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Linux is now the best gaming system. ｜ fernvenue's Blog
blog.fernvenue.comWhen it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS and Windows. I know I know…whenever I mention this, there are always some old-school individuals who come out to say that Linux’s driver configuration is complex, its game support is not rich enough, and its compatibility issues are significant, among other problems. In this article, I will directly address these issues and let everyone understand how much the gaming experience on Linux has developed by 2025.
Hah. Nope.
Man, I would look like much less of a hater if people didn’t keep making demonstrably incorrect claims.
No, installing Nvidia drivers wasn’t a one line affair for me last time I tried (which was just this year, btw), and even after I got things set up it was a toss-up whether features would work, work but perform horribly or not be available at all. That includes HDR, VRR, DLSS, DLSS transformer model, DLSS frame gen and Ray Reconstruction. On Windows some of the newer versions of those can be a hassle to set up in old games and necessitate forcing in dlls using third party applications, but at least official support works reliably.
Some distros do come with Nvidia drivers prepackaged and that’s fine, but all the feature issues remain. If you want a gaming-first distro there still isn’t semi-decent game mode support for SteamOS or Bazzite.
Intel GPU support is slightly better but a bit short of hassle-free. You probably don’t have an Intel GPU anyway, so we can let that one pass.
HDR support in applications is still sub par. That includes gaming and is true regardless of GPU brand, as far as I can tell.
Anticheat support is still poor and it still prevents many very popular games from running. At this point nobody has anything close to a solution to this, even conceptually. Yes, some anticheat providers have some degree of Linux support, but there is nothing close to kernel-level anticheat from Windows. Yes, this is a genuine problem.
Performance is… trading blows, I’d say. In some games you can get much better frame pacing and better overall performance. In others, particularly when using newer functionality it can go the exact opposite way. This is very situational. If you want cutting edge stuff and paid to get the hardware to run it, Linux is probably not for you. Salvaging weaker or aging hardware for older games is a better use case.
Gaming on Linux is much better than it was and it likely will keep getting better. That’s good news in itself, getting hyperbolic just triggers flamewars and negativity on something that should be a pretty clean net positive. It really doesn’t help.
Yeah at this point I’m tempted to swap back to Windows until I can ditch my Nvidia graphics card. Driver support is such a pain in the ass, it is absolutely not a single line. Getting games to run often includes installation of i386 drivers as well as vulkanlibs, because all the “easy” installations of Nvidia drivers only grab the 64 bit ones, and that’s before even starting to get into all the tweaks and fixes you’ll need to add for some games.
Long may this continue. Fuck kernel level
anticheatmalware, and fuck the developers that use it.I want gaming on Linux to be as good as it can be, but I too draw the line at kernel level anti-cheat. I’d rather deal with cheaters than install that crap.
I want gaming on Linux to be as good as it can be, but I too draw the line at kernel level anti-cheat. I’d rather deal with cheaters than install that crap.
Yeah, well, the answer to that conundrum is called a PS5.
If “as good as it can be” means competitive games are full of cheats then “good as can be” isn’t good enough. Back when Windows wasn’t good enough in this way PC gaming was a smaller slice of the pie overall.
Games having access to everything i do on my pc is sheer lunacy. Let the devs sanitize their fucking inputs and not give client information the player shouldn’t have access to. Anti cheat has always been an arms race, nothing, and that does include your kernel anti cheat, will ever completely stop cheaters.
“Completely” is not the goal. Consoles aren’t “completely” cheat free, either.
The goal is to make cheating hard enough that the average twelve year old can’t easily do it or conspicuous enough that you can ban them when they do.
Because at that point most players will go from encountering multiple cheaters per game to encountering a cheater every many games, so the game looks like a mostly fair thing with a few outliers as opposed to an absolutely unplayable mess.
And since cheaters and hackers tend to flock to whatever is popular, particularly if they’re monetizing their cheating in some form, the more popular the game the more of an interest they have in a secure-enough environment.
If you can’t get that on PC they will focus on consoles. If you can’t get that on Linux they will focus on Windows.
You DON’T need kernel access to achieve that.
Developers that go down this route are substituting good architectural design for god tier access to your machine. Kernel access is the proverbial keys to the kingdom, there is literally nothing they cannot do with it.
It’s like a gardener saying they need access to water, so you give them the alarm codes, a copy of every single door key, the safe code, the wifi password, a silicon mold of your fingerprint, and a urine sample for good measure.
It is WAY beyond overkill, and any developer that claims to need that level of access to prevent cheating is lying. There is NO justification for it. They. Are. Being. LAZY and they are putting you at risk in the process.
Well, hey, if there is an easy way that is just as secure and is hardware and OS agnostic I thoroughly recommend you go ahead and develop it. I hear there’s good money in it.
Or is your proposed scenario that every single vendor of anticheat software working today is not only deliberately avoiding the use of equally good non-kernel level Windows anticheat but also deploying deliberately inferior, less secure Linux anticheat when they could deliver a solution just as good as the Windows alternative? How do you think that works?
I’m saying the use of 3rd party anticheat is a crutch that developers use to avoid thinking about cheating in the first place. If they put some proper thought into their architecture, you wouldn’t need such heavy handed anticheat in the first place.
There is nothing inherently more secure about kernel level ac, it just gives you so much access to the underlying system that you can tell if the client is being manipulated.
I’m saying that’s a lazy approach, and you should instead be building your game to be resistant to client manipulation in the first place, rather than asking the user for a stupid level of privilege.