After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.
I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable.
I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
I like to think I would do the same if I got one.. then I turn on Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 and my skepticism sinks in. It’s just _so dope_ I don’t think I could walk away from it… and the sequel will surely give my 3090Ti a run for its money.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a Gold level seal for Linux support according to Proton DB - but it looks like Path Tracing is why it isn't better. Is path tracing really that amazingly better than ray tracing (which works)?
For gaming. For any somewhat smaller market software it’s not great. I had a look at DJ software and while they all support macOS. Nothing supports Linux and they are bugged out in Wine too.
I think itll be a slow march accross the pareto curve. Take care of the biggest non engineering usecases in descending order of number of users. There are way way more gamers than djs. But i think we'll get there. Fingers crossed microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot
2025 is the first year I've moved everything over to Linux. I've had no issues at all with my 4090 on Bazzite or CachyOS, but I will be buying an AMD GPU for my next build to ensure future Linux compatibility, along with the rest of my hardware and software.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.