It's been a couple of years since I've checked out any Linux distro in earnest. Now, that Microsoft has decided to constantly make Windows worse by every update they do to it, I though ti might be a good idea to check out where Linux is now, after years of Valve doing their magic polishing Proton layer to make games work on their own Linux based SteamOS they are using on their Steam Deck as well as on the upcoming Steam Machine, or Gabe Cube as it has been lovingly nicknamed by the fans of Valve, after the its founder Gabe Newell.
Not really wanting to plunge instantly to the deep end, I rummaged through my cabinets and found I had a spare 120 gig SSD drive. It's not the biggest, but as the prices for new SSDs are somewhat high, I decided it would do for a Linux drive, so into my desktop it went. Then I noticed I actually have an old HP Bang & Olufsen Spectre laptop as well, which I'm not using, so I decided I'd do my first test on that instead. Now, it's not the greatest laptop in the world, but I thought it would do for a first test, and I would not cry after anything on its Windows 10 drive.
After looking for distros, I decided I'd go with Nobara. It is built on Fedora, is meant for gaming and comes with most of the things you need for gaming, like Wine, installed from the get-go. So, I quickly made a bootable USB, plugged it into my laptop and booted it. Relatively painless and quick install later, I had Nobara running on my laptop and, surprisingly enough, everything in it was working like it should. I had sound, the touchscreen display worked, and frankly, the laptop felt much snappier than it had ever felt with Windows installed. I was sure that at least the touchscreen would not work, but even that is working perfectly.
So, after my first boot, I did the mandatory updates, installed Steam and Heroic to get a connection to my GOG games as well. And lo and behold, I had my games library again at my fingertips. The machine has a relatively limited GPU, so it's not meant for any kind of heavy gaming, but I figured it would do well on adventure games if nothing else. That led me to install the remaster of Day of the Tentacle, among other lighter titles, and lo and behold, they ran perfectly, without any hitch. DOTT, especially, was an interesting test, as it also works by using a gamepad, so I could plug in my 8BitDo controller and even that worked perfectly.
Another thing I wanted to make sure of was how well it would do when plugged in on my 4K TV, as that's how I do most of my gaming these days, my computer attached to my TV. While it was relatively painless, I had some issues with scaling up the UI and fonts, but that might have been more down to the laptop being relatively old. Other than that, it was more or less a success, and I was soon playing DOTT using the gamepad.
This first success out of the way, I decided to install Nobara on my desktop as well. It's not the beefiest of machines, Ryzen 7 with 3050 GPU, but it's good enough to test some newer games. The installation was again easy, but after installing the NVIDIA CUDA drivers, something went wonky, and the reboot got stuck on a black loading screen. So, a bit annoyed, I reinstalled Nobara and installed only the official drivers, and after that, all seemed to work.
Again, after installing some older games, it's a 120-gig drive after all, I noticed another small issue. In old DOS games, I could not hear any MIDI sounds. After some googling, I found the issues might be missing MIDI drivers, so I installed them and had music again.
The second problem I encountered was that my controller wasn't working. I was perplexed as it was working on my old laptop, and the OS seemed to see my controller. It just wasn't registering any inputs. Some deep dives on the soul life of gamepad drivers, I found out, by a stroke of just trying it out, that the issue was the USB hub I was using. Nobara could detect the pad through it, but something about it broke the inputs. So, after plugging the 8bitdo dongle directly into the USB slot without any hubs, it was working again.
Now that all is working, I wanted to give a go at the RTX features of my 3050. This, I concluded, would be best done by Doom2RTX as well as Quake 2 RTX. On Doom2RTX, my only issue was the fluid sim that was used to splatter blood. It made my screen all read, so I disabled it, and after that, it ran perfectly, RTX and all. I don't know if it was the issue with Linux, the Doom2RTX build or the drivers, but it wasn't a hard thing to fix. On Quake 2 RTX, I had zero issues, so all was working there.
For a more modern AAA game, I gave Alien Isolation a go. The only issue I had with it was when I changed the graphics settings. That made the menu lag, but restarting the game fixed that issue. Other than that, the game was running more or less perfectly. Maybe even better than it had ever run for me in Windows.
So, this was, as far as games go, a bit of a random test. The games I tried all worked. The biggest issues I had with GOG games were that all I needed was just selecting the correct Proton layer, and after that, the games started without a hitch. Some games, like Fenimer Fillmore: the Westerner, people have said don't run at all under Windows 11, ran perfectly on Linux, so in some cases, especially with older games, Linux might even be the better option. Which reminds me, I should give one of my old all-time favourites, Discworld Noir, a go, as it has been broken on every Windows newer than 98.
The games I've tried range from old DoS games to a bit more modern AAA games. Most of them have worked without any issues; some might have some issues, some might have been broken under Linux, but they are under Windows. One such broken game is an old adventure game, Sallambo, which just seems to be bonkers when you try to control it. This is something fiddling with the settings might fix, but in this case, the loss isn't too big an issue to me. I recall having the need to do something about it in Windows as well.
All in all, I'd say it's quite evident Linux has come a long way. It has come such a long way that it is more than a viable option for gaming on a PC these days. At least based on my week playing on it. I will keep playing around in it, but I feel the time for jumping off Windows has finally come, and I can honestly ask myself a question: why did I not give this a more serious go sooner? Now all I need is for SSD prices to come down a bit so I can get a bigger one to install it in.
I'm going to note in my reviews if I've played the game on Linux. But, as I do have some stuff written way before I started testing with Nobara, don't expect to see Linux reviews immediately.
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