I have bazzite on a gaming only HTPC and it’s a gazillion times easier to use than having windows boot into big picture mode. It’s just so much better, I rarely have to keep a mouse around with me now for when I want/need to change system settings.

most mods dont work on linux

Mods work just fine, it’s mod managers that sometimes don’t work.

If mods don’t have manual setup instructions, I install them on Windows, copy back to Linux the mod config file and happily play on Linux.

Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven’t had many if any games that don’t run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).

Mods certainly do work - I’ve modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they’re often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.

The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it’s just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.

Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.

I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven’t used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I’m tempted to wipe it as I don’t use it.

The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That’s not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That’s a problem you can’t get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn’t working on Linux.

Gaming on Linux is flourishing. Achievable migration for most games. Biggest niche asterisk from my perspective is VR. Already a technical pain in the ass to get working reliably/efficiently on Windows. Throw Linux into the mix and expect to have a hell of a time configuring and troubleshooting.

Honestly, we’ve been eating pretty good fam. See https://www.protondb.com/ for game compatibility on Linux.

The only remaining pain points are (see the provided links for databases on what does and doesn’t work):

• Anti-cheat; https://areweanticheatyet.com/
• VR; https://db.vronlinux.org/

Because it’s easier, it just works and it doesn’t nag me.

I use Bazzite, it’s been the best computing experience I had.

Ask anything you want.

Pretty good unless your game doesnt enable anticheat support for Linux like the battlefield games or fortnite for example. Performance per game is either on par or better than Windows. Game support can be checked on https://protondb.com/

I built my wife a gaming PC. She’s controller only. It’s basically an xbox. Decided to try ubuntu to see if we could avoid paying for windows.

She’s already 100% Hogwarts Legacy and played a dozen other games.

The only hangup was controller support for Slime Rancher on her 8bitduo. Had to use an xbox controller.

She knows nothing about linux, but she’ll install and play games through Steam no problem.

The Venn diagram of games I want to play and games that won’t run on Linux is two disjoined circles. My buddy really likes Helldivers, but that didn’t play nice because of the invasive anti-cheat. That has been the only one.

I can play all of my games (well, the ones my 10 year old craptop can handle). The only issue I have is that vulkan shaders can take a minute to cache for some games.

As far as I know, all Rimworld mods will work with Linux. You can either subscribe to them on the Steam Workshop (and enable them from the mod menu in-game) or download them manually and put them in the mods folder in the installation directory. I’ve played with modlists that had more than 100 mods in them and never had a Linux related issue.

To answer your other question, I dual booted Linux for a while, mainly because of privacy concerns, but switched to Linux full time around the time Windows 10 came out. The thing that gave me the final push was Windows 10 on my new laptop telling me it couldn’t open a zipped folder and I would need to pay for that feature! There was also a backup copy of W10 on a second drive that I didn’t know about which automatically overwrote Linux when I tried to install it.

Seems like most mods work fine on Linux, but I’m sure it depends on the game. For games with built-in mod managers like Baldur’s Gate 3, it all just works. For games with manual mods that involve replacing or editing game files, they should generally work since you’re running the same game files to begin with.

I haven’t had any big compatibility problems recently, though again, I’m sure it depends on that game. Proton (built into Steam) works very very well nowadays.

Just a few years ago I found the experience frustrating. It seemed like everything had something wrong with it, even if it wasn’t big. Lots of games had glitchy input, whether using a controller or keyboard/mouse. But somewhere down the line it totally flipped, and everything I play runs great now. I still have a bootable Windows 10 system, but I haven’t actually booted it in…two years, maybe?

I’ve swapped to linux mostly due to aging hardware and low disposable income. I’m still running A PC that was lower MID a decade ago.

So far its a blast, nothing short of shotty anticheat gets in my way. ProtonDB is a great resource. Wine and the proton layers basically give you parity (and in some cases better performance than windows).

It works pretty well. I don’t currently play any pc games with anti-cheat, so most games work well without having to do anything special outside of running them in Wine or some other application and there are some games that actually work noticeably better on Linux than Windows. Some games have required some additional setup but it’s pretty rare for games to just not work at all. Something I find kind of funny though, is that most of the games I haven’t been able to get working on Linux aren’t working on Windows either.

I should also mention that I don’t really use mods for games. I have used mods for the Linux version of SRB2 but the game is designed to be easily modable, so it makes sense that the mods would just work.

Aside from some occasional glitches with SteamVR, it’s been several years since I encountered a game which didn’t run as good if not better on linux than on windows, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a linux-specific issue with mods. My understanding is that anti-cheat software compatibility can still be an issue for some people, but I haven’t run into that yet.

For me, switching to linux was a no-brainer; I prefer it in every way.