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 least on mine.
Linux has been a wonderfully viable desktop OS for ages. However gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s arduous work getting Home windows video games to run properly on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Home windows run higher and have increased body charges on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Home windows. And after studying in regards to the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s expertise working Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I need to attempt it.
To be clear, my desktop works high-quality on Home windows 11. However the basic ratio of cool new options to egregious bullshit is low. I don’t need to speak to my pc. I don’t need to use OneDrive. I’m positive as hell not going to make use of 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 every part attempting to get me to make use of Copilot. I paid for an Workplace 365 subscription so I might 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 understand how.
In the meantime, Microsoft is ending assist for Home windows 10, together with safety updates, forcing folks to purchase new {hardware} or reside with the dangers. It’s disabling workarounds that allow you to arrange Home windows 11 with a neighborhood 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 placing AI brokers within the taskbar to show Home windows right into a “canvas for AI.” I don’t assume Home windows goes to be a greater working system in a yr, so it appears like a great time to attempt Linux once more.
I’m not usually one to alter frogs midstream, however the water positive is getting sizzling.
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 at last out of drive of behavior (and since that’s the place the video games have been). I introduced a desktop to school as a substitute of a laptop computer (so I might 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 acquainted with all the foremost working techniques 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, however, have largely been as a sequence of extraordinarily elective Duties:
- Attempting to arrange Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi. It kind of labored however was stymied by my residence community setup, and I finally changed it with Residence Assistant.
- Establishing a Beepy, a form of a bootleg Linux handheld with a tiny monochrome display and a BlackBerry keyboard. This took longer than I needed, however it labored in the long run, and I realized that utilizing a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a tiny monochrome display is my model of hell.
- Working a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I might use Obsidian, my most popular note-taking app, which doesn’t have an online interface. This was a nice expertise and I’ve no complaints.
- [deep breath] Establishing three completely different digital machines utilizing the Home windows Subsystem for Linux so I might 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 outdated desktop, on which all the Linux subsystem in some way 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 possibly can see how treasured it’s to me.
The prospect of as a substitute 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, however it’s additionally why I haven’t completed it but.
It’s a great time to attempt gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been having enjoyable with Bazzite, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; my good friend and former colleague Will Smith is cohosting a PCWorld podcast referred to as Twin Boot Diaries with this actual premise.
And what higher machine to attempt it on than my private desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Tremendous graphics card? I simply rebuilt this factor. The Home windows set up is simply like six months outdated. It’s working about in addition to Home windows does.
So actually, why wouldn’t I blow that up and begin over?
Based mostly 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 fashionable {hardware}, with assist for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly simple setup.
I don’t anticipate 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 latest Steam {Hardware} & Software program Survey — the very best proxy we now have for PC gaming {hardware} information as an entire — simply over 3 p.c of Steam customers are working Linux. Of these, 27 p.c are utilizing SteamOS (and due to this fact 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 plenty 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 a substitute of gaming, properly, that’s not the worst end result.
Perhaps it’ll all go easily and I’ll report again in just a few weeks, one other prophet of the revolution. Perhaps it’ll go terribly and I’ll come crawling again. Just one approach to discover out.
