When I was a kid I didn't have any concept of what a "gaming platform" was. I had no visibility into the ongoing fight between the Genesis and the SNES, and the only reason I knew anything at all about Nintendo was because of the GameBoy ads they used to stick in Boy's Life.
Brr... Sorry, just felt a sudden chill, as if the cold hand of the grave stretched out grasping at my soul in mournful silence...
Anyway, my isolation from that aspect of gaming in the early 90's was so complete the term "videogame" wasn't even in my vocabulary. No, at my house we had "computer games". While the kids I knew at school were puttering along with Mario and Sonic I was sploodging aliens in Commander Keen or dodging cops in the Pompey Pirate's cracked version of Blues Brother's my older sibling downloaded off the infant world-wide web.
I've gone over this at length in many other videos on this channel, so in summary for the majority of my life I have been what you would call a "PC gamer". But that bucket of gamers is as descriptive as lumping a hardcore arcade emulation enthusiast in with the last guy to buy a PS5 at Target by calling them both "console gamers". I have jumped around to a number of platforms to play games in the PC space over the years. I started on an Atari ST and MS-DOS, and I even gave Mac gaming the old college try in college, spanning both the PowerPC and Intel days. And then, of course, there's Windows, where I have gamed on everything from 3.1 through 10, with the exception of Vista, because screw Vista.
And actually, on that note, screw Windows 11 too. Because as you may have guessed from the thumbnail, title, or description of this video, I have not gamed on 11, and I have no intention to game on 11. I'm moving platforms within the PC space yet again.
It's time I find out for myself whether the year of mainstream gaming on Linux is actually, finally, here.
Prologue: A Window to Other Worlds
Before we get into where I'm going let's spend a bit of time chatting about where I've been. I built what I'd term my first modern Windows gaming rig back in 2015, not long before I started this channel. That box served me well for years, and has been upgraded piecemeal ever since, to the point that my current gaming rig, ship of Theseus style, doesn't share a single component in common with it anymore despite having the same name on my home network. That's sorta even true for the OS, because I installed Windows 8.1 on the thing when I first built it, though as soon as Microsoft announced that they'd let you activate Windows 10 with Windows 8 keys I jumped ship to Windows 10 and never looked back.
Windows 10 was, at first, an absolute joy to game on. Coming off of Windows 8.1 it was nice to get something that felt more like 7, but even moreso the reason I'd built that PC in the first place was that I'd finally gotten sick of trying to make gaming on Macs work. Apple was, at the time, beginning what was going to wind up being a solid 5 years of agony for Mac users, and even before that they hadn't seriously prioritized gaming since the turn of the millennia. But over in the house of Xbox things were good. Games were all being developed with Windows compatibility in mind, my Steam account was right where I left it and my original keys for Diablo 2 and Starcraft were still being honored by Battlenet. Windows 10 looked like the promised land, and Microsoft was standing there, hands outstretched like a benevolent overseer, telling us that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows we'd ever have to pay for.
It's been ten years since then, and suffice it to say that was a lie. I suppose they tried to make Windows 10 the last numbered version they'd ever have to distribute, but they did that by constantly throwing ads into the OS, first for their own subscription services, like OneDrive and Office 365, and then for whoever would stick their apps in the Windows Store, like Candy Crush. When all you're trying to do is game, the ads did get pretty obnoxious. Then, when they failed to get enough consistent revenue through their subscription services, they announced the next version. "Just ignore that," I hear you saying. Just stay on Windows 10. Well, Microsoft is really not keen on letting you do that. Full-screen pop-up ads in the OS itself are evidently a thing in Windows 10 now. Eventually demands that you update to Windows 11 became a way of life, but of course given 11's new hardware requirements those were frequently accompanied by partner ads for you to upgrade your computer.
Even setting aside Windows 10's lack of ongoing support from Microsoft in favor of Windows 11 it's not like all the flowers were blooming back there anyway. Over the years 10 has changed, pushing you to interact first with the Windows Store, then with the Xbox app, if you wanted to play first-party Microsoft games. The oft memed Windows updates also never got less memeable, and with all of that I couldn't help but notice the rapidly increasing friction of gaming on that OS. Half of the time when I wanted to play games I would turn on my computer only to discover that, for one reason or another, I was 30 minutes out from actually being able to. That alone killed a lot of opportunities to engage in this hobby.
