Hello to all i am a 65 yrs old who 5 yrs ago to build my own pc as a retirement activity and it is a succes 18 mths ago i got rid of the shakle of windows and began my adventure with linux and i love it but i need help for a gaming set up after trying many distribution i am sill unable to make a proper set up for it any coaching to do it would really appreciated thank you
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Hi! From my own limited, noobish experience of a Windows switcher wannabe, Fedora with KDE works best for gaming. This is because I have an NVIDIA GPU and most other distros make it a PITA to install latest NVIDIA drivers, including the open source ones (Debian is the worst). In Fedora, it’s the easiest. If you have an AMD GPU, you may have much better luck.
My testing setup is i9-9900K, RTX3080, 32GB RAM and NVME SSD. No dual boot.
I’m also nearing 60 and I was a PC gamer for over 30 years and built my own PCs for around 20 years. My switch to Linux has been bumpy so far and I may not even succeed in the end, but for reasons mostly other than gaming. I have done quite intensive research into Linux gaming over the last year, tested all major distros and desktop environments, way over 20, though I might have missed some stuff.
Coincidentally, the two top gaming focused distros: Bazzite and Nobara are based on Fedora. Depending on how much time, effort and suffering you’re willing to invest, you can make any Linux distro do anything you want, that’s the Linux thing, but some make it harder, some make it easier and these distros make gaming easier. They are Fedora with AMD, NVIDIA drivers and gaming software and utils such as OBS preinstalled. But vanilla Fedora KDE was my pick in the end, since I don’t have the need for all the extra stuff, video capture, streaming, etc., and both distros had some minor (very minor) issues.
It also depends on what kind of gaming you do and whether you do a lot of modding. Competitive games with kernel level anticheat usually do not work under Linux, (Valve’s VAC works), some game servers even outright ban Linux clients. Outside of that, most Steam games can be made to work in a matter of minutes with minimal effort. Most modding tools, game/save editing utils are not available on Linux or it’s extremely complicated to get the them to work. One notable exception is Satisfactory Mod Manager that is released as a native Linux appimage. Also, Nexus Mods App beta is available, but supports only a handful of games right now, including Cyberpunk 2077.
So, if you don’t play competitive online games and do not mod much your road to Linux gaming may be smoother than mine as I mod my games a lot.
Steam is basically the way to go. Valve made great improvements to their Proton Windows compatibility tool, since Steam Deck OS is Linux (Arch, I think?). Outside of Steam there is handful of low-end native Linux games and making Windows games work outside of Steam is way beyond what I’m willing to deal with. If a game is listed in Steam as Steam Deck compatible then it will very likely run under other Linux distros.
There are some native Linux games on Steam too, though they’re usually indie titles. I play one older game, Planetary Annihilation Titans, that is supposed to be “native”, but only works natively on Ubuntu for some reason. On Fedora I have to run the Windows version using Proton and a long list of launch options.
So far, I also tried these games: Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, The Outer Worlds Spacers Choice Edition, The Witcher 3, Dishonored 1 and 2, Defense Grid 1 and 2, probably few more. They all ran at about 75-80% of Windows performance, meaning totally playable. Satisfactory was by far the best experience, considering the native mod manager, the native server and it ran at nearly Windows speeds and was totally stable. Though I still didn’t get to test my main PC with a GSYNC monitor but I hear it should work. I’m waiting for Fedora 42 and Plasma 6.3 before I decide to do this.
Learn about Steam Proton, how to use it. There are many versions of Proton. Most games run fine with the latest stable or experiential. Some may need an older version, so install Proton versions down to 7 in Steam before installing games. Then you may need to test each game with few versions of Proton, starting with the latest stable. Some may yield better performance or some features such as DLSS may work better on one but not on others.
This website is extremely helpful: https://www.protondb.com/. It’s a crowdsourced database of Linux Steam games. Look there for solutions to your games. Like I mentioned, some games require a specific version of Proton and may need Steam launch options, and you will find that info on Proton DB.
There is also the cutting edge fork of Proton made my Glorious Eggroll: Proton GE that is somewhat ahead of Valve’s Proton and works better with some latest games: GitHub - GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom: Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components. The installation is moderately easy, even I was able to get it to run on the first attempt. It adds Proton GE to the list of available Proton versions in Steam.
What specific issues are you facing? If you have any specific questions, please ask, I’ll do my best to answer.
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install kubuntu, find steam in the discover store and install that.
login to your steam acct and reinstall all your games onto a separate linux partition (don’t try to reuse your windows installations), and set each game’s properties to use the proton environment.
if you have .exe games you can either upload them to steam and play them that way (recommended) or try find bottles in the discover store and try to use that … its a flatpak containerized version of wine and is much easier to configure than messing around with a wine install (safer too).