Thinking of switching my gaming desktop to linux. Should I?

I can't believe that no one has asked you this question yet (fucking fanboys...):

Do you mind losing access to most features on your GPU, including (but not limited to): RTX HDR, Shadowplay, the Nvidia App, the Nvidia Control Panel and everything it offers, including the 3D Settings page?

If any of this matters to you, you may want to consider switching to an AMD GPU first before you consider Linux. Nvidia does not support it nearly as well as they support Windows. You get a driver that lets you run games, and that's about it.

Yeah I only kinda really use shadowplay anyway. I don't have a hdr monitor at all. Firstly I just want to see if my games run well enough. If not I will wait a couple years and then upgrade to an AMD card and then switch for good.

linux mint.

DO IT.

JUST DO IT.

The only thing that kept me booting windows for gaming was destiny 2, which choses not to support running on linux.

The current expansion "edge of fate" is terrible though, so it's full time linux gaming for me.

I really hope Bungie changes their stance at some point. The new portal in Edge of Fate seems perfect for quick sessions on a Steam Deck, if nothing else.
- the portal is a good idea, but how they tied (or rather didn't) it to the rest of the game is currently terrible.
  the whole game feels like a broken plate that someone glued together again.. So, i would not expect great things from them currently...

Nobara is good, it's fedora but with better nvidia driver stuff out of the box.

Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic based immutable distro focused on gaming, this means...

out of the box support for Nvidia cards
ships with a lot of useful gaming utilities
very hard to break as you should primarily be installing Flatpaks and can do rollbacks

Basically all modern Linux distros have virtualization support, so does Bazzite, of course. Actual performance differences between distros is also negligible, so feel free to choose whatever you like.

https://bazzite.gg/ if you're interested.

As other people noted, Bazzite/Fedora Silverblue can absolutely bite you in the foot if you leave the "normal use cases" — and if you're not just gaming on the device, you sooner or later will. All of this is solvable and IMO worth it, but probably not great for a beginner trying to become more knowledgeable.
Tldr good for absolute beginners, good for "experts" (in both cases because it very rarely gets in your way/breaks)
I loved bazzite, it was my first out of the box success with Linux gaming, but if you plan to do anything outside of gaming installing stuff can get a little difficult. It was invaluable for teaching moments, but I've moved on to cachyOS and it has been just as seamless and less difficulty installing things after installing yay
My 2c
- I switched to bazzite a couple of months ago and read so much about catchyOS so I tried that too about 2 weeks ago. I couldn't install shit. Never had any problem installing anything I needed except one thing on bazzite but catchyOS just had me give up. I am not sure what I did wrong but after 2 hours of reading and trying to figure out AUR or whatever I just gave up and booted bazzite again. I just want to play my games with the little time I have but maybe I boot it up again sometime in the future.
- This is why I personally think Bazzite should only be installed on devices you intend to only game on, especially if you have any intention of learning any more about Linux than the absolute basics. It'll be fine for a while for beginners, but you're bound to bump into some things that are a hassle to install and/or keep updated. Perfect examples being for consolafying a PC for playing on a living room TV, or installing it on a handheld PC (Steam Deck etc.)
- Cachy. So hot right now.
I second Bazzite

I use Nobara on my laptop which has rtx 3060 6gb with ryzen 7 5800h. Sure Nvidia sucks on every linux distro, but you will get many quality of life improvements when using linux instead of windows.

Btw, Nobara is just Fedora with some good gaming related chages.

Linux Mint Cinnamon was is my first Linux distro coming away from Win10, and I have no issues with it. Mint uses Ubuntu as its codebase, so it's essentially Ubuntu with a different desktop presentation/look/feel.

Agreed. Mint is a very 'new Linux user' friendly distro, and has everything you really need. I've got some recent converts from Windows and even the gamers I've set up are happy with it.

Coming from a Steam Deck, I was really happy when I learned about Bazzite. I tried installing it and stuck with it for a few months now and I'm excited to have gotten rid of Windows. It's fast and works well out of the box. Plus I have the SteamOS experience without fuss.

