This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/TXC_IJOJOI on 2025-01-10 08:21:27+00:00.

I finally ditched Windows 11 and moved to Linux (tried a few different distros) on my gaming machine.

Even though things have improved greatly, since the last time I tried, there are still a few edge cases left, which make it hard for me to keep it as my main gaming OS.

General

Since I’m used to debian, i started off with trying popos and mint before switching to chachyos.

Hardware: Ryzen 5800X3D, GTX 2080Ti, 32GB @ 3200Mhz, Asus X570 Gaming

The Good

First off, wow things have come a long way, since I tried to switch the last time (~7y ago). The forums are full of useful information and you can feel how many gamers want to move on from windows.

All of the distros I tried were a breeze to install, no faffing about with drivers either, my 2080Ti got recognized immediately.

Mounting shared ntfs drives isn’t a big deal anymore. Steam recognized the games library immediately. Still I’d recommend properly defining mount points in fstab.

Steam and ProtonDB are your best friends, even obscure old games were easy to run most of the time. Just amazing!

FPS were generally great, on par with Windows.

The Bad

So why am I not ready to keep going you might ask?

There were two things, that I just wasn’t able to get working: Multiple displays with different refresh rates, and The Finals, the main game I’m playing at the moment.

I was very well aware about the jank x11 + Nvidia could cause. Disabling compositors, changing the cfg files, nothing “really” worked. I tried different drivers and even switched to arch to try to see if wayland would fix this. My only workaround was to disconnect the 2nd screen when gaming. Thats not really a fix though.

The Finals is my main game at the moment. While working quite will, the performance just wasn’t there compared to windows. The GPU was underutilized, while my CPU had weird 100% spikes on single cores.

I tried different kernels, drivers, Proton versions (custom GE etc), but was not able to get it running the way I wanted.

It’s getting really close now. It was never this easy to set up linux for gaming. If valve can make a big impact with SteamOS and wayland gets better, I will not look back.

Maybe next year will be the year.

TL;DR: There were two things, that I just wasn’t able to get working: Multiple dispays with different refresh rates, and The Finals, the main game I’m playing at the moment.