Comment by ugurcant
7 hours ago
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 It required me to manually compile gamescope (wasn't that difficult but Valve's instructions are out of date), and use the backports on Trixie to upgrade the kernel to 6.16, and update wireplumber and pipewire (sound was flakey on some games).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.
So to be fair about Helldivers, it doesn't even reliably work on Windows.
I have to install a two year old AMD driver to get Helldivers to recognize my GPU.
I've had zero issues on Windows. None at all. I have a AMD GPU.
Linux issues have been poor performance generally. Once I installed kernel 6.16 that was fixed.
That's why the correct choice is Bazzite
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.
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.
RDR2 has a gold rating: https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180
It should work with some tinkering.
I have finished RDR2 on Bazzite (story mode), zero issues.
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.
Worked fine for me on a Deck.
RDR2 works great on my AMD Linux machine.
I have a bazzite box connected behind my TV. Even with a non optimal choice of graphic card (an old Nvidia) it works better than I was expecting.
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.