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”.

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 app store.

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