Well...it has the opportunity to be. More native integration and/or wine fixes for certain issues, and anti-cheat being allowed would definitely put it on track to be there.

I just installed bazzite on a spare drive this week, trying to get off win11.

So far generally pretty impressed but hardware support is eh for some lesser known devices. For example my headset (Lucidsound LS50) detects the dongle but can't find drivers for the dedicated wireless channel and Bluetooth is patchy at best.

It's friction points like that that make migration from a lifetime of windows challenging.

Hopefully I'll figure out a solution that doesn't involve replacing the headset!

I want to move to Linux, I tried a few months ago with a few distros but ran into two issues. One, I'm a content creator so easy access and use of my digital tools is paramount.

Secondly I make extensive use of VR and the support for VR graphics drivers was not good. I heard many duct tape and bubble gum solutions to run virtual desktops but I can't mess around with my operating system every day when I need my machine to run and do what I need it to do without lots of little roadblocks.

I want to move to Linux but I do not think it's where it needs to be yet to take me off of Windows :(

Not really. Linux is all about openness and choice, but going with Linux as the only OS will significantly limit what you can play. As a modder, I'm against EAC and and the like as much as the next person here, but ideally I want to be able to play anything that looks appealing, not have to skip games for no reason other than their anti-cheat solutions not being compatible with Linux. I agree that we shouldn't support those practices, but it's one thing to willingly boycott something and another is to not have that agency at all.

While I agree, the article mostly explains how Linux is almost caught up to Windows for gaming. For me, Linux > Windows, so if Linux can play enough games to keep me occupied, it's a better "gaming" system. This was true for me before Steam even came to Linux.

That said, this article completely ignores the fact that many of the most popular games rely on anti-cheat w/o Linux compatibility, so that right there kills Linux as a contender regardless of its many other merits.

I guess my point here is to please don't oversell Linux. You want someone's first impression to be positive, and if they run into game compatibility issues at the start, the experience will be far from positive. I would much rather see a section right at the top about how to check game compatibility, since that's what most people would want to check before looking at the various other things that are awesome about Linux.

Epic Games

...

We also don’t have to worry about download speeds, as they’re even better compared to the Windows client.

Is this true? If so, it's very surprising.

By the way, I always encountered risk control and couldn’t enter the game when playing Rogue Company on Windows. I don’t understand why the anti-cheat component considers me a threat, but after switching to Linux, I no longer faced this issue; it has been much smoother than on Windows.

Anecdotal. I doubt this is a Linux vs Windows thing, but more that they saw different OSes being used by the same account and flagged based on that.

Some of these emulators also have versions for Windows or macOS, but on Linux, we can directly download and install them from the store, without the need to worry about dependencies or version issues, making it a lot easier compared to Windows and macOS.

Good point. Package management is really nice on Linux. However, if you don't know what you're looking for, you're in a similar camp as on Windows.

Games on the Android platform can also run on Linux. In addition to virtualization ways like Windows and macOS, Linux can run without virtualization by using namespaces. If you’re interested, you can check out my previous article on Android Application on Linux without Virtualization.

Huh, neat!

Besides Steam, we can also use cross-platform tools like Flathub: Parsec to control Windows hosts directly on Linux. This means that even games that can’t be run through the aforementioned ways can still be played on Linux, completing the last piece of the puzzle.

So you'd need a second PC? That hardly seems convenient.

Actually, I also wanna introduce some advantages of the Linux graphical interface over Windows in terms of gaming experience. For example, GNOME’s Do Not Disturb botton allows me to toggle all notification alerts with a single click.

Yeah, this is certainly neat. I'm actually surprised Windows doesn't have something similar, but maybe each app handles notifications itself there?

Additionally, I have never encountered the issue on Linux where I can’t temporarily return to the desktop during fullscreen gaming, which is something I often face on Windows, where the taskbar pops up but returning to the desktop is impossible. On Linux, regardless of which game I’m playing, whether in fullscreen mode or borderless window mode, I can freely switch between windows.

On the flipside, I've had a lot of really odd problems switching applications on Linux. I don't know if it happens on Windows too since I haven't used Windows in a decade or so, but I'm guessing the Linux experience here is worse.

I also sometimes have games completely lock up Linux, which I'm guessing is probably the Wayland compositor crashing. That used to happen to me on Windows, but again, this is from >10 years ago, so I'm not sure if it applies today.

Hah. Nope.

Man, I would look like much less of a hater if people didn't keep making demonstrably incorrect claims.

No, installing Nvidia drivers wasn't a one line affair for me last time I tried (which was just this year, btw), and even after I got things set up it was a toss-up whether features would work, work but perform horribly or not be available at all. That includes HDR, VRR, DLSS, DLSS transformer model, DLSS frame gen and Ray Reconstruction. On Windows some of the newer versions of those can be a hassle to set up in old games and necessitate forcing in dlls using third party applications, but at least official support works reliably.

Some distros do come with Nvidia drivers prepackaged and that's fine, but all the feature issues remain. If you want a gaming-first distro there still isn't semi-decent game mode support for SteamOS or Bazzite.

Intel GPU support is slightly better but a bit short of hassle-free. You probably don't have an Intel GPU anyway, so we can let that one pass.

HDR support in applications is still sub par. That includes gaming and is true regardless of GPU brand, as far as I can tell.

Anticheat support is still poor and it still prevents many very popular games from running. At this point nobody has anything close to a solution to this, even conceptually. Yes, some anticheat providers have some degree of Linux support, but there is nothing close to kernel-level anticheat from Windows. Yes, this is a genuine problem.

Performance is... trading blows, I'd say. In some games you can get much better frame pacing and better overall performance. In others, particularly when using newer functionality it can go the exact opposite way. This is very situational. If you want cutting edge stuff and paid to get the hardware to run it, Linux is probably not for you. Salvaging weaker or aging hardware for older games is a better use case.

Gaming on Linux is much better than it was and it likely will keep getting better. That's good news in itself, getting hyperbolic just triggers flamewars and negativity on something that should be a pretty clean net positive. It really doesn't help.