Gaming on Linux - Steam Deck, SteamOS, Bazzite and others

Forums › Gaming › Gaming on Linux - Steam Deck, SteamOS, Bazzite and others

Handle9

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#320157 11-Jul-2025 16:00

With Valve broadening availability of Steam OS and Bazzite being very solid now, it seemed a good time for a Linux gaming thread.

I've had a steam deck for ages, which I really enjoy. I had it setup as dual boot but really only used it in Steam mode.

My livingroom gaming PC, which had been setup as a console with Windows, Playnite etc got into a Windows update deathloop which I found incredibly frustrating. I intalled Bazzite a week or so ago and it's been flawless.

I tweaked the fan curve of the GPU using lact and it's now a truly console like experience. I'm very happy. I've kept a Windows partition for if I want to play something that is Windows only or has real problems with Proton but I'm not seeing it getting used much.

Who else is running Bazzite or a Linux gaming OS?

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#3393324 11-Jul-2025 16:06

I was using manjaro for a long time, before bazzite was so good.

I repurposed that PC about 6months ago.

For games I played, it was pretty much perfect. Single player action/adventure (witcher 3 etc)). Ubisoft was annoying though.

nzkc

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#3393326 11-Jul-2025 16:34

Very very casual gamer on PC. But I run Fedora on a laptop I play Steam games on. Linux gaming has come a long way. And with Pewdiepie switching to Linux I think we'll see quite a switch to linux gaming.

I watched this Jayz Two Cents video yesterday where he tries gaming on Linux:

And uses Bazzite. Looks a great distro.

eonsim

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#3393327 11-Jul-2025 16:35

I've been using Cachyos Desktop and Cachyos Handheld (ROG Ally) which works well. Good performance and support for the ROG Ally, have managed to get FSR4 working via OptiScaler for some titles.

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#3393338 11-Jul-2025 17:57

Using Bazzite as my daily driver for both work and play on my AMD based desktop (7950x / 7900 XTX). After dual-booting Win10 and Fedora for awhile, I realised I almost never used Win10 and really liked Bazzite when I dual booted it on my ROG Ally for a laff. Absolutely converted and Bazzite works well as a general purpose PC for me.

For work, O365 apps work well enough in the browser, RAM usage is almost halved compared to Windows; and for play, games work extremely well or even actually just work at all... for example, I tried Robocop: Rogue City on Windows and it crashed so much (apparently a well-known UE issue) I ended up refunding it. Fast-forward to Bazzite, and I decide to give it a go again, and boom, no problems at all and runs extremely well. Steam is almost perfect and Heroic works well for other stores; I'm playing Death Stranding at the moment installed from the Epic Games store when I got it for free, but also using GoG as well.

Downsides: I have had some random crashes coming back from sleep (pretty sure its pipewire...); and there are still some lingering non-gaming apps that just work better in Windows, so keep a work laptop.

nzkc

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#3393339 11-Jul-2025 18:02

Forums seem to be swallowing my youtube link. So here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa8nMiEoti0

KiwiSurfer

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#3393343 11-Jul-2025 18:12

I love Linux/BSD but have stuck with Windows on both my gaming machines as too many of my gaming library are Windows-only.

Examples from Steam of games not possible to play on Linux via Steam:-

Age of Empires II (+1 of its expansion)
Airport CEO
Endless ATC
RISK
Sid Meier's Civilization® IV (+ 3 of its expansions)
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
Townscaper
Worm.is

The five bolded are some of my favourites so not worth the loss switching away from Windows.

Any suggestions?

I've tried WINE many yesrs ago and it was utterly awful with anything more complex than a simple app, is it any better now?

Is it worth running a Windows guest in a VM on a Linux host these days? I am aware that makes graphics acceleration a big issue but some of the above games are old enough that maybe it's not a big issue anymore.

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ShinyChrome

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#3393344 11-Jul-2025 18:55

I think it would be worth trying to dual boot Bazzite at least, since most of those that i tried searching on ProtonDB showed that they could be made playable, and one of Bazzite's superpowers over just Steam is all the extra pre-loaded apps/tweaks for managing Proton/Wine etc

One thing I will say is your mileage depends on your GPU; AMD definitely just seems to work in general, Nvidia not so much

cddt

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#3393356 11-Jul-2025 19:30

Handle9:

got into a Windows update deathloop which I found incredibly frustrating

Same scenario prompted me to install Fedora in 2017 and I haven't looked back.

