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
Do you have Proton installed, and did you tell Steam to run games using it? Go to Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility. Make sure Enable Steam Play is checked for both Supported and "Other" titles, and the drop down has a Proton version in it. I personally use Proton Experimental for everything.
I can't help but notice that Civ VI, F1 2015 and Broforce which all work for you are all native Linux titles, and all of the ones that don't work don't have Linux versions and would therefore need to be run through Proton. ProtonDB lists all of them as Gold tier titles, so they should generally work okay with only minor issues. Steam doesn't do great messaging and prompt players to do this from what I remember.
Appreciate the reply! Yeah, you're right, the games that should run, run (even though Civ VI is having some issues with AA). I do have Proton enabled, and I have checked ProtonDB (and read comments for tips and "run-commands", but I'm still stuck.
It should again be mentioned that I'm on Fedora 38, but that shouldn't have any impact right? I'm aware that PopOS is the "go to" distro when you wanna game on Linux, but is that actually true?
There's actually a distro based on Fedora called Nobara that is gamer focused. It's maintained by a well-known Redhat employee who also maintains Proton-GE.
Nobara KDE has been my distro of choice for a while. Everything seems to just work for me.
I’ve been gaming on fedora for 2 years now, and it’s worked perfectly for me every time. Civ 6 has working AA for me, and even most ray traced games I have run with ray tracing. I can’t recommend pop these days because it is fairly old, and in its next version will get a whole new desktop which may or may not work well.
Thanks for your input! Much appreciated, and I'll definitely keep using Fedora. A world where Windows isn't the only proper OS for gaming would be awesome, but I honestly beleve we're heading towards that world in the near future. Valve is working hard at Proton and things are only getting better.
Any distro should work provided you have the right packages. The package maintainers will ensure the versions play nicely together. What matter a bit more is X11 vs. Wayland, and Nvidia vs AMD, but in general, I'm fairly confident you should be able to play on any distro through Steam. Some distros come packed with drivers/wine/etc. for convenience, some you might have to compile them. The former will advertise their "gaming-readiness", I would stick to those. Outside of gaming, you will get the same smoothness you find with Fedora with other distros.
Excellent reply! I'm just running stock Fedora Workstation 38 on an all AMD-system. On paper, this should not be a problem. Maybe I'm missing a teeny tiny detail, but that's part of the game I guess,lol. I'll keep using Fedora as a daily and boot into Win 11 when I wanna game. Proton is moving fast though, so hopefully I'll run "pure linux" soon.
Regarding the distro, definitely not the case. Steam Deck runs on Arch for example. Years ago I played on Fedora just fine.
If you don't mind elaborating, what are the issues you're seeing? I absolutely get your frustration, but I think many of us would be happy to help you and hopefully it's a quick solution!