This time I’m actually going to do it. I’m going to place Linux on my gaming PC. Calling it now. 2026 is the yr of Linux on the desktop. Or at the very least on mine.
Linux has been a wonderfully viable desktop OS for ages. However gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s laborious work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Home windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Home windows. And after studying concerning the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I wish to strive it.
To be clear, my desktop works superb on Home windows 11. However the common ratio of cool new options to egregious bullshit is low. I do not want to talk to my computer. I don’t wish to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not going to use Recall. I’m bored with Home windows attempting to get me to make use of Edge, Edge attempting to get me to make use of Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Workplace 365 subscription so I may edit Excel recordsdata. Then Workplace 365 changed into Copilot 365, and I attempted to make use of it to open a Phrase doc and it didn’t know the way.
In the meantime, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10, together with safety updates, forcing individuals to purchase new {hardware} or stay with the dangers. It’s disabling workarounds that allow you to set up Windows 11 with a local account or with older {hardware}. It’s turning Xboxes into PCs and PCs into upsells for its different companies. Simply this week, the corporate introduced that it’s putting AI agents in the taskbar to show Home windows right into a “canvas for AI.” I don’t suppose Home windows goes to be a greater working system in a yr, so it seems like time to strive Linux once more.
I’m not usually one to alter frogs midstream, however the water positive is getting scorching.
That’s to not say I do know what I’m doing. I’ve used Macs for a decade for work, and I dabbled in Ubuntu 20-something years in the past, however in any other case I’ve been a Home windows man since 3.1. At first, that’s as a result of it’s what we had at residence, later as a result of that’s the place the video games have been, and eventually out of power of behavior (and since that’s the place the video games have been). I introduced a desktop to school as an alternative of a laptop computer (so I may play video games), and I’ve been constructing my very own PCs for 18 years. I began my journalism profession at Most PC journal, testing gaming PC elements.
I attempt to keep aware of all the foremost working methods due to my job, so along with my work MacBook I even have a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and a set of older {hardware} I refuse to eliminate. I can work fairly properly in Home windows, in macOS, or in ChromeOS.
My experiences with Linux over the previous decade, then again, have largely been as a sequence of extraordinarily non-obligatory Duties:
- Attempting to arrange Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi. It type of labored however was stymied by my residence community setup, and I finally changed it with House Assistant.
- Organising a Beepy, a sort of a bootleg Linux handheld with a tiny monochrome display and a BlackBerry keyboard. This took longer than I wished, nevertheless it labored in the long run, and I discovered that utilizing a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a tiny monochrome display is my model of hell.
- Operating a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I may use Obsidian, my most popular note-taking app, which doesn’t have an internet interface. This was a nice expertise and I’ve no complaints.
- [deep breath] Organising three completely different digital machines utilizing the Home windows Subsystem for Linux so I may construct keyboard firmware: one for QMK, one for ZMK, and I believe the third was as a result of the primary QMK one stopped working. All of those have been on my previous desktop, on which your complete Linux subsystem someway broke past restore.
All of these tasks, besides the Chromebook one, took longer than anticipated, and lower into my vanishingly uncommon discretionary time. That’s additionally the time I exploit for gaming, studying, staring into the void, and half-starting organizational tasks, so you may see how treasured it’s to me.
The prospect of as an alternative utilizing that point attempting to get my pc again to a baseline degree of performance — that’s, as helpful because it was earlier than I attempted putting in Linux — is tempting, nevertheless it’s additionally why I haven’t performed it but.
It’s time to strive gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been having fun with Bazzite, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; my good friend and former colleague Will Smith is cohosting a PCWorld podcast referred to as Dual Boot Diaries with this actual premise.
And what higher system to strive it on than my private desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graphics card? I simply rebuilt this factor. The Home windows set up is just like six months previous. It’s working about in addition to Home windows does.
So actually, why wouldn’t I blow that up and begin over?
Primarily based on listening to 2 and a half episodes of Twin Boot Diaries and a short textual content dialog with Will, I’m going to put in CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on trendy {hardware}, with help for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly straightforward setup.
I don’t count on issues to go easily. I don’t actually know what I’m doing, and Linux remains to be a really small share of the PC gaming world. As of the newest Steam Hardware & Software Survey — one of the best proxy we have now for PC gaming {hardware} information as an entire — simply over 3 p.c of Steam customers are operating Linux. Of these, 27 p.c are utilizing SteamOS (and subsequently a Steam Deck), 10 p.c are utilizing Arch, 6 p.c are utilizing CachyOS, 4 p.c are utilizing Bazzite, and the remainder are cut up over a bunch of distros.
So if something goes fallacious in my set up, it’ll be a variety of forum-hopping and Discord looking out to determine all of it out. However I’ve cleverly organized it so the stakes are solely medium: I’ve different machines to work on whereas my desktop is inevitably borked (and to run packages like Adobe Inventive Suite), and if I find yourself spending hours of my discretionary time studying Linux as an alternative of gaming, properly, that’s not the worst consequence.
Perhaps it’ll all go easily and I’ll report again in a number of weeks, one other prophet of the revolution. Perhaps it’ll go terribly and I’ll come crawling again. Just one method to discover out.
