Posted by haunter 11/2/2025
Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.
I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.
I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.
I also try other games when I install the system to check the current status of things.
For instance, the Monster Hunter World Demo (I don't like that game, I only use it for testing) is terrible. Very high lag, takes about 15min every time it starts because it needs to redo the graphics shaders, it's much slower than on windows.
Clair Obscur doesn't start. I get into the main menu, and then I can't start it.
Crusader Kings works fine IIRC.
Also, Steam game mode still doesn't work correctly with NVIDIA cards in Wayland... after all these years.
And yes, I did try Bazzite (that's what I mean when I say sometimes I just install a gaming distro instead of bothering to config).
And like I said in another comment, this is not some super specific setup I have here. Now I have a 5060 Ti, before I had a 1080 Ti. This is the basic setup many people have. So, sorry, but I just don't believe when people say "It works perfectly fine for me". It's like when I hear "Firefox doesn't have any different energy consumption on my MacBook"... although people have been reporting the very same issues for more than a decade now and I, personally, experienced it in 3 different Apple laptops.
Your nvidia complaints suddenly make a lot more sense after mentioning Wayland. I've always used X11 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, with Mate as my desktop environment. It was stable in 2009 when I built my first gaming desktop and it's stable in 2025 with my newer one. My main desktop distro has been Gentoo, with my current CPU a Ryzen 9 5900X and a 4090 GPU. (Upgraded from a 1080 Ti. Prior to that on my old machine I had a 1050 Ti and prior to that an AMD Radeon 7950 that worked great up until AMD started messing with their drivers and trying to be more "open" (I hope they eventually got manual fan control back in).)
Besides my Steam Deck I also sometimes have played some games on an older travel laptop (ThinkPad T470p with an older i7 and an nvidia 940MX) running Mint, also with X11 and Mate. Again though I didn't have any real issues apart from having a weak CPU/GPU. (Tekken 7 on fairly low settings and resolution is about the best it can do, I've had better experiences remoting to my home PC with steam remote play or sunshine/moonlight.)
The shader recompilations after a driver update or what have you suck, but I don't think I've had them take nearly 15 minutes before. I've been tempted to turn it off / skip it since in theory it doesn't matter so much anymore for reducing stutters, and Windows is essentially that already (though I still hear complaints all the time from Windows gamers about shader compilation stutters) but I haven't really experimented. This is something that somewhat rewards continuous usage at least, because even if there are games I play that would take that long and I just haven't noticed, it's easy to not notice because the system's on most of the time and Steam can do that in the background as needed before I decide I want to play the game.
I've yet to try one of the "gaming distros" like Bazzite but their marketing often rubs me the wrong way. e.g. they brag about HDR support but I'm very skeptical of that working well or at all for those with nvidia GPUs. I do technically have an OLED 1000 nit HDR monitor but I don't make use of HDR in Linux, that is I guess a downside but when I tried experimenting on Windows when I got it I could barely tell the difference so whatever. In theory gamescope can kinda get HDR working now (as of this year) even with nvidia, at least for playing video files, but I never got it working for games. I have been experimenting with gamescope more but without HDR just to have a more isolated display compositor. Some older games especially don't tolerate alt-tabbing out of full screen and tabbing back in, but with gamescope that problem goes away.
Yes, I must mention that I briefly had a Steam Deck, and it all worked very well. But the issue is with NVIDIA. And my system is not mainly for gaming, so I’m stuck with NVIDIA and I’m Linux is lagging - a lot - when compared to windows.
1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;
2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;
3) have best-in-class community support;
4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.
Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.
I'm willing to try stuff like Bazzite since it - supposedly - comes all pre-configured. But I'm not going down yet another rabbit hole with a totally new OS just for gaming... I just don't have time for that. It's just much easier to install Windows 11.
My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.
nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.
I had to configure (the few distros that still support it) to use X11 and live with another set of issues.
But for my main Desktop(gaming,dev,fun,...) I've reluctantly bought a W11 key (cheap one thank god).
I don't mind working through driver issues and needing time to figure stuff out but the thing that bothers me is 'Compatibility between online games and Linux is hindered by anti-cheat software, which often lacks Linux support, especially kernel-level anti-cheat systems' (thx google).
I could go on a very technical rant, or start about setting up w10/w11 vm's with 5% loss in performance etc...
But honestly, I wanna play my online gaems =(
Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.
It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux when you have the survey popup.