My referral links: BigPipe | Mercury

cddt

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#3393358 11-Jul-2025 19:43

KiwiSurfer:

Examples from Steam of games not possible to play on Linux via Steam:-

Age of Empires II (+1 of its expansion)

I have been able to play this with Steam on Linux many times, although I will admit I haven't done so for more than a year.

Checking the reviews on ProtonDB, most people indicate it still works. When I first set it up, multiplayer always desynced in the first few seconds, so I had to patch ucrtbase.dll from https://download.microsoft.com/download/9/3/F/93FCF1E7-E6A4-478B-96E7-D4B285925B00/vc_redist.x64.exe

Worked flawlessly since then. Had to limit frame rate because my GPU was running at 100% and rendering 400 FPS or something silly.

My referral links: BigPipe | Mercury

KiwiSurfer

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#3393359 11-Jul-2025 19:45

cddt:

KiwiSurfer:

Examples from Steam of games not possible to play on Linux via Steam:-

Age of Empires II (+1 of its expansion)

I have been able to play this with Steam on Linux many times, although I will admit I haven't done so for more than a year.

Checking the reviews on ProtonDB, most people indicate it still works. When I first set it up, multiplayer always desynced in the first few seconds, so I had to patch ucrtbase.dll from https://download.microsoft.com/download/9/3/F/93FCF1E7-E6A4-478B-96E7-D4B285925B00/vc_redist.x64.exe

Worked flawlessly since then.

Interesting, Steam on Linux refuses to download/install this game. Do you sideload it somehow or run it outside of Steam?

ShinyChrome

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#3393366 11-Jul-2025 20:13

KiwiSurfer:

Interesting, Steam on Linux refuses to download/install this game. Do you sideload it somehow or run it outside of Steam?

Have you enabled the "Enable Steam Play for all other titles." option in Settings > Steam Play

IIRC, I couldn't do anything until I enabled that running the Steam flatpak on Fedora

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cddt

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#3393369 11-Jul-2025 20:31

KiwiSurfer:

Interesting, Steam on Linux refuses to download/install this game. Do you sideload it somehow or run it outside of Steam?

Direct from Steam.

My referral links: BigPipe | Mercury

KiwiSurfer

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#3393371 11-Jul-2025 20:36

ShinyChrome:

KiwiSurfer:

Interesting, Steam on Linux refuses to download/install this game. Do you sideload it somehow or run it outside of Steam?

Have you enabled the "Enable Steam Play for all other titles." option in Settings > Steam Play

IIRC, I couldn't do anything until I enabled that running the Steam flatpak on Fedora

I could play plenty of other titles fine -- sounds like a different issue if you couldn't do anything?

KiwiSurfer

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#3393372 11-Jul-2025 20:39

cddt:

KiwiSurfer:

Interesting, Steam on Linux refuses to download/install this game. Do you sideload it somehow or run it outside of Steam?

Direct from Steam.

Do you mind finding out which edition of AoE2 you have? There's a number of editions and I wonder if only some of them has been ported. I have those ones:

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#3393383 11-Jul-2025 21:44

Protondb shows AoE II as playable. Might want to check there to see how people are playing. Iirc if you have steam compatibility enabled it will let you install and attempt launch regardless.

As for the topic of this thread, I run steamos on steam deck and kubuntu dual boot win10 on my desktop. It runs well out of the box with nvidia “open” or proprietary and DLSS functions well. No significant issues at all playing games and kde plasma is nice. I did upgrade from kubuntu lts to 25.04 to get latest plasma and try out wayland.

I will say while it works there isn’t feature parity with nvidia windows. There is no RTX HDR, video or DLDSR available on linux. DLSS frame generation also was not available until fairly recently. Theres also a performance regression for Dx12 titles up to 20% as well as raytracing hit up to 40%, both are in nvidia forums as bugs and are being worked on.

That and the whole thing around closed drivers and wayland makes nvidia not as great vs windows. It’s comparative to AMD/Intel if you just want to play games but I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.

It’s probably also the biggest reason steamos for desktop isn’t out, 75% or something of the steam hardware survey is nvidia.

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