Sheesh. Where to start.
Okay, let's start with the why.
My first brush with Linux was in 1998 when Red Hat was all the rage and it seemed Linux was on a mission of global domination. The GUI back then was abysmal by today's standards. KDE was a baby learning to walk. Unix users however were hopelessly in love with Linux. But I never took to it.
So now in 2025 I decided to give Linux a try. With the Windows 10 October 2025 situation, YouTube had a content explosion of "switch to Linux."
However, that was not my motivation for trying Linux. I had upgraded to 11 a long time ago. Neither were any of those "Microsoft bad" opinions gunshotted over the internet.
It was simple curiosity.
Enter the wonderful world of distros. What a bloody *ix-mess.
Now just to be clear let me state what I use my desktop PC for. Obviously, for work. Since the COVID-19 fiasco I am a WFH so the previous gaming PC had more important things to do. In order of priority, a) work, b) general internet usage including streaming services, and c) 2-3 hours/week gaming,
The work software has no Linux counterpart but that was so minor an issue, it was not even in the "switch to Linux" equation. I could always boot into Windows for 10 hours a day.
The whole browser situation went out of the equation years ago. As long as the OS boots and the browser opens, the rest is all personal preference. There are no winners or losers there, it's all subjective.
As for the rest, I switched to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice),Thunderbird, Krita, etc. as soon as Microsoft Office, Adobe, and the rest became recurring subscription services. I don't mind paying for software but the whole subscription model is disgusting. Maybe it comes from being old but when you remember that you could buy anything for Windows (Office, Photoshop, etc., etc.) install it and ignore updates and use it for life and no kick coming from anyone, subscriptions feel as pleasant as a sledgehammer to the testes.
That left only one thing that had to work on Linux: Gaming.
I am not going to list the quirks of every distro I tried because there is nothing to list.
Briefly and in no particular order I tried the following: Bazzite, Nobara, Linux Mint, Big Linux, Regata OS, Pika OS, NixOS, EndeavorOS, Garuda, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS!, and more.
Two months into all this the thought occurred: Why am I installing distros "based on ****." Why not try ****?
So then Debian, Fedora, Arch.
By this time, some three months later, demotivation was growing obese.
Also by this time the pattern was becoming clear. To someone who knows nothing about Linux, the "gaming" distros are not doing anything special because base Linux cannot do it.
It doesn't matter which distro you like. If you are running an NVIDIA GPU, pick one that comes with the driver preinstalled. The gaming distros simply provide a GUI for taking care of the driver and NVIDIA Control Panel. Vanilla (like default Debian or Fedora) expect you to know the terminal. Searching the "store" on non-gaming distros do not provide a "click here to install/update" driver. And of course the driver does not auto-update.
Gaming distros will do a few things out of the ISO image: Install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Wine, etc. depending on the distro.
In effect, whether through GUI (but mostly through the terminal), the steps required to get NVIDIA and various gaming launchers going, the gaming distros just do it from the install ISO.
If you know how, you can just pick a plain Fedora or Debian and do it yourself and you have a gaming distro. Yes, yes, gaming optimization is mentioned prominently but beyond a certain hardware configuration there is only so much optimization. Things will work well or they will not. What compounds this further is that they all look alike. If you go with GNOME, all Linux options look the same. KDE, same. Cosmic, same. If you try enough distros, at first boot you will immediately know what you are getting into. This is a good thing as it provides consistency. The problem comes in when you are trying 15 distros and then try to figure out what the hell is the difference. The Linux ecosystem takes it for granted that the user already knows.
More than a dozen times I had to install and log in to GOG, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Amazon. Installing launchers (especially EA and Ubisoft) takes a bloody long time. EA does not even list your library outside of its launcher and sometimes it opens in Arabic. Ubisoft launcher frequently gets "fatal errors." Lutris has to be among the top 10 oddest software I have used in 40 years. Pardon the vagueness but it just "feels wrong." Just like Heroic feels "normal" because it does not install anything after itself.
If you are exclusively Steam, you are in for a good time.
If you are on AMD hardware, you are in for a fabulous time (that's mostly a guess/hope, I don't use AMD so cannot speak from personal experience).
The more you stray from those boundaries the more discouraging the situation becomes.
Some people have voiced concerns about Anti-Cheat not working on Linux. Since I never use anything that requires Anti-Cheat, that is a non-issue to me. I just want the bloody game to work. Gears 5 verifies anti-cheat at startup even for single player campaign, so as of now that will never work on Linux although it is a Steam game.
If you want to use EA, the process is the same on ALL Linux. The nature of the distro is irrelevant. As mentioned earlier, no distro can help because base Linux cannot help.
You will say, and I will agree with you, that if a $billion corporation cannot be bothered to release a native Linux launcher that is not a fault with Linux. Same goes for NVIDIA. And Ubisoft and everything that is a cumbersome chore on Linux.
There were many lessons along the way. For example, on Garuda the maximum game resolution was 1920 x 1080 on my 4K monitor. Then this happened on other distros. Forums, forums, forums. Plenty of suggestions, none helpful, all involving terminal commands. The default interface size on 4k is so small that I had to scale the display to 200%. This can potentially confuse Wayland (does not happen on X11). There was no problem with anything. Disabling the scaling enabled the 4K resolution in the game. This might have been fixed by now. Don't know.
Tiny things like this. I discovered this not in any forum. No one replied with the suggestion. It was some random page on the internet that suggested the Wayland and scaling issue.
That brings us to the help provided on forums.
But before that. For someone who has been using Microsoft since MS-DOS 3.0, I don't know how Windows works in the sense that I don't know what is going on when something works or does not. Before internet search engines you either had to grab an engineer to help you out or reinstall Windows.
The point is that the number of people who actually understand what Windows is doing is laughably small (I sure don't). Hazarding a guess, 99.99% Windows users are like car owners. We know how to drive but not how the car works or how to fix it if it stops working.
Windows is not "Operating System for Dummies". It is "THE ONLY Operating System built exclusively for Dummies."
When interacting on Linux forums the feeling is almost physically palpable that all the "experts" by default expect you to know how to take the car apart and put it back together. Preferably blindfolded.
I like RegataOS and Pop_OS! and will keep fiddling with it. If you can manage to ignore everyone gushing over this or that Linux and focus on expected developments in Linux generally speaking, things are moving is the right direction but due to the open source nature of development you cannot set a realistic date by when to expect major changes.
Right now gaming involves too many components: Wine, Proton, Wayland, display driver, and quite likely a lot more I am ignorant of.
I hope they manage to clear the jungle and establish a few rough paths at least if not an actual road.
But right now, today, November 1, 2025, apart from Steam, Linux simply is not gaming ready. So like me, if that is a primary consideration for you, I wish you luck. In the absence of a viable option, I am sticking to Windows.
Again, I hope this changes soon
Till that day, however, Linux as it was back in 1998, remains an interesting experiment but if gaming outside Steam is important to you, then it is not going to be a "Hello Linux, Goodbye Windows", not in the foreseeable future anyway.
Note: Forgot to mention something. Dumping ISOs on a Ventoy USB does not work for some distros (Bazzite, OpenSuse). If a distro will not install, use something like Rufus and make a bootable USB with that distro's ISO. Weird thing, how an open source tool developed for open source operating systems is incompatible with some specific ISOs.
There is another Linux oddity to ponder.
