I’m planning on switching to Linux on my main PC as I don’t want to move to Windows 11 and was curious about other people’s experiences doing so.
I have a Steam Deck and everything there works out of the box, but I imagine that’s a more curated platform compared to standard distros.
What are your experiences, good or bad?
I switched from Windows to Linux last year. I’m typing this on Ubuntu 25.04. All the games I have ever tried to play work, and work well, with very few exceptions.
Steam just works, all I had to do was go into its settings, the Compatibility, and enable Steam Play for all titles. I set the default compatibility tool to “Proton Experimental” and haven’t needed to change it. Even for the titles that say they don’t work on Linux.
Heroic Games Launcher handles my Epic and GOG libraries, and again, everything just works. Epic is not friendly to Linux users, and the only exceptions have been a couple of free games on Epic where the developers have gone out of their way to break Linux compatibility. Red Dead Redemption is the only game I would like to play, but haven’t figured out how to get it to work. Most of my Epic games work, including complicated ones like Train Sim World 5. All of my GOG games work without exception.
I use a program called Bottles to handle edge cases. It’s a little trickier to get set up, but once you’ve got it running, again, stuff just works.
Hope this is helpful. I’m happy to answer questions.
Thanks. I didn’t know about Bottles, that seems useful (mostly for non game software I guess).
This screenshot is just an FYI at some of your options. I’ve got bottles, PortProton, and the ProtonTricks launcher as options for any given EXE/MSI installer. Bottles is usually all that’s necessary but I have the others for super tricky stuff like embedded software development BS that would never be encountered by a normal person (haha).
It works well for games that just come as EXEs too, but I mainly use it for non-games, yeah.