I switched my gaming PC to Linux, and this time I think it's for good
This year I'm finally putting into action something that I've been wanting to do for some time: fortifying my home's network, improving privacy for my father and me, and laying the foundation for a smart home. (You guys took the time to help me out with that here, which, btw, thanks again!)
The network and privacy fortification is well underway and working. I set up Pi-hole with Unbound on one of my Raspberry Pis that also acts as a Tailscale exit node, got a new router that can connect my devices to ProtonVPN, have my Synology server working as storage, and... you know what, let's save this for another post. I'm still figuring some things out and want to let the dust settle first.
Anyway, back to gaming and PC'ing.
I'm no stranger to Linux; I've been using it on and off for over a decade on older PCs. But I've never committed to it on my main rig. As I said in another post, "It's the little things that make me not jump to Linux". While "these little things" didn't completely go away, I guess rolling up my sleeves to reconfigure my network, becoming more privacy-conscious, and reading about the ongoing issues with Windows 11 tipped the scales.
I debated between EndeavourOS and Fedora KDE. Fedora won.
EOS is a solid choice and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to try out an Arch-based distro. But Fedora is undeniably more popular, which means if there's a Linux app, it's almost guaranteed the devs will have a Fedora version with dedicated documentation and installation commands. In other words, the potential for more convenience won out.
And convenient it was, mostly thanks to this website: https://nattdf.streamlit.app/. It helped a ton. It installed codecs, SSH, enabled Flathub and RPM Fusion, etc. It even provides a script to install Nvidia drivers.
But drivers weren't my real worry. My real worry was something else entirely.
You see, I lied to you guys by omission. I actually tried to install Fedora a few months ago, but I had severe issues with my TV. My PC is connected to both a monitor and a TV. The monitor worked without problems, but the TV was a different story. The image quality was terrible. You know those photos taken with the very first camera phones? That's how the colors looked. I remember trying everything: switching to X11, installing different driver versions, messing around with Nvidia settings, display settings, color profiles, even the TV's internal settings. Nothing worked. So I gave up and went back to Windows.
But today, while trying to fix an issue with my TV, I noticed two things:
- I found out that my TV's HDMI ports are not all equal. Port 4 is HDMI 2.1, while all the others are 2.0.
- My PC was connected to Port 3.
This was the problem. It's what caused my Windows to randomly lose sound, and it's what made the image quality terrible on Fedora, and it's what caused issues I mentioned in my old post. I don't know how or why Windows could "deal with it" and output 4K 120Hz without apparent image quality loss, but somehow it did.
Regardless, after moving the cable to Port 4, installing Fedora, and getting the drivers running... it works just fine and dandy. Great image quality, 4K, and 120Hz. My PC still works flawlessly as a gaming machine.
The moral of the story? Don't be like me. Before blaming Wayland, Nvidia, drivers, or Linux... check the back of the TV.
This also brings a much-needed sense of standardization to my setup. Now that everything is under the same Linux umbrella, I can manage it all via SSH with total consistency. I’m already eyeing my Raspberry Pi’s Telegram bot as a way to remotely wake the PC for heavy tasks and shut it down afterward. The potential of this setup has me feeling pretty euphoric.
Now that the biggest hurdle is cleared, Steam is running perfectly and Proton is handling my game library like a champ. I'm finally daily-driving Linux on my main rig, and this time, I think it's for good.
Congrats! I've been running my main gaming rig on Linux solely since they started trying to push us to Windows 11 something like 5-6 years ago. I, too, settled on KDE but I settled on Kubuntu rather than Fedora (and don't get me wrong: I love Fedora), because Debian had the deepest bench of driver/low-level support I'd ever seen at that time. There's a chance that's shifted, but so far I've never bumped into an app that didn't have either a .deb or a flatpack and so it's never come up as an issue for me.
