PC Gamers Abandoning Windows 11 for Linux with Higher FPS & Fewer Interruptions
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Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck
I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
Another data point to add. I’ve started using Bazzite and introduced it to my brother. The only hitch I’ve noticed is not being able to play stuff like the new Battlefield.
It is by far the easiest operating system to install, keep updated, and run basic apps and play games on. Flatpaks are great. Brew is good for CLI tools. AppImages are another alternative to Flatpaks that work well. Steam comes pre-installed, and most games run well.
There are no ads, no AI, no dark patterns. It’s just a simple operating system that keeps itself updated.
Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with
rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite). But my examples of these are installing GhosTTY (non AppImage), Paretto Security, and 1Password SSH Daemon/op. Most people will never need to do these.I’m a software engineer, and I’ve found that for the most part, Bazzite is good enough to run on my gaming pc and work pcs.
I’m sorry you had such a bad first experience with it.
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
Interesting. I’ve been using Linux for nearly 6 years now, and I can definitely relate to pipewire and audio related issues (I’m a musician so I’ve suffered much in that area), but I can’t say I’ve struggled so much with devices. I wonder if those are Bazzite specific issues or if our setups are just different.
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Oh I completely disagree. There are severe enough issues for users to switch to Linux, they’re just not severe enough for you.
Or the overwhelmingly vast majority of windows and Mac users.
Linux is an OS you’re forced to use, not something you choose.
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Have you looked into using Wine or Proton to install Cubase on CachyOS? I see the wine page for it has a few garbage rating for the app, but I imagine that some of the work being done to get the steam games working might carry over to other desktop apps that didn’t work well on Wine in the past.
I’ve attempted to install Cubase using Bottles with no luck. I think the difficulty revolves around audio drivers and such.
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Which GPU do you have? There are plenty of distros that work just fine with Nvidia.
GTX 1080.
Might be an issue with my setup. I run HDMI + DVI. My BIOS refuses to work with DVI for some reason.
Might detect it as two monitors, hence why it runs at full boost clock constantly. Didn’t find a fix for it so just gave up and went back to Windows where it works just fine.
Also doesn’t seem to detect DVI without the HDMI connected. Might be my GPU is faulty.
/shrug
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The worse part of vista wasn’t even that it looked awful or ran awful. Personal perfence not with standing.
It was just 3 years too early and hardware fucking sucked. Drivers went standardized and everything was too weak.
Going back to vista years after the fact show it was actually really solid.
Probably the last time Microsoft was ever ahead of the curve in terms of design. Vista then 7 were great design wise, then it was only down hill since.
Changing the graphics driver model at the same time as making the desktop graphically demanding was probably a bad idea
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
I just installed cachyos after using mint for a year. Overall, was smooth until i tried to use VLC. Video played fine, but an hour of settings later and i could finally hear the movie. I was an inch from saying fuck it and going back to mint. I debug software for a living, last thing i want to deal with is debugging my personal computer when I just want to watch a movie.
May go back at some point, mint really is so easy and just worked, but the performance and aur are pretty great.
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Oh it’s immutable? Damn.
That explains some shit.
How do I go about switching to CachyOS? Just wipe the NVME and run an installer?
Yeah I’d wipe it if you’re going to switch, always less headaches that way. CachyOS has a lot of options so I’ll throw my 2 cents out there, I set it up with btrfs file system and the limine bootloader because it automatically sets up snapshots so you can roll back if something gets borked. It’s also easier to get secure boot working with limine if you’re trying to dual boot.
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Or the overwhelmingly vast majority of windows and Mac users.
Linux is an OS you’re forced to use, not something you choose.
“Linux is an OS you’re forced to use, not something you choose.”
You’re right, I was held at gun point by the Penguin Task Force led by Torvalds himself. I feared for my life and I had to figure out how to use NixOS otherwise my family and I would have been sent to the gulag. Oh how I wish I could be using Windows but I can’t
Windows is my Juliet and I am her Romeo.
