All in all it depends on you. Arch isn’t that big of a deal if you can read and are willing to put a bit of an effort to it and its strenghts justify that for the vast crowd using it.
I can read doc an put that bit of effort if necessary - the eternal question is, do I really want to project myself to do that on a daily basis?
Newer games might not be optimized for Linux in the first place
Thanks to the success of the SD, I believe many developers have started testing and optimizing their games for Proton, which I also account for when I’m talking about “optimized for Linux”.
Noted for the rolling releases! Don’t rolling releases necessarily bring the risk of unstabilities as well? There’s often a balance which might be hard to find between features and stability.
Battle.net works as well, OW2 plays fine on Linux.
I thought SD users had to dual boot to play Diablo IV quite recently, I thought it was because of a Batlle.NET compatibility issue but I might have been mistaken.
As for a distro, I’d aim for something Arch based. Simply because you’ll get the latest drivers and mesa versions all the time, which is proven to increase FPS a ton over say, Ubuntu.
That’s a very good point I hadn’t thought of! Any specific recommendations?
Ubuntu has been (mostly) great so far! And there are some Ubuntu-based distros that seem to be tailored for gaming, so I was curious to see if any users around here had used them - I’ve mentioned Draugr and Ubuntu Game Pack, but if I was to use a base distro and tune it myself I might pick Pop! OS which seems really nice.
I almost exclusively play solo games, with exceptions here and there for solo campaigns - I’m currently playing MH:World, which is officially supported on the Deck so I guess compatibility will not be an issue. So anti-cheat systems will not impact me (or barely), and I don’t know what games will be a hinder.
Any games that haven’t worked at all for you? And what kinds of hiccups have you encountered? I haven’t seen any actually incompatible game so far on the Deck - the main blockers I’ve seen were controller issues, or sometimes performance issues here and there on bad ports like FFXIII, FFXIII-2 and FFXIII: Lightning Returns. I guess modding can be quite a problem too, especially when all external tools are built for Windows.
Regarding NVIDIA drivers, what GPU do you have if I may ask? I recently upgraded to a 4070, I must say I’d hate to have upgraded to hinder performance because of the OS.
Yes, it is so much better than even 2 years ago - I would have never even considered Linux for my desktop, until very recently when I saw how everything pretty much works on the SD.
Your first two points don’t impact me that much, but that third one hurts - I have been unable to make my monitor work in the correct resolution / refresh rate with Wayland and have had to use Xorg instead.
Isn’t Arch a bit much? I’ve only used Ubuntu so far so I could consider easily using an Ubuntu-based distro, and although I tinker a bit with it I feel like Arch is really for more experienced users. Although Endeavour seems to accompany users a little bit already.
That’s exactly the kind of feedback I wanted to have, thank you! I don’t think I play any game in your list, or any game that use of anti-cheat (most of the games I play are solo games anyway), which tends to suggest that I might be the kind of gamer that would be able to switch without too much to look back to.
Do you know how comparable is the performance between Linux and Windows?
Indeed, I mixed up DRM and anti-cheat. On one hand, it’s really annoying, but on the other hand it’s really not the genre of games I play, so I wouldn’t be bothered with any of this.
I think Diablo IV and maybe even the Battle.NET launcher. for example, won’t work on Linux at all, won’t they?
I understand cloud gaming works well, and I agree that it might be a very good alternative for the Steam Deck. However, it’s not a viable first option with a powerful enough desktop - I’ve bought such a machine to be able to play on it, not to stream to it. Besides, my backlog of games is already large enough that I shouldn’t require an unlimited library of new games!
And King Crimson fans!