Gaming PC on Linux: How hard is it?
For PC gamers there is one Defacto operating system: Windows 10. It’s very easy, really, you build or buy a magnificent gaming PC, a slap of Windows 10 on it, and go drink coffee when steam download your library. Then you just load and turn off you go.
Not directly, but you get a picture. Hardware prices are not the only reason that Mac gaming is not a bigger deal. But on your PC you can install Linux, and lately Linux gaming has strong support from people like valves with developing communities.
For me, I am in a position trying to study Linux but also like to play games. So how hard can it combine both? Not as bad as you might think about.
Unlike with Windows 10 and MacOS, when it comes to Linux you are spoiled for choice. All the best Linux distro has an active community, which makes it even more frightening because there are great resources out there to help when you can inevitably.
For gamers, in particular, there are some of which are considered the best linux distro to play games, with certain tweaks and software tools that are loaded to help PC gamers become much faster.
I use Linux Mint, for no reason but I started using it when I first jumped into Linux and that was what I liked. This is based on Ubuntu and very friendly beginners.
Hardware and Linux Gaming Drivers
This is the part that really surprised me the first time I started seriously using Linux to the game. The driver is quite a problem in Windows 10 sometimes, but surprisingly the situation on Linux can be considered better.
Take my game PC, for example. Currently running the AMD Radeon GPU, and I don’t even need to install the driver. Open-source drivers, Mesa, are built into Mint Linux (and many other distributions) and it only works outside the box. There are newer drivers out there, but this updating is not difficult with access to web browsers and search engines.
Nvidia graphics cards are a little different, but there are open sources and exclusive drivers for use with this. Try Linux Mint on a gaming laptop with Nvidia RTX 2060, imagine my pleasure when the default driver manager appeared on the first boot with a choice between the latest version of each. It only knows what I need on a particular machine and make it easy to install.