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
Huh, most people actually like Flatpak, and for good reasons too.
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
nano is the Fishcer Price’s My First Text Editor and you’re expected to quickly graduate to something that sucks way more
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This was the same era when I tried to switch, due to the shittiness of Vista. I wanna say it was Mandrake Linux was what I was trying to use, but I couldn’t get it running correctly on my hardware.
Came back some time later and discovered Mepis Linux. After that, I never went back.
I started with Ubuntu, switched to Mint and finally settled on Arch.
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I made the move to Linux about a month ago, and it’s been super smooth (and yes I have an NVIDIA 3080). I went with CachyOS though. The ONLY thing keeping me dual-booting windows though is Cubase (DAW), which is unfortunate but whatever. I don’t really play any games that use EAC / kernel-level anti-cheat so it doesn’t affect me, but is a bummer.
Cubase works great for example in Hatari
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I’ve attempted to install Cubase using Bottles with no luck. I think the difficulty revolves around audio drivers and such.
Yeah, Linux audio is great when it does work, but a real pain when it doesn’t. Looks like there is some work being done to bridge the DAW gap like https://github.com/microfortnight/yabridge-bottles-wineloader, but I image getting it working will be a bit of a rabbit hole.
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The worse part of vista wasn’t even that it looked awful or ran awful. Personal perfence not with standing.
It was just 3 years too early and hardware fucking sucked. Drivers went standardized and everything was too weak.
Going back to vista years after the fact show it was actually really solid.
Probably the last time Microsoft was ever ahead of the curve in terms of design. Vista then 7 were great design wise, then it was only down hill since.
Hardware was definitely the issue. What got me to first install Linux was my wireless card just randomly stopped working. People were recommending that I do a full reinstall of Vista to get internet working again. I installed Ubuntu instead and never looked back.
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i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
Exact opposite experience here, coming from using Linux as toy desktops for the past few years. My main PC is EndeavourOS, and my gaming laptop is Bazzite. Bazzite has been a really good hands off “just works” distro that I don’t have to think about.
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Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck
I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings
Linux is at a point where we really shouldn’t be using distro specific installers.
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Yeah, Linux audio is great when it does work, but a real pain when it doesn’t. Looks like there is some work being done to bridge the DAW gap like https://github.com/microfortnight/yabridge-bottles-wineloader, but I image getting it working will be a bit of a rabbit hole.
Sweet. Well hopefully in the future I’ll be able to get Cubase running and ditch windows entirely.
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Another data point to add. I’ve started using Bazzite and introduced it to my brother. The only hitch I’ve noticed is not being able to play stuff like the new Battlefield.
It is by far the easiest operating system to install, keep updated, and run basic apps and play games on. Flatpaks are great. Brew is good for CLI tools. AppImages are another alternative to Flatpaks that work well. Steam comes pre-installed, and most games run well.
There are no ads, no AI, no dark patterns. It’s just a simple operating system that keeps itself updated.
Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with
rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite). But my examples of these are installing GhosTTY (non AppImage), Paretto Security, and 1Password SSH Daemon/op. Most people will never need to do these.I’m a software engineer, and I’ve found that for the most part, Bazzite is good enough to run on my gaming pc and work pcs.
I’m sorry you had such a bad first experience with it.
i think i learned that there was a lot wrong with my set up that windows just shoved under the rug. and maybe windows is right to do so, figuring i was willing to dig in deep this time, but my friends… not so much, and i don’t think i have the capability to help them if they run into issues like i did.
the reason ‘I’ learned to dislike flat packs is that it puts the software in its own little isolation bubble from what i understand. and i get where people are coming from. but they REALLY don’t like connecting to hardware, or sharing nice with other apps.
keep in mind i am a fairly adroit user of windows, diving in head first, so a lot of this is learning the hard way (nano anyone?) and i learned a lot. but yea bumpy.
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