Bonus points for you, it's Fedora based and easy to install on top if Fedora.

Notably I had tried Ubuntu before this and had issues with VRR and a couple of other things. Bazzite is built for this, and it works well.

i love bazzite, just got a new app store too
Does the rockstar launcher run? I’d like to move over but always wonder about losing access to quite a few games in the process
- I think I got to install & launch GTAV without modifications or additional software. I'll confirm and get back
- From my experience on SteamOS, I’m launching RDR2 through the steam app but I own RDR2 on Rockstar game launcher. I used these steps to get it running: https://expertbeacon.com/can-steam-deck-run-red-dead-redemption-2/
  I can only assume it’s similar on Bazzite but I haven’t tried.
I just went straight with a bazzite install since fedora literally did not want to work on my pc

Take Fedora, as you're already used to it. Steam handles Windows games for you. In 99% of cases they just work. Only games that do not run nowadays are games with unsupported kernel level anti cheat. Look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/ to see if your games are supported. A VM won't help you as that is usually blocked by such anti cheat as well.

If you do have a problem with a non-multiplayer game look at https://protondb.com/.

For games from GOG, Epic or Amazon use Heroic. For every other store you can add the launcher or just the game itself to Heroic.

ProtonDB is a godsend. People will even post config tweaks for games
I believe you meant to type protondb.com
- Yes, thanks!
Is heroic overtaking lutris now?
- For me it is. I've been using Lutris for years, but they're just stagnating. The design is all over the place, they still don't have a unified library, their native integrations break so often that I have to add my games manually anyways. And I cannot fathom why they don't adopt the same library integrations for GOG, Amazon and especially Epic as Heroic. They are much faster and have much less hassle.
  At the same time Heroic has been adding the same tools I originally missed from Lutris. Like the Wine handling and using external wrappers like Mangohud or Gamemode or your own wrappers and variables.
  Lutris' installation scripts are still often nice for figuring out a game's dependencies. I just wish they were in a git repo where people could add comments because some of the scripts are needlessly complicated.
  If someone made an itch.io command line client that Heroic could tap into it would have most of the things I could wish for.
I just want a VM for my 10 year old cracked version of photoshop and some other apps. I never intended to game on a VM.
- Of you're going foss for your OS why not take a look at Krita and gimp for your image editing needs?
  I've not tried either in years at this point hut can't hurt to check them out if you haven't already.
- Any distro will do tbh. If youre missing something you just install it.
  But since youre used to Fedora may as well stay on that tree. You can always play around with other Desktop Environments like Plasma if you want, its what I've been doing once I get an install going.

Of course you should - Do a dual boot as a test on whatever rig you're currently using. Easy to undo and it costs you exactly zero.

IMO, basically any distro with fairly modern (fairly often updated) packages should do. Apart from some build/packaging differences it's all same software anyway. The gaming side of software gets updated fairly often, so that's why you'd probably want frequently updated packages.

"Gaming" distros are basically just selection of gaming specific packages installed as default, instead of lets say productivity apps. You can run VM's in gaming/studio/whatever distros

FWIW, I got 5800x3D, RTX3090 - so, "close enough" same system as you. At least same series cpu/gpu. Running Arch, and gaming has been pretty easy, haven't yet found a game which didn't work - that said, some occasional game has had odd stutters (Darktide, for one. But I haven't tested in months).

Getting things to run did get a bit more involved than "just click it". Some extra compatibility stuff (proton-ge-custom), launchers (lutris, heroic, because GoG Galaxy just refuses to work). Steam & steam-games tend to "just work", although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.

But overall, stuff works, and in case of issues it now just seems to be either disabling ntsync and/or wayland for specific games and gaming away.