Really my biggest issue was finding a version of Linux that worked well with OpenRGB because I didn't at the time (and still don't) know of any other way to customize (disable, really) the RGB on my computer and RAM.
I've tried linux on my gaming rig several times over the years and this last time I switched to Kubuntu 25. It's the best PC experience I've had in a long time. The desktop performance and default file browser really highlighted to me how bad the user experience of windows has lagged behind. Wine/proton has gotten good enough that most windows apps I really care about generally just work.
The only thing I really miss from windows is Playnite but from what I've seen the dev is switching to linux themselves this year and rebuilding the Playnite UI with Avalonia.
Kubuntu has been my go-to distro for about a decade now. I've tried all the others out there but I prefer KDE and I already have 20+ years of using Ubuntu under my belt, so Kubuntu just winds up being the best fit for me. I don't push it on others because it's hard to explain all the unique nerdy choices that landed me there over the years. Besides, finding the distro that's fit for you is 95% the point of Linux to begin with.
I should really use my gaming rig more often but I've got it configured in such a way these days that it's more annoying to get everything flipped over to it than to just stay on my Mac and stream Steam from it sometimes.
Not picking on your choice of distro, more of a statement for awareness - but OpenRGB runs flawlessly on Arch for me (and I assume other Arch-based distros). I don't have RGB RAM, but it works fine for mobo fans, GPU, and peripherals - same as it did under Windows for me.
I also know I was able to disable the temperature sensor on my RAM because it was causing my PC to fail to sleep. I don't recall the exact commands though, but perhaps it is possible to also disable just the RGB by preventing it from being accessed or something. If I can find the article I read on how to disable the sensor, I'll be sure to share it
The last time I looked at Arch was about 5+ years ago, so I'm sure the experience has improved, but whenever it was that I looked at it the whole thing was a little too nitty-gritty for me. I like that I can get deep level if I need to, but whatever was going on when I checked out Arch made me exhausted. Maybe it's different. I do need to upgrade my Kubuntu as I believe I'm using an LTS version that's about to lose support; I genuinely never look into it anymore, so I have no idea what version I'm running as I don't much care as it's already configured to do what I want it to do and that's enough for me.
There's plenty of Arch-based distros that take a lot of the "nitty-gritty" out of the equation - CachyOS is one I've seen recommended lately, though I personally haven't used it. But it's supposed to be gaming oriented and seems to be well received.
SteamOS came out in 2021 and that has greatly benefited Arch. Entirely possible you last tried Arch just before the Steam Deck released. But it's definitely come a long way thanks to contributions from Valve.
Might be worthwhile to try again. I definitely still want the full desktop/gaming rig setup. KDE can be annoying to run at times, as Gnome was always the more supported window manager in my experience. I just always appreciated KDE’s design philosophy. But I also spend a huge chunk of my time in terminal, so the window manager is less important these days.
Good news then - KDE is really well polished recently and Gnome is well... still Gnome. I find the opposite to be true these days and KDE being much easier to do most things in than Gnome
You might also be interested in EndeavourOS if you're more of a terminal power user as terminal usage is the main focus. KDE Plasma is the default DE there and also on CachyOS, I believe.
I need to upgrade for sure; I’m apparently still using X11 or X.org rather than Wayland, and Plasma 5. Gnome just looks bad, Abe I don’t really like Cinnamon or the more cut back window manager, either. I tried Gnome 3 with Ubuntu in an emulator awhile ago, and other than agreeing that the dock is better to the left for wide screen monitors like mine (I moved my Mac’s dock over there years ago ) the rest of it didn’t sit with me.
Oh yeah, Wayland has also come a long way in recent years. I'm kind of required to use it because I have different refresh rates on all my displays, something X can't do. My only nitpick is that I use input-leap as a software KVM to control my work PC and in the more secure architecture of Wayland, I can't use the clipboard share between machines. But I have other options, so not a deal breaker.
