Linux The ‘I dumped Windows to daily drive Linux’ megathread

You won’t catch me playing COD or anything, so far everything else in my Steam library has just worked with Proton. And Firefox on Linux is literally no different to Windows for me. I think if I had any games at all that have to have kernel level anti cheat and simply won’t work on Linux no matter what it’s be a different story but I sure don’t!

 

I dumped Windows 11 ... *checks notes* sometime earlier this year I went OpenSUSE after initially trying Bazzite. Really liked Bazzite but I needed an OS which also worked well for general use. I wasn't confident enough to not break Arch and I had used OpenSUSE years ago so that's where I ended up.

Apart from the F1 games, everything largely just works!

 

What I’m really looking forward to isn’t desktop stuff, it’s ARM handhelds. Proton 11 beta released recently with ARM support, meaning Steam can now run on ARM.

I picked up an AYN Odin 3 “Max” (16GB LPDDR5X, Snapdragon 8 Elite, 512GB UFS4) not too long ago. There are already MESA “Turnip” drivers for the GPU and we’re now starting to see Linux kernel support for the CPU. The ROCKnix Linux distro is adding support for this device, with nightly builds already working. Performance isn’t quite as good as Android equivalents yet, but these are nightly builds, and Proton 11 is already up to beta 5.

You’re not going to be running the latest and greatest games, but the fact that I can already run x86/x86-64 PC games on ARM using Android apps is pretty damn impressive.

It’s basically the same for me.

The one that actually really surprised me was being able to use Battle.net. I thought it was pretty much a write-off, what with it being a non-Steam launcher and Blizzard’s games being very much multiplayer-oriented. But through Heroic Games Launcher, it works just as well as it did under Windows. There’s no native integration for it so you have to install it as a “custom game”, but it works just fine.

Note that I qualified this with “it works just as well as it did under Windows”, because it’s a big kludgy hulking mess that takes ages to start up. But that’s not a fault with running it under Linux, because it’s always been exactly the same under Windows as far back as I can remember.

 

I haven't dumped Windows, but I have used linux for gaming since Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog was in beta (my first distro, suggested by a friend back then). My work laptop has Fedora, my personal laptop has Ubuntu, I've got a Steam Deck and my day to day job is Linux-based, but my gaming machine still has Windows. I haven't run into many off the issues other run into, but I do usually make my USB drives using Rufus and the first thing I do is use the Titus app (previously I used OFGB) to wipe it of cruft.

I probably will at some point, maybe when the office upstairs is ready (it hasn't been ready for 4 years and counting, my fault), I'll go ahead and do that.

I guess the fact that I deal with Linux all day every day can in a way make Windows feel like a breath of fresh air, but near a cow farm.

 

I just added it as a non-steam game, and symlinked the c:\games folder from inside the Proton folder to outside it so if I needed to futz with the proton part I could just point it at the game folder again without having to re-download. Also means I could have another entry directly for the individual games using launch options, pointing at a single shared folder.

This was what I used - https://gist.github.com/zerbiniandrea/04240ff706789eec80d748cd60c73192

 

The guys who do this game are clearly special, as far as this game goes it is not the most graphically impressive but they somehow manage to kill my eGPU setup under windows, not in the game, just the menus before hand, menus are like a slideshow, if you have the patience to wait and get into game it is OK but blimey, what are you actually doing to cause such performance hits in the menus!!!!! do you really need to be raping the GPU bandwidth for that.

 

Ahhh, OK, I see…

I was already using Heroic for GOG games anyway, so it worked out well when I found instructions for setting up BN in Heroic. I prefer to try and keep Steam a bit “cleaner”, the only time I’ve added non-Steam stuff was on my Deck via EmuDeck. But I plan to move all that stuff over to the Odin 3 anyway, I’m just debating whether to wait for a full release of ROCKnix or set up some other front-end on Android.

 

I had a little go with Linux when Windows XP was a thing. It didnt go well. But seeing this topic - i might give it another go on a laptop to see if i can use it.

 

It's very different nowadays.

I tried Bazzite briefly, pretty much no problem with any game I tried. Will go full time in a few months.

Mint has been the go to to prep my OH for the switch. Easy to setup windows like and I haven't found anything that doesn't just work peripheral wise.

Even my BT Logitech keyboard and mouse picked up straight off the bat and actually gives more useful information like battery remaining that windows didn't.

 

Probably the wrong place to ask, but,
I want a build that fixes two things MS destroyed: -Using the optical out/SPDF for audio, (Seriously, Windows, It's not an HDMI cable.)
-The option to record off the sound card because windows nuked the 'listen to this device' option, and keeps deleting audio drivers. I think I spent most of 2017 re-configing one system just to keep sound coming out of the speakers. A week later MS would 'update' and the cycle would repeat.

 

SPDF works fine.

Screenshot From 2026-06-08 15-05-53 by yuusou posted 8 Jun 2026 at 14:06

Pavucontrol or an EasyEffects plugin probably lets you record off the sound card as well.

Code:

S   ID  QUANT   RATE    WAIT    BUSY   W/Q   B/Q  ERR FORMAT           NAME                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
S   30      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Dummy-Driver
S   31      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Freewheel-Driver
S   49      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  Midi-Bridge
S   52      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  bluez_midi.server
S   62      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo
S   63      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo
S   82      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  v4l2_input.pci-0000_00_14.0-usb-0_4_1.0
S   84      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  v4l2_input.pci-0000_00_14.0-usb-0_4_1.2
I  101      0       0   0,0us   0,0us  ???   ???     0    S16LE 1 44100 speech-dispatcher-dummy
S  138      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_output.usb-ESS_Technology_FO32U2P_ESS_Audio_1-00.analog-stereo
S   74      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.usb-ESS_Technology_FO32U2P_ESS_Audio_1-00.mono-fallback
R  118   2048 384000  99,9us  18,1us  0,02  0,00    0   S32LE 2 384000 alsa_output.usb-TTGK_Technology_Co._Ltd_KM-HIFI-384KHZ-00.iec958-stereo
R  136   8192 384000  15,5us  20,8us  0,00  0,00    0   F32LE 2 384000  + Google Chrome
S  107      0       0    ---     ---   ---   ---     0                  alsa_input.usb-TTGK_Technology_Co._Ltd_KM-HIFI-384KHZ-00.mono-fallback

 

*Checks settings* Huh. It's back again... Windows finally added that to their own driver suite, and it's only been broken since...Vista. The desktop icon for the Realtech audio drivers burned a permanent logo into my screen, though.