Some things work, some do not. Check proton compatibility DB for your games of choice.
If you like fortnite, GTA, rdr, or games with really strong anti cheating features, expect to be launching Windows..
- Everything this.
  Personally nonissue since I don't play any of those online/pvp games
It's not all the same. A key thing you want is to get the latest graphics drivers (mesa or proprietary) as soon as possible after release. Same day or at least week. For that you probably want a rolling release like Tumbleweed, or something based on Arch, like CachyOS. I'm running Pop OS, and I still don't have the drivers needed for Doom: The Dark Ages. Seems to take like a month or so for Pop OS to update Mesa. Seriously considering trying CachyOS for this reason.
I already installed fedora but games just don't get stable framerates. might have to do a clean install and try again.
- make sure first that it isn't issue with specific games, some may require some proton flags to be set for them to behave properly. Or just newer/older proton/wine.
  in general worth a try to switch the compatibility thingy (technical term),
  steam, in game's properties:
  but similar option is in lutris/heroic too.
- I switched to CachyOS on a 5700X3D/3060 combo 6 months ago and have had zero issues gaming. CachyOS has a custom fork of proton and it has worked like a dream. Lutris and Steam have been rock solid after some mild setup and my framerate has been as good as/better than it ever was on Windows. I've run a couple VMs to test and also had no problems there. Definitely check ProtonDB for the minor tweaks necessary for some games to run but most have just worked out of the box once setting steam to use compatibilty.
although actual native-linux games seem to have issues while running the windows-version of the same game on proton just work - WEIRD.
Its not really weird.
Windows is unfortunately what most people are using so it gets first priority for everything
Linux environments can vary considerably. Running it in Windows gives a fixed environment for the game to run in
Happy cake day!

Surprised I haven't seen Bazzite or Nobara recommended here, those are full desktop experiences with built in features for gaming. I use nobara because it has a version with pre-packaged Nvidia drivers.

Just use Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Mint if you want a hassle free, secure, and stable Linux distro that supports everything and works out of the box.

Don't use those gaming centric distros like Bazzite. It's not worth it. Don't use Arch or other bleeding edge distros unless you want to keep troubleshooting your system because of problems or vulnerabilities.

Take it from me. I've been using Linux since 2001 and Ubuntu based distros have always been the best choice for a secure stable OS.

100 percent agree - just waiting for the Canonical haters to arrive
I would actually recommend the nvidia image of bazzite since it takes the potential driver module and kernel mismatch problem out of the equation which IMO is one of the most annoying problems an nvidia user can face, and if it somehow bugs out anyway rollback is one or two keypresses away depending on if you hide grub or not.
Virtualization is possible with the boot flags and vfio if needed setup using the "ujust setup-virtualization" script. qemu/kvm, probably not virtualbox which also requires kernel modules iirc.
- I have had ONLY NVidia cards since my first ever own PC in 2000 when I started college.
  I've used Mandrake Linux for a while then switched to Ubuntu when it came out in 2004 and have used that ever since.
  I've NEVER encountered any problems whatsoever. In fact, it made using an NVidia card easier because of its built-in third party driver installation tool that takes care of everything.
  If something doesn't work, it's very probable that it's because the user messed around with something and caused it to happen.

Garuda dragonized gaming will get you everything out of the box and you can change the theme after. It will walk you through a lot with assistants, which is nice to learn things on an arch based distro. Its an easy switch from windows, plus, now I can use fish konsole htop and paru alright.

Second time tonight I have heard of this distro - I may have to check it out.
My husband built me a gaming computer and wanted to install the OS. Told him he probably wouldn't be able to as I had picked out an arch based distro. I'd never installed arch myself. He'd never installed any linux. He had no problem putting dragonized garuda on there. It's been nearly 3 years now and I still haven't changed the theme tho.
Edited to add: I ain't got any nvidia anything in that PC, so can't speak to that.
- Ah I have two nvidia GPU laptops running it right now and its great!! A 2070S and one even older tho. Nothing considered modern by todays standard.

I see bazzite mentioned a lot here, but wasn't there a post here a while ago saying that it might stop existing if fedora pushes through with the decision to ditch 32bit support? Did they decide not to do it after all?

The proposal to ditch 32 bit support was withdrawn
I think they decided not to, with some (IMO fairly) snarky comment on how that was just a proposal and people were getting needlesely outraged.

