Back in October of last year, I switched from Windows 11 to Linux on my gaming PC. I noted how well it worked for me compared to previous attempts. Now it's a little over three months later, so let me tell you about how it's going.
I started out with Debian 13. That seemed to work fine, but as I used it more and learned more about why I was encountering the bugs and glitches I saw, I began to understand how poor a match for me Debian 13 was.
The graphical problems were mostly because of Wayland. However, the root cause was that Debian had really old Nvidia drivers and it was difficult to update them without breaking other things. I do a lot of gaming, and the Nvidia drivers were causing me all kinds of issues like bad FPS, flickering, and crashing. Even non-games like Visual Studio Code and Obsidian had graphical glitches that made them almost unusable.
So, I switched to the distribution that I used before, Pop_OS!. This solved a great many problems for me, and I think this is mostly due to the newer drivers that it includes. I was also curious to try System76's new COSMIC desktop environment that Pop_OS! now uses. So far, it's been fine. It definitely works better than Debian did. There are none of the graphical issues that I had before. Some games just seem bound and determined to not work for me, though, despite ProtonDB saying they should work fine.
Some of these include:
- The Finals, which has horrible FPS drops on Linux
- Overwatch 2, which seems to get some bizarre mouse issues, though has fewer graphical issues than the Finals
- Star Trek Online, which just... gods, it runs like I have a Pentium II and no graphics card at all.
The other major issue that I keep fighting with is the really poor WiFi performance. I have an old Intel built-in WiFi adapter, and while I could get around 400 Mbps on Windows (and I still do on my other non-Linux devices), on Linux it varies widely and seems to stay in the 5-50 Mbps range. I've tried a ton of things to fix this, but nothing has worked.
Other than those issues, though, gaming has actually been pretty good on Linux. Dune: Awakening is my most-played game right now, and it works wonderfully on Linux. I also play modded Minecraft (via the Prism Launcher), which wouldn't run at all on Debian 13 but runs just fine on Pop_OS!. Monster Train 2 also works flawlessly.
I could keep using Pop_OS!, but my desire to tinker and try and fix these issues has started to draw me to CachyOS and the Arch world. At this point in my life, my knowledge of Linux might be good enough to navigate Arch, despite its reputation for fragility.
Alternatively, I might try to replace some of my PC components. This computer is 6 years old now, and it's definitely showing its age in some respects. However, with the price of PC components skyrocketing thanks to generative AI, now is not the best time to buy new ones.
Anyway, in general Linux is going great. Some other time I should write a post about the software and process changes I've made as an indirect result of Linux.