I’m a long time Linux user that hasn’t gamed much in years. Previously I tried it by installing wine and going from there but I had to manually hunt for DLLs so I gave up. So I have recently installed Bazzite and stuff that I want is working :) But I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite outside of gaming. So how does one reasonably setup gaming stuff on another distro? Is flatpak the way? On Ubuntu you have many different ways to install Steam for example. What about Proton? I saw people wrangling multiple versions for different games.
If someone can point me to somewhere where tech landscape is explained it would be great.
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Ideally, install Steam with a native package, but if that doesn’t exist, the Flatpak is always fine. You can also use Lutris if you want an all-in-one launcher for Steam, GOG, standalone, itch.io, emulators, etc. (and I know Heroic is nice if you need Epic Games)
If you use a newer device, you might want a distro with a newer kernel, but even Debian will work okay for gaming nowadays.
For most games Proton will work OOTB, but you might want to check on forums and ProtonDB for any information regarding specific tweaks for certain games. The only ones that don’t work as of yet are because the companies don’t want it to work. (plenty anticheat games work on Linux, Big Tech simply decides to revoke that functionality because money talks)
Linux gaming has had huge development over the last few years, it’s awesome!
I am moving to Piefed at [email protected] (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)
Heroic replaces all the functionalities of lutris without being near-vibe coded.
There’s a manual install feature that allows for the same flexibility without any fuss.
Literally every distro has seamless gaming.
What is your target outside of the gaming aspect? Which package manager do you want to use, which desktop environment, etc. What don’t you like about Bazzite?
Literally every distro has seamless gaming.
To expand on this: Some distros want a little more setup than others for gaming, but it’s generally a one-time thing and not particularly hard. Even my Debian Stable system plays games beautifully with a handful of Backports installed.
Is flatpak the way?
Steam can be installed natively or in a Flatpak. The latter can be a little fussy every once in a while, depending on your setup, but has the advantage of somewhat better sandboxing. (For better privacy protection, do your gaming on a dedicated machine or at least in a dedicated user account.)
What about Proton?
Proton is great. Steam comes with several versions, allowing you to choose the one best fitting any game that doesn’t work with the latest/default version. Some users choose to add third-party Proton builds (like GE-Proton) to Steam alongside the standard ones, but it usually isn’t necessary.
I would put a hard astrisk on that statment.
While technically true, some distos are much, much easier to get off the ground for gaming than others, and drastically reduce the level of effort that the end user has to put in.
Nobara is a great gaming distro that I’ll use for example because I use it. everythings configured and ready to go out of the box and basically just install steam and install your games and go. You don’t have to install anything, compile anything, configure anything.
its all there, complete with automatic updaters already installed that make updating it all easy peasy.
Can you do that on ubuntu? yes, but its gonna take a lot more work and you’ll have to manually do it all.
