-convincing, but eventually I got brave enough to switch my main gaming PC/desktop workstation... and with a little bit of work, it was soon perfectly lovely (I'm typing this on it right now). I've been running PikaOS, a gaming-focused Debian variant for over a year now and it's been an utterly fantastic experience. I have zero complaints. Are there still some rough edges? Yes, absolutely, but I don't mind. I use them to file the callouses off my bash-scripting fingers while I figure out a way to smooth them down.

    I'm pretty savvy and experienced with Linux, and I realize it's probably not ready for everyone yet, but it's ready for more people than you'd think. For grandma, who only uses web browser and word processor and email, Linux is a straight upgrade in user experience, stability, functionality, everything. For Gamers, everything you need is almost all out there already, thanks to Steam and Wine and Proton and the gaming-focused distros and all the ecosystem that's built up around that. Ironically it's the technically competent Windows "Power Users" who might still struggle the most, they won't have the survival skills they need to operate at the level they expect in a Linux ecosystem yet.

    It would also be good enough for a Power User to work at grandma's level with zero effort, or a Gamer level if they were willing to just blindly follow copy-and-pasted instructions, but that justifiably won't be enough for them. To work at a Power User level in Linux, you need to learn some different skills. Maybe you can get those on the server side and through stubborn trial and error, like I did, or maybe Linux will eventually get good enough that it's intuitive to do everything even Windows Power Users want to do eventually. But I don't think it's quite there yet for that group. It takes some effort, for sure.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    The games I like to play actually saw performance gains when switching over.

    Yes. That's part what got me to let go of my dual-booting habit.

    When booted to Windows, I would get tempted to play something (that I had installed on both sides) lazily without rebooting back to Linux, and it would suck.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (11 children)

    TBH I don't understand what's there even to be reluctant about if you're already a Linux user. You've probably already been dualbooting, it's not exactly a lot of effort to install Steam or a gog Linux installer.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago* (6 children)

    How shit gaming had been on it, for the majority of it's lifetime.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah do people not remember the pre proton era? Or before the push in the 2010s that got indie games to support Linux?

    Linux gaming has seen wild changes in just the last 5 years.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah for tech savvy people it wasn't a big deal. Download Windows game on the interwebs, check winehq and then game.

    But it wasn't always plug and play. Also I always was flexible on what games I wanted to play.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I absolute do remember the pre proton era, but for Linux users it should have been common knowledge that Proton exists and worked pretty well for years. And it's certainly less effort to try at least a little to get a game working you already own (by looking it up on protondb if it doesn't work right away) than to boot into Windows specifically for gaming.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    If the game is not on Steam or doesn't have a native Linux port (which is actually worse more often than not) then manually setting up to run through wine/proton is pain the ass.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (2 children)

    How many people only play games that this applies to?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    There are a lot of people play such such games at least occasionally. And on Windows they just work. The moment gamer try to do this on Linux and realize that it doesn't, they will go back to Windows.

    The paradise of easy gaming on Linux ends the moment you try to leave Valve's walled garden.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    For me, it's Final Fantasy XI - it's a million years old and it actually does run fine on Linux, but some of the third party QOL tools I use to make it less painful to play don't work (or at least I can't figure out how to get them to work) through Lutris.

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