Hi I recommend against using an Arch based distro like manjaro or cachyOS ( arch by nature demands active maintenance ) also depsite the brand name ubuntu is a very bad place to start ( due to them forcing snap packages ). Go for something like fedora kde or bazzite, most of the app you need can come from flathub.

For games you got Steam, Heroic ( for epic games ), lutris ( for everything else ). You will have to quit the habit of hunting .exe file online, most of your apps will come from your store ( discover in your case ).

Vms will not let you bypass anti-cheat stuff so keep that in mind. Check for game compatibility on protondb if needed. Don't be afraid to ask question ( even dumbs one ).

Thanks for the first part.
I know how apps and that works I have been using fedora for 3 years on my laptop.
VM is meant for apps that do not work with wine like photoshop.

There are a ton of distros that work well for gaming. I am currently running CachyOS. It was easy to get set up, runs smoothly, and I've been happy with it so far.

https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/gaming/

What about Bazzite? It's fedora based and made for gaming. I've only tried it on handheld like steamdeck and rog ally but it's awesome, even better than steamdeck os.

I've used it on an old HP all in one and it made it useful again. The daughter tossed it because it lagged hella bad and her Roblox and Minecraft etc sucked, Runs Baldurs gate 1 and 2 just fine and all my older game emulators so I love to bust it out for Wii gaming night etc. The machine is pure crap with integrated graphics and a whooping 8gb ram. Thats gotta burn seeing all the stuff I've got going and knowing you threw it out. Then again I dont know if it's noticed over TIk Tok

FYI: I have a rig similar to yours. I’m currently running Mint and have had no issues. I used to run Pop OS, but even after a fresh reinstall of their LTS, updates stopped working, so I recommend avoiding Pop OS.

I use Mint too and I've never had any trouble running my games.

The amount of these posts make me happy.

Give it a try and you most likely wont regret it. Linux has come a long way since the general statement what you want game on it. I purchased a Asus ROG laptop about a year ago and installed Manjaro Linux on it (spare the hate) and its been working flawlessly. With that said. I'm not a hard core gamer and been sticking to Steam and console emulation so others with more time to play games should flank in.

since you already have experience with fedora, you might wanna look at nobara, which has an nvidia-specific installer available. i'm running it a bit longer than 7 months now, and don't have any issues with it, and i have a pretty similar hardware config to you (a ryzen 5 instead of a 7, and a 3070 Ti instead of the normal one)

I also run a windows 10 VM, mainly for stubborn installers from cracked games that won't run correctly under wine and for my mouse/keyboard software (they have onboard profiles, so i pass them through to the vm to configure)

Currently installing bazzite. If that turns out bad I will try nobara.
This env variable might help with your cracked installers
‘’’ WINE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 ‘’’
- thanks, i will test it next time i encounter issues. But at least the Kaos Repack installers have some other issue, the UI buttons of the installer don't work as intended, they just don't react at all after clicking the install button.

Bazzite is made for gaming and it's worked for me pretty flawlessly for about 6 months BUT I had a lot of issues getting it to run a VM. I'm certainly not a Linux expert but I eventually gave up trying.

I think there's some hidden complexity with immutable distros that most people ignore, I also had issues getting podman/docker to run properly there IIRC but dunno if its the same thing
- I saw "gaming focused distro" and immediately jumped into it without any research but that's just the way I do things. Sometimes I work my way backwards and develop at least some understanding. I believe it's commonly referred to as a learning disorder. Don't regret it though.
There's a ujust script to set up virtualisation on Bazzite. ujust setup-virtualization in the terminal should get you going. Alongside the background stuff it sets up, it installs a GUI virtual machine manager.
- It's all a blur now but I know I did something with ujust. I'll try it again to make sure, thank you for the info.
There is a ujust script for enabling KVM.
I forget exactly how I had to do it. If there's anything need beyond ujust, if you search for it, you'll find solutions (if nothing for Bazzite, try "silverblue" instead in your search as it'll likely be the same solution)
- Never heard of silverblue. That should narrow things. Good info, thanks
I'm pretty sure if you use bazzite-dx you get the virtualization setup as a ujust set-up script
- I'll give that a try too, thanks

Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.

