Jason, Liam, and Nick navigate all the bad news from Valve, explain the Discord drama, and reframe some game developer news with a positive spin. Plus, a mountain of evidence showing how awesome Linux gaming is already doing in 2026. Oh, and the obligatory rant from Liam, some spicy opinions about GeForce Now on Linux, and much more!
Every few years I dip my toes in the Linux pool to see how things are going. This weekend I set up a separate drive on my gaming rig to install CachyOS. I haven’t had time to try many games yet, but the ones I have tried run really well. This might be the year I actually make the switch away from Windows.
Yeah, this was basically my shift away. I still have my windows drive as a backup but I’ve basically moved away. CachyOS covers a lot of bases for me.
Do it! Join us
So far things are looking good. I usually spend a week or so trying to get everything working then usually get frustrated and wipe the install. Usually over something like GPU drivers. This time setup went almost entirely without a hitch. I spent way more time trying to decide what distro to use than actually installing it. Everything (video, audio, input devices) was working on the first full boot. The only thing I ran into was when I tried to turn on HDR on one of my monitors, everything went black. I had to open a terminal to delete a config file and reboot but it has been fine since. Steam and Proton were part of a single package install. I did have some difficulty getting Steam to set up a library folder on a separate mounted partition, but I got it working.
From here it’s mostly about what games I can get running, and if I need to find replacements for apps I use a lot on Windows, or if Linux versions are available. I’ll be very interested in whether I can get it to work well with my Quest 3, but that seems like a stretch.
All that said, I’m pretty optimistic so far.
Pretty good list of what works and doesnt. https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Are you using Nvidia? Those apparently have many more issues than AMD GPUs. That being said bazzite comes with lots of preinstalled things like drivers, steam, lutris(for wine) and bazaar for apps.
Youtubers and Star Fleet Academy are what you get when you let people who should never be near a camera, near a camera.