With Windows 10 going away, and my aged but honestly capable PC unable to run Windows 11, I thought I better give gaming on Linux a serious go in 2025.

Oddly, my original foray into Tux Tinkering ™ was inspired by boredom when I lived in Tanzania in 2001. I think it was Mandrake Linux? From 2003, I used Arch Linux and so system configuration became a past-time in itself. I did have a few attempts at gaming over the years. I played a few native games like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble and Wesnoth but also managed to run stuff like Quake and Half-Life under Wine. (That’s actually the only time I have played, and finished, Half-Life.) But from 2005-ish, most of what I wanted to play was only available on Windows and, with the introduction of Steam (and the Humble Bundle!), it was just getting easier and easier. I was still tinkering with Linux for fun. I even got connections to our virtual desktops at work up-and-running via Citrix (which definitely WASN’T supported by IT).

But by the time our second child arrived in 2015, I had no time for tinkering and very little reason to even use a Linux desktop, with work being so Microsoft-centric. Fun time was extremely limited and stability was paramount and around then I started to look much harder at Workstation distros. I used Ubuntu for a bit but I think I decided to stick with Fedora from around 2019. I mostly used XFCE back in the day, but I did enjoy the “out of the box” experience of Gnome on Fedora. But throughout that time, desktop Linux was only used for the odd thing that was just too much hassle in Windows. Like anything to do with ffmpeg or any sort of bulk file management. I was still running Arch ARM on a Raspberry Pi, so I was still very much a Linux hobbyist, but gaming on Linux never crossed my mind.

Then, last year (I think), I heard from my (now teenage) son’s friend, that SteamOS is now based on Arch. And when my son got a Steam Deck for Christmas 2024, I started paying a lot more attention to how it works. I mean, I have to really. When your boy wants to run Marvel Rivals and he’s not using the right Proton build, you gotta dig into that! And I quickly saw that gaming on Linux as a main platform suddenly looks not only doable but almost straight-forward.

So, although I do have a year of updates on my W10 install, before it really goes away, I started looking at what I might do and I guess I’ll cover that in a new post.