I was in the same shoes, then one day I decided to give a shot to Bazzite. To my surprise the installation was extremely smooth, and everything worked right away. Now I’m playing almost everything on it (Arc Raiders, EU V, HLL and Horizon FW recently). If you want to _try_ all you need is 15 minutes, some HDD space and an empty USB. You don’t have to give up Windows at all, dual booting is also pretty smooth.
Gaming on Linux is hit and miss, depending on the distro you use and your desktop environment. Some games should be launched with gamescope if you are using Gnome/GDM
To have HellDivers run in borderless window on Debian 14. It required me to manually compile gamescope (wasn't that difficult but Valve's instructions are out of date), and use the backports on Trixie to upgrade the kernel to 6.16, and update wireplumber and pipewire (sound was flakey on some games). Kernel 6.16 performs much better than 6.12 just generally.
All the Arkham games work perfectly. Doom Eternal has some weird latency in the mouse and aiming doesn't feel right.
I could never get my Xbox One bluetooth controller behaving with Linux. I ended buying a 8bitdo Xbox style controller which works perfectly. It is much better made than the Xbox controller and roughly the same price.
A few games I've tried required a little fiddling to work correctly. Some of these, like Dark Souls, required me to get a Windows patcher to run in linux to patch a windows binary, which required me to launch the patcher from Proton in Steam, and know where Steam installed the game. Not straightforward at all, but it can be done. I would not call it an experience for the average Windows gamer.
Some of the latest shooters, will get you banned because anti-cheat.
That said, there's nothing in my library (180 games!) that doesn't run in Linux, and I have a number of games that you can't even get to run in Windows at all anymore.
I think the gaming community should all send Gabe Newell a Valentines Day card, or maybe a Christmas gift, or something. Seriously, the man has done so much for gaming, think of where we'd be without him. Windows App Store, Sony Game Store, walled gardens...
No the correct choice is what I want to use and it is Debian. Distro-hopping doesn't fix your problems and you will end up with either the same issues or more issues by distro-hopping.
I use my Linux machine for things other than games and I am not moving to "distro of the week" to run one game.
The correct choice if you don't want to spend all that time fucking around with your configs to play a game is Bazzite. If you value something more than the time you save then sure, use Debian for that ineffable reason: but don't bitch and moan about Linux being hard to play games on just because you're using a distro that isn't designed for it.
Bazzite makes gaming easy and is the Linux distro for gaming.
>People exaggerate the problems of using a stable distro.
Stability isn't a problem, it's a feature. Companies trust Debian, Ubuntu LTS, etc. for their servers EXACTLY because the packages are old.
This isn't the case with desktop computers, where the latest optimizations are delivered weekly if not monthly, and may improve performance across the board.
I've been playing games on Debian Stable for many years now, and although there were some issues back when the Linux Steam client first came out, in past five or so years, I noticed that I tend to forget to even check whether a game works with Proton before buying, and I haven't had any issues playing all sorts of games.
Of course, I don't play AAA slop that's essentially rootkits with a game attached on the side, but even more reasonable AAA titles tend to work just fine.
What I'm trying to say is that this "debian stable is from previous century" confusion needs to die. They had one or two slightly longer periods between two stable releases, many years in the past, but that seems to be all people remember.
I also bit the bullet and did a bazzite install and am blown away how seamless it has been for what I need. All the games I like run on Steam. Even Diablo 4 runs through the Blizzard launcher which does take some work to get installed, but nothing you can't find in a youtube video.
No issues using the system as my daily driver for personal things. I have dual monitors, one oriented vertically and one 144hz. All works great! I'd recommend it to anyone
The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.
I've been very happy with Aurora-DX, which falls under the Universal Blue umbrella. I reboot it once a week to apply updates and I can roll back if I need to.
Loved the concept, tried it out, didn't work, at least not for RDR2 which I was trying to play. But how would it work, there is Linux, Bazzite, then there is Steam, RDR2 needs the Rockstar launcher, it's such an intricate web of dependencies, I'm not surprised something isn't working.
When silly DRM or a game launcher is all that is keeping you from enjoying a game, that is when you get the pirated version without any of this bs and enjoy it without remorse.
frankly at this point pirating the content seems a lot more convenient than some of these games, I wonder if those execs are trying to intentionally push us off