Plasma 6 is really pretty! And if you want a dock, there are plenty of options. I like that in vanilla Plasma, there's very little I feel like I have to modify to fit my liking. Whereas Gnome and XFCE have always required a lot of fiddling. Though at the end of the day, I would take both of those over the original Ubuntu Unity DE...
I use a KVM called Synergy (originally purchased when I was transitioning my main computer tasks from Windows to macOS) and its long time inability to work with Wayland was a main reason I didn’t upgrade, but I think they’ve fixed that by now.
Other than the theme and a few random things here and there (such as setting my taskbar clock to 24 hours), I’ve done no tweaking in KDE. I recall hours of time plunged into configuring Xubuntu and Lubuntu years ago when I was testing out the best Linux to use for my gaming rig. I tried to give each distribution a good few months to trial, and only the two KDEs were winning, and at the time the only reason that Kubuntu won over Fedora Core was wider compatibility of software and drivers for Debian-based distros than Redhat at the time.
Hah, input-leap is a Wayland compatible fork of barrier which in itself is a fork of the original synergy core.
Though looking at the synergy site, it seems even input-leap is falling off too. Though I don't really appreciate the tone in this blog post - the author comes across to me as "open source sucks, use our paid software instead". I might still check out Deskflow though and see if native clipboard sharing is supported there.
I've come to the opinion that my best bet is to stick with what I do now: have my keyboard connected via USB-C to one, and Bluetooth to the other, and just swap off mice (the only ones I've found that have an input select button in a convenient place tends not to last long.)
If you decide to try out arch again, try Endeavour OS. It's arch but with extra scripts, with several features and settings preconfigured for you. It makes Arch ready to go out of the box, so you don't waste time configuring every minute thing.
It also has a welcome screen which acts as a tutorial, it tells you what you need to do upon first launch, and it also acts as a shortcut for several features that you can use later
Second Endeavour. It's great.
I might give that or the other suggestion of Catchy a try. I vaguely recall my main pain point with Arch being the installer itself being a nightmare as my particular setup was fairly new at the time and not well supported. Now my tech is nearly a decade old, and since it’s fully AMD maybe it’ll be an easier install for me this time.
Honestly OpenRGB seems to have been easier to set up with the permissions needed on Fedora than it was on an Ubuntu-based distro for me. Might just be that I gave up earlier when I set up my previous distro though. I finally have it set to turn the lights off when I put the computer to sleep (and back on with my preferred settings when I wake it back up) since my PC is now in my bedroom 😌
I’ve always had to get the .deb file direct from the website and I think only Bookworm ever worked right? It’s been awhile since I set up my gaming rig, though, so I could be misremembering.
You have to follow the instructions on their website regardless, and to get it access to everything you usually have to give it particular permissions. I could change the lights manually when I was an Ubuntu-based distro but I never managed to get it to work properly automatically, but either my savviness improved in the interim or it was just easier on Fedora. There's an official Fedora package for it iirc, but I thought there also was one on Ubuntu so idk
I do notice that I have to manually apply the OpenRGB profile again if I shut down and boot from cold, but not if I simply restart. Seems like a project for the weekend. I have gone distro hopping in years, but I think I’ve got the energy for it if this week isn’t too beastly at work.
I've been gaming on Linux since around 2021 or 2022, and I recently distro-hopped to Fedora KDE myself! I'm really liking it here. In terms of gaming, it's gotten to the point where I don't even really have to check ProtonDB before I buy a game at all, because I can just assume it'll work (though I do usually check for any good recommendations for changing settings just in case). Granted, I don't play many multiplayer games and thus haven't suffered much from anti-cheat, which is where most of the remaining friction with gaming on Linux is.
That’s why I stopped playing with my Linux box and did most of a year of live on my Xbox. My main game is GTA Online, and they’ve basically kicked the Linux gamers off of the game. I’ve found a workaround recently that lets you play in solo lobbies which is all that I do, but it’s still frustrating that I have to feel like a criminal IT hacker and route around Rockstar. At any given time they could take umbrage and blow up my spot so thoroughly that I lose my Steam account and my Xbox account.