So okay, why not update to Windows 11 then? If your hardware is compatible, it's technically free! Well, Windows 11, if I may be frank regarding my own experience, takes every issue Windows 10 has developed in the past decade and turns them up to... 11.
No, I'm not sorry.
On top of that Microsoft has been relentless in their quest to smash out every avenue of using 11 without signing into a Microsoft online account, and they've absolutely packed the entire thing with as much AI-based bloat as possible. It's pretty clear that since us home users don't love paying ongoing subscriptions just to use our computers Microsoft has decided to change up the way they monetize us by turning us into data-mines they can sell to advertisers and who knows who else. Bugs in Windows 11 generally take a back seat to new "features" that, say, literally grab a screenshot of everything you do on your computer to stow away as a tasty nugget for some unsavory folks if you ever inadvertently download some malware, and in the 16 months I've been forced to use Windows 11 at work I have had more forced restarts and BSODs than I ever had in my entire tenure with Windows 7.
All stacked together I've been ready for a change for a while. The broad array of middle-fingers Microsoft has been throwing with regards to their stance on gaming over the past six months has simply been the final straw in the heap of hay that's piled up around here for years. Besides, I've been waiting on the sidelines with bated breath for actual decades for Linux to become the mainstream OS I always thought it could be, and gaming was one of the last major holdouts keeping me from going all in on it.
So, I finally took the leap.
Chapter 1: The Year of the Linux Desktop
We're going to take a step back again to talk about why this is such a big deal in a new segment I'm calling "grossly oversimplifying". If you're not super familiar with Linux, hi. You're my target audience, actually, welcome to the table. Here at Calling all Platforms we talk about our experiences with every gaming or computing platform and we encourage everyone to become at least a little familiar with all of them so they know basically what their options are. Linux, like Windows, MacOS, Android, or iOS, is an operating system. It's a big old pile of software that acts as an intermediary between your hardware and the programs or apps you actually want to use. The fundamental differences between the various operating systems all basically come down to how they communicate. Some can communicate with some types of hardware while others can't, and when somebody develops a piece of software to run on a particular operating system they have to do it in such a way that the two can talk. If you try to install an operating system on hardware it doesn't understand, it won't work, and at the same time if you try to install a program on an operating system it wasn't made for, it won't work.
With me so far? Good. So if, for example, you take an Apple computer made in the past few years with their very fancy, but actually no they're pretty fancy, Apple silicone hardware in it and try to install Windows on it, you're going to hit a brick wall. Windows doesn't know how to communicate with Apple's hardware, so nothing's going to happen. Another example, say you take a game that was made to work on Windows and try to install it on Linux. Any guesses what happens there? Well, prior to the past few years you'd be right; it wouldn't work. The game and the operating system wouldn't know what to do with each other, so nothing would happen.
Then valve entered the fray.
Listen, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Valve did all of this themselves. They've built the monument that is the Steamdeck on the foundations laid by thousands of valiant open-source devs decades prior. But I'm also not going to pretend that the work they have done isn't of immense value. Speaking once again to my not-super-familiar-with-Linux friend here, the simple fact is that if you went back five years and tried to use Linux as your main operating system, you would have probably sworn off computers forever and fled into the woods. It wasn't that long ago that for the average consumer Linux just sucked. Infinitely customizable, astonishingly versatile, incredibly powerful, and free to boot, yes. It was also all of those things. But it was a pain in the butt to use if you didn't want to spend an ungodly amount of time in setup and you swore off terminal interfaces when DOS fell out of popularity.
What Valve accomplished with the Steamdeck was, on the one hand, an impressive feat of pulling together existing tools to enable a wild level of compatibility with software that wasn't designed to run on Linux, and on the other hand a miraculous accomplishment in demonstrating to all the brilliant and talented open-source developers how to design a user experience for normies.
