Any games that you can just run on Steam without issue will work fine, it’s when you have to start passing launch commands etc that things become more complicated. Most things are still possible but harder because you have to deal with the very unusual way Nixos stores its files. The specific thing that made me give up and go to CachyOS was trying to get gamescope working under wayland for Steam games – every way I tried, I was having to compromise on what I actually wanted. Also VR has been easier to play with, though it’s still far from Windows parity.

I mix, my server and laptop are nixos but I use an arch variant on my desktop. Mostly I do this because of various pain points with nixos and gaming.

Well that seems like a fairly big deal.

SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.

It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.

In my experience it either works or it doesn’t, based on whether the devs have blocked it or not. The only extra step I’ve needed to do for anti-cheat on Steam games is installing a Proton runtime for the given anti-cheat, which are just in the tools section.

Hmmm okay I understand. There might well be a dedicated program for this, but I’m also sure it’s technically possible, just maybe far from trivial.

A bit of searching turned up this, I haven’t tried it myself but it claims to offer the functionality you want: https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxjoymap/

My understanding is that actual kernel-level software would have to at least have a Linux-specific driver included. Otherwise if it really is running entirely through Proton, it’s somehow faking the ring 0 access. I’m not entirely sure, but I do think that anti-cheat must work differently from the big ones like FACEIT and Valorant.

Ahh okay no I’m pretty sure that isn’t being explicitly enabled.

Hmm, I haven’t had this issue with Peak and I’m running Wayland… But I do run AMD.

Denuvo is not a blocker for Linux, anti-cheat is the main one.

BattleEye and EAC have both worked on Linux since 2021. Any games that use those at this point but don’t support Linux are choosing to block the platform (e.g. Fortnite).

I wouldn’t recommend replacing your steam deck os with bazzite… What’s the expected benefit?

I think that’s pretty specific to Elden Ring – it’s had that stuttering bug since launch on Windows and while they made it better it still happens, but for whatever quirk of Proton it never happened on Linux.

Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.

For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.

They won’t run on proton. “Kernel-level” means it’s well below the level that Proton runs at.

I don’t understand what you mean, how do you do this in Windows?

Yeah I’ve touched both TF2 Classic and Open Fortress in the past. They’re certainly better than post-2016 TF2, but a) they have very low player-counts, and b) they’re definitely not trying to be vanilla TF2. Each has their own unique vision and balance.

edit: Okay I played TF2 Classic for a couple hours last night and actually it does feel a lot like the good old days. A couple of the new weapons feel either over- or under-tuned (namely the Heavy’s AA cannon is crazy strong while the Demo’s TNT feels pretty bad), but having such a manageable amount of alternatives keeps each class pretty grounded. One of my complaints about modern TF2 is how almost every class can be played so differently – it’s good for player freedom, but bad for instantly recognizing what you’re up against.

Putting the game out to pasture after years of neglect… Sad that they’ll never restore the actual game to its pre-matchmaking glory days. Hopefully this will result in a proper vanilla experience, but it’s pretty painful that the actual game (which will always attract the most players) is being left to rot like this.

“it’s not ready for the mainstream because it’s not mainstream” truly fantastic logic

The only point I can really agree with you on here is Adobe products (and some other niche proprietary stuff like AutoDesk – I don’t consider MS Office an industry standard and if your job does I’m very sorry). And that’s just corporate lock-in, if you’re already paying hundreds of dollars a year to use those programs then yeah you’re gonna stay on the corporate OS.

Other than that, everything you brought up just isn’t quite accurate, or evaporates as you get more comfortable with the Linux ecosystem. The distro point, for example: every distro is just a starting point. Outside of some niche exceptions like Gentoo and NixOS that will radically redefine how you configure the system, any distro can largely be made to work similarly to any other. The major differences are just a) initial package set, b) the package manager, and c) the set of available packages. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to “what software should be on a computer”, which is why there are so many distros and spins out there.

I would say gaming is actually pretty close to perfect, provided you don’t play any of the games that have decided they just will never work on Linux – almost exclusively games that use invasive kernel-level anti-cheat software which I wouldn’t want to install on Windows either. There are a handful like Fortnite and Apex Legends which use EAC, which works great on Linux now, but the devs explicitly decided to disable it. Just like the corporate lock-in point, if you’re committed to those games stay on Windows. Heroic and Lutris take a few more clicks to set up than Steam’s one-click magic, but it’s generally pretty straightforward for any game with any popularity.

The point about ads is where I start to think you’re deliberately being obtuse. You think that, what, a splash screen telling you how to use your computer when you first boot it, and notifications from apps you installed, are advertising? And you find them similarly annoying as the actual sponsored content that shows up in your start menu, on the lock screen, in Edge, when you use Cortana… Not to mention the constant pressure from the OS to use those things? The only way I can interpret this without you just trolling is that you’ve spent too long in the Windows ecosystem and you’ve just adjusted to not notice how often it’s shoving something in your face.