I see a lot of bazzite recommendations but I think that is an outdated take. IMO CatchOS is the better choice, ofc this is personal opinion.

Go with AMD GPU, be prepared for true happiness.

Some tips for you:

• Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so

• Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it’s usable, but if you’re starting fresh 100% AMD.

• Don’t fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you’ll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I’ve heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have / and /home be different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that.

• Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that’s okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.

Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.

How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton?

The speed drop is negative. That is, it’s often actually faster.

Yes, I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.

For the most part you would just build the same machine as if it was a Windows gaming machine. That said, there are a few things to know:

• AMD has historically had better video drivers on Linux than nVidia, though nVidia has made some changes that has improved things quite a bit
• You want a basic, well supported common distribution if you’re not extremely familiar with Linux. Don’t go with some weird niche distro because you heard it will get you 1% better frame rates. Things like Steam and Lutris are well supported on the common easy distros. I would suggest Mint as it is Debian based, and basically everything supports Debian derivatives.
• Not every game will work, but a whole lot will. The things that are most unlikely to are competitive online games with anticheat root kits. If those matter to you, then unfortunately you’re better oft in windows.
• Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ for a list of what is well supported and any information if they need some trick to run.

I got broke by just reading the title.

How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton? Is it so big or just small?

Honestly, in some cases, proton is faster than games directly on winblows. Microslop even said they’re going to try to make windows faster than proton again.

Apart from other things said here (e.g. AMD GPU), if you are planning on using wifi check that the adapter works well. Intel wifi usually works very well on Linux (although I have read that there are some issues with their newer wifi chips). AMD mobos usually use some kind of mediatek chipset. It might be better supported now, but I ended up replacing mine with another m.2 wifi (intel ax200).

A quick search for general support from the mobo vendor is probably a good idea too.

Most games I just click play and they run.

Ryzen 9 x3D, XFX Radeon 9700 XT, 32 GBs RAM, with some flavor of MSI mobo I am too lazy to get the box out to look at.

It took me like a year to build as I was saving for all the parts (and the everything crisis began, at the time called the RAMpocalypse). I think it was around 3K to build then including the 2TB M.2

I’m never going back.

Others have commented on performance, so I don’t have anything to add. The parts/cost is really large and varied topic depending on what you’re trying to do and what your budget is. And pretty much every part of my rig has gone up in cost since I got it, so no idea what it would cost to build at this point, but more than I’d be willing to spend.

So I’ll just cover a few things you may run into issues with when trying to game on Linux.

Anti-cheat: Some anti-cheat software is not compatible with Linux or the developers didn’t properly set them up for Linux. There isn’t anything you can do to work around that. Just the way it is.

Some launchers/DRM: Ubisoft and EA seem to be big ones for launchers that are broken regularly. There may be others as well, but those are the ones that come to mind. You can sometimes get them to work by switching to different versions of Proton, but it can be hit or miss.

Niche gaming hardware: Some niche hardware like steering wheels, shifters, pedals, flight sticks may have some issues. Some work right out of the box, some work but can’t have software/drivers updated, some can’t be customized because of proprietary software that is windows exclusive. This hobbies have some pretty dedicated fans, and more of them are making the transition to Linux. So you might be able to find assistance here on Lemmy or on various forums if this is something you’re trying to get working.

You may run into other minor issues but there are a ton of resources out there to get games working. Most will rum pretty much like they are native. I think Linux is a fantastic platform for gaming, and it will likely continue to be better as more people adopt it.

As far as distros are concerned, Bazzite is a fantastic starting point because you almost certainly can’t go wrong. If you run into programs that need a kernel module or superuser permissions, just distro hop. It’s very likely that in your first time using Linux that you’ll not need those power user things, so Bazzite will be rock solid for you.

Also, in Linux, best practice is to set your home folder to be a separate partition on your HD. You can point your distro to the existing home folder so if you distro hop and you won’t lose your desktop environment prefs/setup or your files.

Here’s my notes on this for Fedora if you need a guide:

/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=geekbench6 com.geekbench.Geekben
ch6

Yeah, do it 3 years ago.

Go with an AMD graphics card over Nvidia, even if it costs significantly more. with Nvidia you will need to deal with shitty drivers (similar to Windows) and eventually your GPU will stop being supported. Also niche distros may have extra steps required to get everything working.

With AMD your card just works great no matter the distro, no matter how old the card gets. I never think about my GPU because it works at full performance every time with zero setup

CPU matters less: Intel and AMD are both solid on Linux

Linux can live with less RAM than Windows and work fine, but with more RAM Linux will intelligently cache frequently accessed files to speed up pretty much every program. Linux looks like it’s using more resources but it’s actually using them for something useful, and Linux will still back off if something you are doing actually needs more RAM

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Download protonplus to manage proton versions. Try proton GE 10-34 first, 99% of the time it works.

Not sure if you’ve chosen a distro, but I can vouch for CachyOS being pretty decent. There are more stable (i.e. non-rolling) gaming distros, but CachyOS doesn’t take a huge amount of tinkering, and most things truly just work (I’ve actually had some games be less buggy on Proton than native Windows).