You absolutely can use VMs, but you don't need a VM to run windows software and you won't have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.

Honestly the biggest headache is with the "linux native" stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they're all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it's far from transparent to the user. Maybe I've overthinking it but in my opinion it's a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don't know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.

I will try just normal fedora and if stuff does not work I will try bazzite. VM would be used for stuff that does not work through WINE like photoshop (10 year old cracked version).
- I'd give WINE a go before messing with a VM, I know some versions of photoshop do actually work: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=41345
  You can get cracked versions of the CC 2023 version, but if you wanna use your current version then yeah, just give it a go. Worst case you waste 30 minutes and have to install a VM anyway.

It actually doesn't really matter.

The distro doesn’t. Getting off windows is a great idea.

CachyOS since you're using fedora for 3 years

I am still very happy with CachyOS. That'd be my recommendation. Nobara / Bazzite are good options, too, but I never tested them.

I recently made the switch. Running intel ultra 5 and nvidia rtx 5060. Bazzite and Pop!_OS were advertised as working, out of the box. I couldn't get either to work, following the wiki setup guides. I tried Ubuntu, couldn't get that working, either.

I switched to Nobara, and learned that I was messing up gamemoderun in Steam. So I have no idea if Nobara fixed my issues, or if I was messing something up the whole time, or maybe a little of both. It was fun, though! Absolutely glad to be done with windows.

Benchmarks online tend to show very minimal performance difference between distros. The main difference with gaming distros will be ease of installation of gaming stuff like gamemode, etc. Some distros also have a Steam Picture like mode if you prefer that. Besides the "gaming" stuff, the distros are otherwise just a normal Linux experience so yes you can install a VM software like normal.

Bazzite and CachyOS are two popular suggestions. Bazzite is a Fedora atomic spin for gaming and has specific images setup for your hardware. CachyOS is arch based and has optimized packages for your specific hardware

Yes, if you want. If you don't, no.

I have a very similar build as yours, just with a RTX 3090 instead. I switched to Pop!_OS about a year and a half ago, and it's been running like a charm ever since.

Manjaro KDE would be easier for a beginner. Manjaro XFCE if you want to play RTX games and ok with tinkering WM.

I'm a simple man who use Mint on my gaming PC. No issues. Everything worked out of the box.

Dunno how nvidia drivers are for manually installing these days, know there was som jank before.

Im running Nobara and they got ez driver setup for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Either way I think you'll be fine no matter what distro you use.

Personally I like Nobara because it comes with a bunch of kernel patches, fixes and gaming utilities pre-installed.

I can’t think of any modern distro that doesn’t just have Nvidia drivers as a package in the repos.
- Very true, they do ofc exist there. Nobara just gives you a first-time install-wizard which lets you one-click condigure it. I was more thinking of a use-case as OPs where you wont need to tinker too much after the initial installation.
  But yes, basically all distros do have the drivers in their package repos, so any would work.
Also Nobara is built on fedora, so OP doesn't have to adjust to something new

Unless you play anything by Riot or Fortnite, YES

if you do then don't
the community is more toxic than chernobyl
- I meant because their Anti-Cheat doesn't support Linux. But yeah that's a pretty good point too

It's more personal preference and use case than anything.

Gaming dedicated versions are nice if you really only plan to game. Bazzite, ChimeraOS, Garuda, along others are available. ChimeraOS is what I installed on my stepson's pc and outside of a network issue it has worked pretty well. He is happy and since he mainly uses his android tablet for web browsing and whatnot, it's perfect for me to not need to do a bunch of troubleshooting issues. I've tinkered with Garuda but I'm not convinced it's for me and I dislike anything with a Mac feel.

I use an Ubuntu based system (Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS) with a 5800X and GTX1080TI because I want stability and the ability to edit video, game, manage websites, manage our home services, along other things.

Instead of asking which one you should use go out and try some demos and look at your intended use case.

nvidia shenanigans aside this should be fine for linux gaming.