Gaming on Linux - The Beginning

For the last 15 years or so, the sole purpose of one of my systems is to run Windows for gaming. While I could have started using Windows for work when Windows Subsystem for Linux became usable, I did not see a reason why. I am comfortable with macOS, as it is primarily used to remote into Linux boxes for my work. So the little Windows box was sitting there, waiting for me to find some time to play a game. I did not really have any reason to complain, it worked perfectly fine.

However, lately Microsoft made all the right moves to make me consider moving my gaming library to Linux. Starting to remove the option of local user accounts, ads in my start menu, whatever their idiotic approach to bundled Spyware is called... And my absolute favourite: send your system to sleep just to see it rebooted and running for multiple hours, because Windows decided to install an update unannounced.

I really tried to make Windows work and behave for gaming. Thanks to tools like ShutUp this is relatively easy. But a few features that cause some annoyances (such as Windows Update) are a bad idea to turn off.

Thanks to the SteamDeck I know that many of the games I play are working on Linux. There are some esport titles I will miss due to the anti-cheat solution requiring kernel level access, but this essentially means two games I am playing. If I really miss them I can still keep a small Windows partition around.

I already had a second NVMe drive with Linux Mint on it in this system for some machine learning work. No reason to not use the GPU, but I did not want to trust Windows with all its additional kernel modules, game launchers and all the other fun stuff you should never let near any personal or business information.

Linux Mint is a rage post in itself. It is the first time since 2005 that a Linux system gave me a hard time running an OS upgrade. It was the easiest way to get proprietary Nvidia drivers on this box while having access to apt. So it still serves its purpose well.

But if I am using this system more often I would prefer something that is first of all not Ubuntu based and second of all brings all the nice things you would have to manually configure out of the box - HDR support, optimised CPU scheduler, controller support and more. All things you take for granted or accept that they cannot be changed on Windows.

Scott Williams pointed me to bazzite. A gaming optimised distribution based on Fedora Silverblue, an “atomic” system. The atomic part in itself is interesting to me, I only had exposure to this kind of OS in the embedded world. But the theory sounds pretty good.

A few friends of mine are keeping a close eye on this gaming on Linux experiment. They are open to switch for mostly the same reasons I listed above, but they are not eager to learn about all of the things that makes “the year of Linux on the desktop” next year. A system which is unlikely to break during an update or allows for an easy rollback sounds like a great starting point.

Having used Fedora on my Lenovo Carbon X1 Gen9 for a few years, I know that the distribution itself is decent. I still miss apt, but that might be Stockholm Syndrome considering that I am primarily using Debian since Potato.

bazzite

On a high level the hardware I am using is a Z590 chipset paired with an i7 11700k running “slightly” above stock speeds, 128GB memory, a 4TB NVMe and a RTX 4090.

I had to kick off the download for the 7GB ISO three times. The servers seemed to be having a bad time. I chose the Gnome and Nvidia version. My all time favourite desktop will always be Gnome 2, Mate is acceptable, the new Gnome - whatever the current release number is - is okay.

Installing bazzite was pretty easy. I did not go with the default partitioning, as I wanted to make sure it keeps its paws off the Windows drive, but that was basically it. One thing I do not know and which I want to check in a VM is the standard filesystem it would use. I have the suspicion it would default to brtfs. Nothing inherently wrong with this, but also not my preferred choice and once you disable all the features that burn through your flash chip writes and ignore the ones not relevant for a gaming system you do not have much left that makes brtfs a good choice in some scenarios.

On first reboot I was prompted if I want to enroll in MOK aka Machine Owner Key aka secure boot compatible system. While I do not see this as important on my gaming system, having a one click option to make it work is pretty nice. But some explanation instead of a TUI screen would have been nice.

Grub presented two options beside Windows, ostree 0 and 1. Makes sense, if you read up on Silverblue. Again not the most intuitive, but people likely just select the default or let the 5 second window timeout and should be presented with a login screen. For regular user feel-good vibes I would have appreciated a theme to make grub look a bit nicer.

After the first login the onboarding assistant offers to install some commonly used applications and additional Nvidia tools. Somewhen during this process Steam was automatically being installed and for some reason I was prompted about ssh-keypass by Gnome. And then I had to reboot. This is great, it already feels familiar!

From what I can tell all hardware was recognised. Both Intel NICs, Intel WiFi, Bluetooth, sound worked out of the box. Nvidia drivers are up to date and properly installed. nvidia-smi shows the current CUDA version and nvtop that Steam and Gnome occupy a good amount of GPU memory. (I should keep these apps closed when running an ML workload.) The only thing I had to do was go to display settings to set the screen to 165Hz and disable VRR.

What I had to actually look up on the web was how to hide Gnomes panel. Which seems to require an extension which thankfully was already installed. Having an OLED screen I try to minimise the number of static elements being displayed. So “panel visibility” off and “panel visibility in overview” on and we are good to go.

I used Heroic Games Launcher to install CyberPunk 2077 from GoG and Steam to install Baldur’s Gate 3 and Deadlock. Both games installed and started without any issues. This is also all I will say about gaming today. I want to run some benchmarks and see how the system compares to Windows. One thing I noticed in CP2077 was that I could not select HDR and I could only choose AMD FSR2, not Nvidia DLSS.

So far the experience has been far better than I expected. And while not perfect, I believe the setup process is “good enough” if you are willing to read the dialog boxes and potentially ask your favourite search engine if something is not immediately clear (MOK).

This is not yet a recommendation. I did not play anything but two rounds of Deadlock. I still want to see HDR work. I want to install a few more games from my library, especially those which are not natively supported and rated silver or gold on ProtonDB. Likely also one or two indie games I bought on itch.io and support on Patreon. But things are looking better than expected, so I am hopeful.