Someone is down in the comments already typing up something about Ubuntu or Mint. Buddy, we are not the same. I've installed Ubuntu on more machines than I can count. I've run flavors of Mint in both KDE and Gnome as far back as 2001. I've given PoP! and Manjaro and a half-dozen other distros their fair shakes over the years and I reiterate that we are not the same. Every single distro I've used has impressed me as a tool, as an accomplishment, and as a concept, and gun to my head I would have taken Windows or MacOS over every single one of them. So yes, Valve is peeing off the shoulders of giants, but don't try and pretend this was a problem that was going to magically get solved if someone didn't show the community how to do it.
Right, where were we? Ah yes, Valve. Ever since the release of the Steamdeck and the very possibility of SteamOS being a viable alternative to Windows for gaming, I've been literally champing at the bit to get in there and try it. Well, not champing hard enough to invest in a Steamdeck clearly... Oh well, I'm gonna leave the metaphor in there. The exciting development is that while SteamOS still doesn't have a public release, and while that public release is probably going to prioritize living-room gaming over desktop gaming anyways, I wasn't the only one excited by the possibility of it. In fact, it turns out that all those awesome open-source developers I referenced earlier were also excited by the possibility, and there are already a half-dozen new or altered distros that are targeting the same goals as SteamOS.
Those goals are, of course, to take all the tools the open-source community has developed to make Windows programs talk to Linux and stick them into one pre-configured package that normies aren't going to accidentally screw up by looking sideways at the terminal. This is what's been needed for Linux computing to finally break through to the mainstream and, gosh... I think we might actually be ready for this now.
Chapter 2: It's a Leap of Faith
My methodology for this switch was a tentative one, I will say. I bought myself a new SSD on which to install my chosen distro so I could try it out without touching my Windows install in any way. The goal was to mount my game drives in Linux so I could test the games and see how much friction there was to my playing them without having to re-download them all.
Those of you familiar with how Wine works are already seeing issues with this plan. We'll get to that in a minute.
See, I didn't really want to set up a dual-boot system or anything like that. If I'm making the switch I want to just make the switch, but I wanted to see for myself whether my must-work games did, in fact, work before I committed to it. So I installed the clean SSD and made myself an install disk of the distro I had selected, Bazzite. Why Bazzite, I hear you asking? Well, it promised to come pre-configured with all the packages and tools I'd need to easily run Windows software, and it also promised to be pretty much immutable, meaning I couldn't inadvertently screw up the install by poking around in the wrong place. Generally speaking I'm tech-literate enough to not do that, but... better safe than sorry.
And that was it. That was my entire rationale, and I feel like that pretty closely mirrors the desires of most general tech users and gamers. Bazzite, being a Linux distro, installed pretty much just like any other Linux distro; quite simply. A few basic questions, no pervasive prompts to grant some corporation permission to snoop on all my activity, and no online account setup and I'm in. Steam is already installed, there's an app store of sorts, so far this all looks pretty friendly. Let's just point Steam at the game libraries on my game drives and...
Hmm. Interesting. Nothing at all works.
This isn't terribly uncommon, of course. What the open-source community is trying to do here is pretty remarkable in terms of complexity and they're trying to do it with absolutely no support from the other side of the aisle. Generally speaking the people who make software are only targeting the largest possible install bases, which means Windows, and for some workloads Macs. And Microsoft obviously isn't going to do anything to be helpful. Their entire business model relies on stuff like what I'm trying to do here being difficult. The Linux devs are fighting an uphill battle in every respect here and any tiny progress is worth celebrating.
Those of you well versed in Linux will know my issue already. My Windows drives, that have all my games on them, were formatted as NTFS drives. That's the Windows NT file system, which you used to not even be able to mount in Linux so the fact that I was able to just mount these suckers, read data off of them, and point Steam to those libraries and nothing complained should have impressed me, because I've run into issues trying to read off of NTFS drives in Linux before. But it just didn't even register as remarkable until I tried to run games and they didn't work. That's a testament to how seamless the initial setup of Bazzite was.