Yeah, unfortunately afaik the anti-cheat stuff is mostly due to developer unwillingness (particularly from big devs). The only big multiplayer game I play much uses Easy Anti-Cheat and works fine, but some of the biggest names are unfortunately a whole lot worse about this aspect. Hopefully that'll change with time.
A lot of them simply are running on inertia I believe. Rockstar started off exclusively developing on PC/DOS/Windows and they’ve probably got a ton of custom tooling in place to enable them to develop quickly and effectively on their chosen platforms. The annoying thing is that their stated reason was “hackers” but the problem has always been the PC port.
I don’t think that Linux gamers hack much for the purposes of cheating. I’d like to believe it’s because we’re more ethical but it’s probably just that we’re too busy fiddling with Linux itself to ever bother hacking some game. /s
There are actually several major anti-cheats that support Linux, with developers only needing to flip a switch in the settings to turn it on, and iirc there have been at least some instances where devs used anti-cheat that supported Linux but just refused to turn it on.
I also don't think Linux users are particularly more likely to be hackers (at least in the multiplayer gaming sense). I suppose I'll acknowledge that it'd be easier for them to do so sometimes, but like, I don't think it's even the case that hackers would switch to Linux for that reason if games added Linux support.
Rockstar is using BattlEye and could absolutely merely “flip a switch” to support Linux, but they refuse to do so. To be honest, this feels like something deeper having to do with Valve and the Steam Deck than it does actual Linux users and actually caring about them cheating. But I have no proof, so this opinion is brought to you entirely by Vibes™
Yeah I agree, I think it has more to do with territorial behavior on the part of Rockatar than it does actually combatting cheating in any way.
Cosigned. I have been a linux gamer for a decade now, it has never been easier and everything just works. Just make sure you are using Proton-GE and you'll be running fine all the way through.
I have tried every popular distro this year after finally leaving my self-install versions of Arch, and they've all worked. CachyOS with Snapper is great and performant (Arch based). Fedora Silverblue through Bazzite works great if you're not one to tinker (otherwise it's hell), and even NixOS or OpenSuse are pretty resilient on it.
Honestly even Proton-GE is mostly only needed for edge cases these days. Normal Proton has advanced a ton, at least if the decrease in frequency with which I need to switch to GE is anything to go by.
Honestly, I've gamed on Linux+Steam for 4, 5 years, and not once have I needed to use GE.
I've swapped to it for a couple games in the past based on ProtonDB recommendations but I think it was to solve a few edge cases (weird audio issues and the like), and I haven't had that happen for years.
This is why I just use GE as a default, I don't even have to debug and figure out the edge cases, since everything that works in GE will work in standard. One less thing to worry about.
Honestly it's been ages since I've had to manually switch Proton versions for anything, GE or otherwise. The user experience for me has really become quite smooth by now.
Neat! Also good timing, just like you I have been using Linux on and off over the years. I did use to dual boot for a while back in 2019 (Ubuntu at the time) but still had to fiddle a bit too much with it for my taste back then.
Lately I have been contemplating switching and was actually in the process of setting everything up. I have Fedora (KDE plasma edition) installed on an old surface go table, which made it feel like new I might add. The next step is going to be the switch on my main desktop.
Neat! I like how it is transparently showing what it does and how, not just gives you the shell script at the end as a download. Most of it I had manually already prepared, but it is good to see some confirmation of my own work and some extra things I had not thought of.
@JCAPER
I made the switch yesterday and really want to thank you for bringing https://nattdf.streamlit.app/ to my attention! I still had to tweak the script a little bit but it took a lot of work out of my hands!
Happy to help mate
I installed Pop_OS! on my gaming PC and have been having a good time so far. I tried plain old Debian but it wasn't playing so well with my 3080 Ti. I'm proud to say I'm now living in a Windows-free household.
