No matter what part of the internet I’ve been on, I’ve always seen folks praising Linux for doing what Windows can and won’t. But at this point in my life, I’ve learned that some Linux distros are doing a better job of what Windows supposedly does, and outpacing it in important areas. Gaming is one of those key areas, and it doesn’t matter if it’s on a handheld device or a dedicated desktop.
After getting my hands on a ROG Ally X and replacing the default Windows 11 installation with SteamOS, I figured maybe it was time to start dual-booting my PC to achieve something similar. After testing out Bazzite on my setup, I finally fulfilled the promise that I made to myself and tested out Nobara, and I’m kicking myself for not trying it sooner.
Nobara is built with gaming and content creation in mind
It’s already got WINE, OBS, and all of the other tools I need pre-built in
One of the things that always made me hesitant to try using Linux in the past was the rumor of how much work it took to make things actually work. Command prompts and terminals, paired with app incompatibility, had me interested in testing it, but never confident enough in myself to actually make the jump. After using SteamOS for a while and seeing how well everything worked right out of the box, I felt a lot better about the idea of dual-booting or potentially even replacing my Windows 11 installation in the future. Nobara is definitely helping me feel like the former option may be my best bet.
Seeing as Nobara is built around the idea of gaming and content creation first, it has everything installed that I specifically need straight away. No downloading extra things via Discover to make games that typically don’t work suddenly work. It’s already done all the heavy lifting for me, and I’m eternally grateful for that.
I found the key to gaming on desktop Linux
Bazzite for most games, and a dual-boot of Windows for games that won’t typically work
Bazzite is also another excellent choice
As long as it works better than Windows, I’m not going to complain
Before switching to Nobara, I tested out Bazzite on my desktop. At this point in time, I would personally say that both Bazzite and Nobara are excellent options for gamers hoping to leave the Windows ecosystem behind. Or at least, to run Windows 11 as a backup to their primary Linux distro. Nobara offers more tinkerability, so if you’re hoping to mess around with things behind the scenes, this may be the perfect opportunity for you to do so. Bazzite, to put it plainly, just works out of the box and doesn’t have as much customization for the average user.
Linux distributions have been advancing rapidly in the gaming space, sometimes offering major performance gains over Windows 11. This 50-minute-long video by Gamers Nexus details Bazzite benchmarks and shows the performance gains users could expect to see when trying out a Linux distribution for themselves. It also details some of the bugs and issues that eager installers may encounter, as Linux does have issues when it comes to certain multiplayer games.
- OS
-
Linux
- Developer
-
The Nobara Project
- Price model
-
Free
- Operating System
-
Fedora
Why does Linux run games better than Windows?
That’s what I’m most curious about, especially since Windows is so widely used
It’s no surprise that Windows is getting more bloated by the day, and this is part of the reason why we’re seeing degraded results. There are a ton of things in the background that are always running, regardless of whether you’re using them or not. I’m not a fan of Copilot, and I don’t want it on my PC, but there’s a great chance that it’s running in the background of my PC as I type this sentence out right now. Even if you go through and remove all the bloat from a Windows installation, there are still more things running in the background that you can’t disable compared to Linux. But not everything that comes preinstalled on Windows is bad bloat, to be fair.
Linux, on the other hand, is much less “bloated” than a typical Windows installation. With less overhead and less running in the background, it can help improve performance in even the beefiest of games. Vulkan is also a major player here, wrapping around DirectX games and making them run like a dream. If you’re dead set on using Windows for gaming purposes, and you enjoy playing older games? Do yourself a solid and look into DXVK, a program that converts older DirectX games into Vulkan via wrappers and helps improve their performance.
Even with performance boosts, Linux gaming isn’t perfect
There are going to be some games that just don’t work at all
If you’ve used a Steam Deck or any handheld that is running a version of Linux, you may already know about this downside. Certain multiplayer games, regardless of what you do to try to make them work, just won’t work at all on Linux. This is all due to the way that anti-cheat works in games, and since more multiplayer games are using these measures to avoid cheating players in online lobbies, Linux users are often left behind.
You can use programs like GeForce Now or Boosteroid to play some of these games, but seeing as they are being streamed from the cloud, you’ll need to ensure that your connection is stable enough to support these at the most minimal amount of latency possible. Or, dual-boot and get the best of both worlds. Use your Windows 11 installation to play these multiplayer games, and use Linux for better performance in your standard gaming experience.
Gaming can only keep getting better from here
There’s a reason why Valve keeps using Linux on all of its devices
It doesn’t matter if you’re waiting to buy the upcoming Steam Machine from Valve, or if you have plans to make your own — gaming on Linux is only going to keep getting better and better from here. With most Linux distributions being open-source, community members can continue contributing to make it outperform Windows for the foreseeable future.
While I was initially hesitant to try it out for myself, I’m slowly getting closer to fully replacing Windows on my primary desktop as my daily driver operating system. If they can make one of my favorite hobbies work this much better on their OS, I’d be very interested to see how my daily tasks could potentially improve if I dedicated a few weeks to run Linux exclusively.
