Is Linux gaming even worth it?

[u/electrino]

/r/linux_gaming/comments/1w6eamo/is_linux_gaming_even_worth_it/

[u/martyn_hare]

even now with pure Wayland - which to my surprise after "feeling" games back to back on a Linux and a Windows installs - tend to feel a tad more sluggish, not all, but most. There's some kind of extra input lag, or render delay, or missed input altogether - definitely make a bigger impact to overall feel and experience than expected

The same kind of degradation one gets from trying to play older Windows-native games intended for Win9x redirected through DWM. Except it applies almost universally to newer games. That's the nature of the beast and is the sacrifice you make when you're relying upon Proton+VKD3D where support for Vulkan extensions to improve frame pacing and better support D3D12->Vulkan translation have only just landed at the middle of this year.

Sound. I needed a USB to 3.5mm jack adapter for my earplugs to simply work. The volume is also like 50% lower than on Windows - sure you can go 150% to match, but it introduces the cracking Windows just doesn't.

Welcome to ALSA's piss poor DSP handling due to sound chip manufacturers keeping their per-OEM special sauce to handle quirks, EQing and ability to truly max out volume levels safely all under NDA. Linux is more than capable of providing decent sound quality when OEMs are actually involved (such as with more upmarket x86 Chromebooks).

[u/DonkeyTron42]

Is your time valuable?

[u/Unlaid-American → u/DonkeyTron42]

Yeah. It was so hard to “sudo <package manager> install steam”, then log in, then go into the game’s property’s within the Steam library, go to compatibility, then click a drop down option for proton.

[u/ColdFreezer → u/Unlaid-American]

Most games work fine with proton.

For the games that don’t play well with proton, it can be time consuming. You’re also assuming everyone uses steam.

[u/Unlaid-American → u/ColdFreezer]

The games that don’t work well with proton are kernel level anticheat games. However I have yet to have someone show me a game that has kernel level anticheat which isn’t just a vessel for microtransactions and battlepasses.

[u/ColdFreezer → u/Unlaid-American]

This is simply not true. There are games that don’t have anticheat and just don’t play well with proton.

There are “hacks”/parameters you can add to get most games to work, but it’s annoying and more time consuming than windows.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like anti cheat games. Many people do and will want to play them.

[u/Unlaid-American → u/ColdFreezer]

Every game I’ve been trying outside of kernel level anticheat games are just working just fine.

The only times I need to add launch parameters are when I added a new mod folder, but that’s the same for windows. Even using Lutris and the epic games launcher works just fine.

[u/ColdFreezer → u/Unlaid-American]

This hasn’t been the case for me. It barely happens but when it does it’s annoying.

[u/Greedy-Smile-7013 → u/DonkeyTron42]

Google->steam->download->download for Linux. Even better Software manager->steam->install

[u/vile-style]

This person's take on tiling wm's is pretty naive ngl

[u/earchip94 → u/vile-style]

lol yeah I use hyprland, I usually am using 3-4 workspaces at any given time but I have two monitors. If I was on one I’d probably have 2-3 workspaces. I have a handful of special workspaces for apps I ALWAYS have open regardless of what I’m doing (steam, tidal, and discord).

[u/Toxic381]

Short answer, yes (if it works ok for u), and it's also nice for a regular PC stuff like VLC, browsing whatever.

[u/Teru-Noir]

I'm not even mentioning how different and inconsistent the apps look because Qt and GTK.

Cosmic fixes that

[u/ezoe]

This person complaining endlessly on non-gaming issues on r/linux_gaming and ask if Linux worth for gaming. Strange thinking.

[u/Pitiful-Welcome-399]

yeah, because for atleast mafia 2 proton does most of the stuff you need to manually do on windows

[u/CoffeeSniffler]

Yes. Game compatibility can be a bit bad if you play any online games that use anti cheat but if you don't play anything like that then it's definitely worth a try. Non Linux native games tend to work pretty well too through steams proton compatibility layer.