I also recently decided to properly switch!
Similar spot for me, used it off-and-on dual-booting and had it on my laptop (though that's basically a web-browser device), but decided to actually switch with no plan on going back. Overall, definitely no regrets. It feels like being a kid again where computers were fun and if you don't like something you can just change it.
The switch was a pain in the ass, but that had nothing to do with linux. I had previously set up a few drives as media storage via Windows Storage Spaces, and getting that reconfigured was a slow and annoying process. Lesson learned for the future to think ahead about storage compatibility.
Gaming has been no issue at all. I mostly play indie or puzzle games, and a lot of them were as simple as
wine game.exeand it just runs. Lutris/Steam have made anything else work without issue.The only thing that didn't work great wasn't a game, but MusicBee. Running it via wine has some issues, and nothing I've found native to linux comes close to its functionality.
Glad the switch has been running smoothly for you, so welcome to Club Penguin! I've been on Linux full time for a few years now (I run Arch btw).
I'd love to make the switch to Linux on my gaming PC, but I still like playing games like Madden, FC, and Fortnite - none of which work without Windows due to anti-cheat.
Congrats on the switch! It always is the most minor things that end up causing the biggest headaches haha. I switched my own PC to Linux for gaming back in 2023 and I've never looked back since. I started with Ubuntu but distro-hopped a bunch over the last 3 years and have now landed on EndeavourOS. It works alright but I never had the time to properly learn how to use the underlying Arch systems so my system is in a weird state. I've been thinking about just hopping back to Ubuntu and keeping automatic updates on.
I switched to Aurora two years ago after wanting to check out Fedora Atomic, then Universal Blue (the broad project that Aurora is a part of), and had a great time with things. I did get tired of some limitations of the atomic environment (not being able to add certain packages without developing a solution myself against their build system for my own Github job), but have since switched to Debian with the release of Trixie (13) and it's been everything I want. Some quirks, but Windows just has different quirks.
I keep Windows for the occasional game that needs Ring0 anti-cheat (EA Skate, mostly), but even then don't really use it much.
My favorite thing is I like to play older games, like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which all have PC ports, and use Bottles to run them with mods so I can have everything in a separate environment. You just can't do that in Windows. I actually think WINE is far better for older games a lot of the time than Windows-native is.
Kohan Ahriman's Gift, which is a RTS game from the early 2000s (strangely available on Steam), runs miles better on linux than it did on Windows 10. I was amazed at the performance.
Nice one. I've had my main PC on Linux for something like 20 years now, and a couple of years ago it was finally upgraded (the PC is like Trigger's broom at this point) to a stage where gaming was possible. Good, even, given the platform I was building on.
I ran an Arch derivative and Steam just worked. I was astonished at the level of compatibility.
There's some past tense here because I switched my main desktop to a Mac, but I use sunshine and moonlight to use the Linux gaming PC from my Mac desktop. It still works flawlessly, lol. I use WOL to wake up the "big PC" and steam big picture can suspend it again when I'm done. It's like having my own streaming cloud in my house.
Same here, running Bazzite (with Gnome). Atomic desktop is pretty cool, it’s very difficult to break stuff. Gnome is simple and gets out of my way.
Had to do some minor fixes but all in all works great. Still have Windows in dual boot but haven’t started up Windows in like half a year.
I have been using Linux since the start of the Windows 7 era. I ran Windows in a VM for all my gaming needs, a few years back I switched to a purely Linux gaming with NixOs. I had one Windows machine left in my living room for my son's gaming needs, but like things go in the Windows 11 era, certain games stopped working all together, and the Linux opportunity has risen once again, I installed CachyOS there, my son has been once again a happy camper.
Proud Linux gamer here too, since late last year. I switched both my laptop and desktop to Arch Linux. Zero issues, switching both took a few hours until I was happy with my desktop environments.