Gaming on Linux: How?

Unlike Windows or Mac, there isn’t one Linux, but various groups and organisations provide their own flashable images set up with preinstalled apps and one of several desktop environments. In terms of gaming, I recommend Nobara or Bazzite which come preinstalled with Steam, OBS, Discord, and many other familiar apps.

Regardless of which you choose, it’s easiest and lowest risk to get yourself a second hard drive to install it to, so that you can keep Windows on its current drive and boot back to it as needed until you’re comfortable using Linux full time.

In most cases, the steps are almost the same as installing Windows, and can be boiled down to:

  1. Download the appropriate ISO file from the project website.
  2. Flash the downloaded ISO to a USB flash drive.
  3. Reboot your computer and boot to the USB flash drive.
  4. Follow the user friendly installer that will pop up.

Each image has its own instructions that will elaborate and add to the above:

Post-install

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”.

These are the magic part that allow games to run on Linux as if they were running on Windows. Valve’s Proton is the best known and most commonly used, and because it’s open source, there are a number of popular forks that can improve performance and stability over vanilla Proton. Nobara comes with the ProtonPlus app pre-installed to download and install new versions with a single click, while Bazzite comes with either ProtonPlus or the similar ProtonUp-Qt installed.

Note that once you’ve installed a new one to Steam via one of these apps, you have to restart Steam for it to notice it and offer it as an option. You can then go to the Steam settings → Compatibility tab → Default compatibility tool to change it; note that you can also right click a game in your Steam library and set a different one for just that game if (for example) people are reporting that a specific layer or version is needed to run it on ProtonDB.

Read more about compatibility layers on the Bazzite wiki.

For your personal files in your home (user) directory, Pika Backup has a great interface that walks you through everything. For more advanced users, I highly recommend Backrest.

If you need something equivalent to Windows’ System Restore or macOS’ Time Machine, Nobara ships with Timeshift pre-installed, and Bazzite can be rolled back to previous versions easily.

The answer is OpenRGB. It’s very light weight and works with a lot of devices across many manufacturers. Bonus: you can start using it even if you’re still on Windows for a while longer.

Guides and links