We both feel it. You want to escape. I want to escape. Microsoft's usurpations have grown too many and too frequent: useless AI in every wazoo, constant upselling on Office 365, the feeling of a gradually tightening noose as more and more apps try to corral you into this or that walled garden—the Microsoft Store, the Xbox App, etcetera. That's to say nothing of all those other reasons you might be keen to ditch Redmond these days.
It's time to leave Windows behind, you resolve. Then comes the irrepressible second thought: where will you go?
Surely not Linux. Linux is weird. And hard. Everything is a file? / is root? /root is not root? Why is everything a user? Why do I have to keep chmod'ing everything? What's systemd sad about now? I think I just deleted the bootloader? I want my mum.
Or, you know, something like that. So you stay with Windows, for now, and wait for that glorious day when Gabe Newell finally descends from Mount Sinai with desktop SteamOS aloft in his outstretched hands. Then will come the Great Exodus: we'll all can our Win11 partitions and move into the sunlit uplands of a Valve-backed Linux that just works. Computing will be saved and all shall be well forever.
Good news and bad news. The bad news: that's never going to happen. Whether Valve ever gets around to releasing a truly universal desktop version of SteamOS or not, I'm sorry to say it's probably not going to clear up every single bugaboo and quibble you have with Linux as an OS. You will probably have to launch the command line. You will probably have to sudo something. Not on the sudoers list? Sucks to be you, buddy. Better get on there pronto.
The good news: that doesn't matter, because if you're really serious about getting off this bus to hell called Windows on your gaming PC, then the Linux revolution has already happened.
I've been running Bazzite on my gaming desktop for the last month or two and have had very little issue with it. My games launch, they run, they work, and at no point has anyone tried to sell me a word processor or tried to sell me to an advertiser.
Bazzinga
I could get very boring at this point and start talking about how Bazzite is an immutable and atomic Linux distro and—but your eyes are already glazing over. The need-to-know is that Bazzite aims to approximate the SteamOS experience on a wider range of devices (although you can, as I did, download a version that launches into a normal desktop rather than a gamescope'd version of Steam's Big Picture mode) and it is very easy to use and install.
If you download its KDE variant (more Windows-y) rather than its GNOME variant (more macOS-y), you'll hardly notice you've left Windows at all at first blush.
My games launch, they run, they work, and at no point has anyone tried to sell me a word processor or tried to sell me to an advertiser.
And really, it does kind of just work. Not for everything, I stress, but for a certain kind of videogame enjoyer—my kind—it runs everything worth caring about in your Steam library. In the past couple of months, I've played:
- The System Shock 2 remaster
- Pillars of Eternity
- The Witcher 3
- Hunt: Showdown
- Baldur's Gate 3
- And most importantly, Stonks-9800
All with nary a stutter. These games all run through Valve's Proton, which kicks in automatically like it does on Deck, and they perform just as well as they do on Windows 11 (or close enough not to matter). I'm on an RTX 4080, too, and it works fine despite, ah, Linux's tumultuous relationship with Nvidia.
If you're predominantly a singleplayer gamer and you mostly play things like god intended: on your monitor at your desk, I think you could feasibly pop Bazzite onto your drive right now and never have to worry about a Windows update ever again. For the most part, that's me, and for the last couple of months I've only really been firing up Windows for work, because I suspect the company IT department might actually kill me if I attempted to login from a random Linux distro (they did let me go Linux, Josh, but it did require a blood sacrifice –Ed.).
If you're not a singleplayer lifer... ah, well, that's dicier. Look, facts are facts: a lot of online games with onerous anti-cheat demands just aren't going to work outside of Windows right now. Fortnite? No. Apex? No. Valorant? No. R6 Siege? No.
You can check Are We Anti-Cheat Yet to see how your online tipple of choice copes with Proton, but the fact is a lot of multiplayer games haven't done the work (and may never do the work) to get themselves running on Linux. If you're a live-service sicko then your experience with Bazzite, or any other flavour of Linux, probably won't be as smooth as mine has been.
A second, smaller caveat: HDR is weird. To be fair, HDR is weird on Windows, so I can't really complain too much, but I've run into the odd issue when I try to get it working on my majestic OLED TV. Sometimes it's fine, and all I have to do is input a particular gamescope command into the Steam launch options for a game (for instance, Horizon: Zero Dawn) to make it all work smoothly.
Other times (The Witcher 3) it absolutely refuses to work regardless of what I do.
Does that matter to you? Bear it in mind. Though I will say it is compensated for, slightly, by Linux being way more adept at handling my three-monitor setup (two monitors, one TV) than Windows is. Turning on my TV is liable to send Windows into a kind of spasmodic fit, where Linux simply embraces the new, three-screen reality with grace and deftness.
The short and tall of it is: give it a try. If you're constantly grousing about Windows but you're waiting for Valve to save you, then stop. Clear off a partition and stick Bazzite (or any distro you like; I hear CachyOS is good) on there and see how it goes. There might be some teething issues, but I think you'd be surprised at just how easy the whole thing is these days. At the very least, you'll stop being hassled about Copilot.
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