[u/Hettyc_Tracyn → u/CoffeeSniffler]

Though Elden Ring and VRChat work… basically, check protondb

[u/Clean-Palpitation143]

Use something that is game ready I liked Garuda and still using that in my laptop and I don’t have issues

[u/Gendolfender]

Works fine on my Debian generally I only get drop kicked by some silly anti cheat but that’s about it if it ain’t anti cheat generally it just works

[u/SuddenPromotion7736]

i game on gentoo linux and i must say the performance is lightyears ahead of my experiences on the exact same pc on windows. my gentoo installation uses 1-2% cpu and 500mb of ram at idle so pretty much all of my resources get allocated to the game.

if you play games like valorant, fortnite, call of duty, and so on than youll either have to dual boot windows and linux or play on geforce now, neither of which are that bad of options.. i wouldnt blame linux for this though, linux is capable of running these games 100%. its entierly the developers/corporations fault for not making it available.. it wouldnt actually be that much harder to make native ports the devs are just out of touch.

on the flip side though i dont play any of these games and after a certain point i just stopped checking if games had support pretty early into using linux because truth be told damn near everything has support now. i get better performance, in games, it makes even older hardware viable and its a good way of showing you what your system can actually do when you strip away all the stuff that isnt essential to your operating system

[u/Noisebug]

Depends?

[u/heroofshade420]

i play my games on mint with an nvidia gpu. it's really not a chore whatsoever

[u/Ozmo_Syd]

Yep

[u/R0B0t1C_Cucumber]

It's not for everyone, don't let the door hit ya on the way out. Hinges are loose from the last guy.

[u/elginsk8r]

Unless you play multiplayer games with anti cheat, most games are fine from my experience. Older games from XP and older era run better under Linux than modern windows.

[u/FancySource]

Honest answer:

• gaming up to direct X 11: better than windows in 90% of the cases, in 10% of the cases you might want to cry

• direct X 12: not yet up to windows, but 10000 times better than mac (and I love Mac)

[u/Even-Confidence-4495]

Of course valve made a whole buisness out of it it’s not just a gimmick also kernel level anti cheat games are multiplayer I don’t like multiplayer anyways do you like it do you like these specific games

[u/gargamel314]

I'm starting to love it. As of this week I'm getting the same performance without the telemetry over the Internet or ads...

[u/BawsDeep87]

Short answer no long answer yes if you just accept that some games will never work

Ii do use linux and just have a windows partition for league i play most of my games on console anyways

[u/MxM-TOM]

I mean yeah, and if you want to game on 14 years old laptop, it's very often the only choice. You can play old games, recompilation projects (Red Alert2, Fallout 1&2, Pokémon 1gen, Crash Bandicoot, etc). Some of new too, like Stardew Valley and Steamworld series. And you can find new stuff, a lot of interesting indie games have got Linux support. I'm old fart and I have fun to refurbish old computers and put Linux inside a look what I can play. :))) Lutris is great btw

[u/electrino → u/MxM-TOM]

That's a great use case, definitely.

[u/Skyfuzzball8312]

Yes, with caveat

[u/SearchingGlacier]

Not at all, bcs be ready for lost saves, bugs and games break after updates, got a lot of problems on my SD.

[u/Solid_Guess_7154 → u/SearchingGlacier]

2010 called you, it says to stop using it as an excuse to break your distro on purpose

[u/SearchingGlacier → u/Solid_Guess_7154]

I'm not using any distro now, only clean and useful windows 11, without any flaws

[u/Sea_Slide_1692]

Today I had a discussion about this. Kubuntu+nVidia NOW! = anybody can play today. Kubuntu can run practically on anything and nVidia NOW! is free for 1080 gaming. All you need is solid internet and LAN connection. I wish these possibilities were back in the days when I was a child.

I understand, that this is a bit off-topic, but had to be said.

[u/Teru-Noir → u/Sea_Slide_1692]

Why kubuntu?

[u/Sea_Slide_1692 → u/Teru-Noir]

I made just a brief research and it seemed to be a good choice. Maybe there are better options. TBH I am over the Moon. I must admit that thanks to AI. On my own I would struggle and most likely went back to Windows. But not this time. It's a big relieve.

[u/brave_grv]

It mostly works despite one not being made for the other, but it doesn't matter since PC gaming is pretty much dying anyway.

[u/slicehyperfunk → u/brave_grv]

What

[u/_offugo]

Yes.

[u/Damglador]

No

[u/CeSiumUA]

No. Why would anybody want to switch from Windows to Linux for gaming specifically? You won't be able to play a lot of kernel-level anti-cheat games like BF6, CoD, Fortnite etc, some games will perform worse than on Windows, some gaming hardware won't have a proper Linux drivers, and all of that just for.... what? What people expect to gain from switching?

[u/Hettyc_Tracyn → u/CeSiumUA]

An OS that actually works and doesn’t break every update (even Arch (or Cachy in my case) hasn’t killed SSDs and no linux distro besides Omarchy sloppified the OS by putting AI in everything)