So I selected a subset of my smallest frequently played games and installed them on my tiny 256 gig boot SSD and verified that yep, when installed on a Linux formatted drive they ran just fine. That includes a couple of games I had installed on my PC back when I still had a CD drive on it, which I was able to just copy straight across from Windows and run from the executable without having to re-install anything. Frankly everything was going so well that I decided to just finish the plunge. I made sure I didn't have anything important on my extra-space spinning rust drive, reformatted it, copied the stuff I wanted to save from my main game SSD onto that, then reformatted that one. All that's left is my Windows boot drive, which is two mouse clicks away from being gone.
Chapter 3: A New Dawn
So far? No regrets. There have been some quirks for sure, but nothing outside the general trend of getting used to a new OS experience. Steam has of course been the easiest setup and go process, but getting all my games from GoG and Epic working just required downloading the Heroic launcher from the OS package manager app and signing in. Lutris has worked well for all the random little games I have that didn't come from a launcher, like those CD-based games I mentioned earlier and even the old version of Diablo II using the CD keys Blizzard still has stored in my profile on Battle.net. It is worth noting that for that case I wasn't able to get Lutris to successfully run the installer for Diablo II. There are certainly roadblocks to that which probably won't get specifically addressed given the age of the game. But I copied over the directory of the game from Windows, where it was already installed, and added the executable from there into Lutris. That works a treat, complete with battle.net connectivity and everything.
Speaking of Battle.net, that was also a bizarre combination of curse and blessing. Of course I didn't want to lose access to games like Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, but I figured this was always going to be the hardest thing to play ball with on Linux given how Microsoft owns Blizzard these days. I'd sorta made my peace with just losing them, but figured I'd give it a shot anyway. Getting the Battlenet launcher installed and running was, in fact, a pain. The combo that wound up working in the end was installing the launcher with Lutris, then launching it via Steam under the current beta version of Proton, and then I had to jump through some hoops with how Proton virtualizes the C drive in order to get Battlenet to install my games in the right place and not fill up my tiny boot drive. But thanks to random people on Reddit I was able to get through all that configuration and then, through an ironic twist I am certain nobody at Microsoft saw coming, I was able to use Battlenet to install the one game I bought on the Microsoft store that I was actually sad about leaving behind; Sea of Thieves. Because yes, since buying Activision/Blizzard Xbox has started adding some of their own games to the Battlenet launcher, and thus inadvertently made it so I could leave Windows behind without losing access to a single game I play with any sort of regularity.
I'm sure I'll run into other minor issues as I go, but at this point I'm so beyond caring. This switch has been so comparatively painless versus my previous attempts at mainlining Linux that Microsoft could straight-up offer me a free computer to go back to Windows and I'd turn them down. There is something so freeing about booting up my computer to play games and knowing I'm not going to get blasted with ads and update prompts to install more ads. About knowing that there's nothing in the background funneling all of my data off to some undisclosed server farm to train a large language model I don't want and will never use. About being able to ask my computer to do something and having it just... do it.
So is the year of the Linux desktop finally here? Honestly it could very well be. For gaming I'm sold, which means I'm off Windows forever. But I do still use a Mac for all my creative workloads. Granted a good portion of those workloads are in open-source apps, which means they'll transition to Linux without any fuss at all, but there are a few things that don't have native Linux support. Unlike five years ago, though, that's no longer the end of the conversation. I will 100% be testing out the Windows versions of those on my gaming box to see if the Wine packages built in to the generic Bazzite install will get that software working.
This is honestly a crazy time to be alive. Just when it seemed like there couldn't possibly be any light at the end of this sewer of electronic misery that has been the past few years of LLMs and constant data mining and price hikes the open-source folks, with a bit of guidance from Valve, have just about completely restored my faith in computing as a hobby. But I hear you wondering, if that's really the case, why I haven't wiped my Windows install completely and reclaimed that SSD storage? What's holding me back from completely committing? Am I just posing for this video and I'll be back on Windows in a month?
Well, it's purely sentimental. See, that OS license key is the only thing left of my original gaming PC that this box appears as on my network. Wiping that means the ship of Theseus is completely gone, and I haven't come up with a new name for it yet.
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