Dual-booting Windows 11 and Fedora 38. Gaming on Win 11 is, as expected, most times great. I want to migrate to Fedora and use it as a daily driver, and while it does a damn good job at doing just that, it’s disturbingly aweful at gaming. I’ve installed Steam and I set out to try a couple of games to see what it would handle.
It should be noted that I’m not a hardcore gamer, and I’ve historically not gamed on PC (but PS and Xbox), so I don’t have quite the extensive library of games on Steam like many others do. I’ve got Game Pass, but that won’t help me here. Anyhow… the games I’ve tried to run are games that I currently have on Steam.
Hardware:
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CPU: Ryzen 5 4600G
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GPU: RX 6700 XT
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RAM: 32 GB 3200 MHz
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SSD: 4 TB M.2
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I expected Civilization VI to run fine, and… it did. although anti-aliasing decided not to work.
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Humankind, does not run. At all.
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Broforce does in fact run perfectly fine!
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F1 2015 (don’t laugh, it was free), does run and it does in fact run at max settings, but the controls (keyboard + xbox) are fucked, so that’s also a no go.
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Red Dead Redemption 2, hahaha no.
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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, hahah no, for some reason.
While I “love” and support “Linux”, this doesn’t cut it. Why am I even “here”? I’ve been using “Linux” for at least 15 years (incl. Windows),but if I want to play a God damn fucking game, I want to play it now, not tomorrow, or after I’ve googled a fucking hack that’ll break x amount of shit and take me hours to get running. This is why I’ll still use Win 11 as my daily.
Fedora as an OS is smooth, quick AF and I very much like it. Gaming on it? God no.
My point is, while Win 11 is basically “don’t worry, it’ll run!”, Linux (or Fedora at least is “I don’t know… maybe?”. That won’t convince a lot of people, and currently not me.
EDIT: THIS IS WHY LEMMY IS BETTER THAN REDDIT. HUMAN CONVERSATION. THANK YOU ALL
I agree that the experience on Linux is quite variable; I set up my Linux installation to play games once 3 years ago (it didn’t take me hours) and my Steam games are plug and play. I don’t play all the games from those lists but RDR2 plays perfectly fine for me. Occasionally, there would be updates that would introduce a regression for some games (DX12 is still a bit hit or miss on some titles) and it would take a few searches to find a workaround, but I can accept that, since I can stay on an OS I trust and would rather use. Rarely, there would be a serious bug or issue that I find difficult to triage because I can’t tell whose fault it is between Proton/Wine, Steam, Nvidia etc. But this happened once in the past few years.
I think what would help is Steam making their own Wiki (with contributors) on gaming on Linux for its own platform for players who just want a streamlined experience.
But communities like /c/linux_gaming (or its orange site equivalence) are ways to get support and help one another. You could even see it as the “friends you make along the way”.
I would say gaming on Linux has come a long way since, but depending on how much time and energy one has for the occasional tinkering, one might need to exercise more patience. Sounds like Windows gives you what you need, and that’s okay.