Gaming on Linux

I played games on Windows for over two decades. Then I ditched it for Linux and never looked back. This is basically a how-to for getting started with that.

Linux is the future of gaming. This isn’t some fringe opinion. Valve, famous for the ubiquitous Steam, has been putting significant effort and resources towards that, and they’ve proven it with the Linux-based Steam Deck.

And because we all deserve better; we all deserve privacy by default. It’s bonkers to me that anyone is okay with our devices - which provide intimate access to our daily lives and most private of thoughts - being beholden to the whims of enormous corporations first and foremost. Microsoft gathers a scary amount of data, and even if we assume their intentions are altruistic (anything but), it takes just one major security breach to instantly do identity theft on potentially millions of people.

Linux is designed and written in the open, contributed to by big companies and individual hobbyists, built from the ground up for security and performance, and doesn’t care about your data except to ensure that it stays in your hands. It’s actually a really good gaming and content creation platform at this point, and yes I will die angry about it.

Did I mention the Steam Deck?

Content creators, artists, gamers, and many other people you might not expect all run Linux on our computers.

Chances are that you already use Linux in some form, but don’t know it. If you have an Android phone or tablet, that’s Linux-based. If you have a Roku player or TV, that’s Linux-based. If you have a Steam Deck, that’s overtly and unapologetically running Linux.

Nope. Modern desktop environments like KDE Plasma or GNOME are beautiful, fast, and as user friendly as anything from Microsoft or Apple. I’m not kidding:

A screenshot of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop and application menu.
From the KDE 6 megarelease announcement; link contains videos of it in action.
A screenshot of the Nobara 40 desktop in dark mode.
With the Nobara 40 theme.

Technically, they’re not - they’re made to talk to Windows APIs, which is a crucial distinction. Wine and Valve’s Proton translate those APIs to their Linux equivalents in real time, as if the game or software was running on Windows.

In my experience, most games run as well as on Windows, and sometimes even more smoothly with faster and more consistent frame rates - see this Tom’s Hardware benchmark post. ProtonDB is a great resource and lists over ten thousand games at the time of writing that run well on Linux and the Steam Deck.

Some of it may not be, but you might be surprised by how many are: Steam, Discord, OBS, and many others have Linux versions. Many other things are web-based, which means they work cross-platform; for example, the web-based version of Photoshop works great on Linux. For software that doesn’t have a Linux version, Bottles is the recommended way to run Windows software with its nice UI, and works for most things.

Nobara

I highly recommend Nobara Linux. It comes with everything you need for gaming and content creation already set up or super easy to install. Yes, that includes drivers, OBS, Discord, and so on.

Like most Linux distributions, you can boot it from a USB flash drive to give it a try before installing it, and if you install it to a second hard drive (recommended), you can switch back and forth between it and the Windows drive until you’re comfortable using Linux most or all of the time.

  1. A USB flash drive with 8 GB capacity or bigger.
  2. The Nobara ISO image downloaded on your Windows drive; if you’re unsure of the different different versions:
    1. If you have an AMD video card, get the non-Nvidia “Official” version.
    2. If you have an Nvidia card: scroll down a bit on the download page and get the “Official” version under the Nvidia section.
  3. Software installed on Windows to write the image file to the USB flash drive; Rufus is a good option.
  1. A second hard drive to install Nobara to. This avoids making any changes to your Windows drive.
  2. A back up of your Windows drive just in case. You have back ups, right? 👀

Let’s do this

Once you have the above ready, it’s not that different from setting up Windows:

  1. Boot your computer from the USB flash drive which should load the Nobara live environment.
    You’ll need to boot into the firmware (a.k.a. BIOS or UEFI) to change the boot order so that it tries USB before any hard drives.
  2. The welcome app should have popped open as soon as you logged in, and it’ll take you through the steps via a user-friendly interface. If you close it, you can reopen it from the icon on the desktop.
    1. Be careful where you choose to install it; the installer will show you if there’s an operating system already present, so if you have a second blank hard drive, it’ll obviously be the one without anything on it; if you decided not to get the second hard drive, it’ll give you options to resize the Windows partition so that you can install Nobara alongside it.
    2. Choose a password. I’m serious. If this is a home computer and you live in a fairly secure area, you can get away with a single word; if this is a laptop that will ever travel outside your home, use a decent password. It’s 2024: you should have a password manager (I use Bitwarden) or at least use the one built into your browser. You can have your password manager generate phrases like “correct horse battery staple” that are super easy to type and remember.
    3. You’ll generally want to enable the disk encryption. You’ll probably be fine without it if this a home computer, but I can’t stress enough how important this is for laptops - I’ve had mine stolen and the disk encryption saved me from any number of things, including potential identity theft.
  • Once installed, you can shut down the live environment from the application menu (kind of like the Start menu), which will prompt you to remove the USB flash drive. Do so, and reboot into Nobara; the welcome app should offer you various additional things you can install, such as Discord and OBS.

    • Post-install improvements

    By default, Steam only enables the ability to run Windows games on Linux to those it has verified as working, which is a much smaller subset than what’s available on Steam. A lot of those games often can and do run well; see ProtonDB. To enable Steam Play for all games, open your Steam settings, go to “Compatibility”, and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”.

    The package manager that comes with Nobara 40 is…well, super basic. Hopefully that’ll improve in future releases, but for now, I recommend installing the KDE Discover store. Open up Konsole (search in the app menu). This will be one of the few times you actually need to use the console, I swear. Type:

    sudo dnf install plasma-discover

    Hit enter. It’ll prompt you for your user password, so type that in - note that it won’t show you any feedback as you’re typing it for security reasons, only once you hit enter. It’ll ask you a couple times to verify so just type “y” or “yes” and hit enter. It’ll finish pretty quickly. Now you can search for “Discover” in your app menu and open it. There you go: a nice point and click app store where you can see screenshots of what you can install.

    For your personal files in your home (user) directory, I highly recommend Pika Backup. It has a great interface that walks you through everything. You can search for it in the Discover store.

    If you need something equivalent to Windows’ System Restore or macOS’ Time Machine, Nobara ships with Timeshift pre-installed (I told you it was cool), though by default excludes your home (user) files which isn’t a big deal if you’re already using Pika Backup or a similar app. 

    They are, but you should also keep things up to date because people find creative new ways to compromise systems regularly, and sometimes it’s hacker movie bad.

    1. To enable automatic updates:
      1. Open System Settings
      2. Go to Software Update
      3. Change “Update software” from “Manually” to “Automatically”
    2. To turn off the notifications:
      1. Open Nobara Package Manager
      2. Open the three dot menu (…) on the top right of the window title bar (next to minimize, maximize, close)
      3. Click Preferences
      4. Optional: Toggle off “Show systray icon on updates” if you don’t want to see that icon in your system tray
      5. Toggle off “Send Notification on updates”

    Now you’re protected and it’s less annoying.

    A culture of sharing

    One thing you might notice after a bit of time is how much more of a culture of helping each other and sharing is present in the Linux world. It certainly occurs in the Windows world, but not quite like this. It’s a more human approach to software. In that spirit, if you get stuck on some part of this journey, please don’t give up - ask for help.