This time I’m really going to do it. I am going to put Linux on my gaming PC. Calling it now. 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop. Or at least on mine.
Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming on Linux is now viable, too. Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on the Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro, than they do with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and Antonio’s experience running Bazzite on the Framework Desktop, I want to try it.
To be clear, my desktop works fine on Windows 11. But the general ratio of cool new features to egregious bullshit is low. I do not want to talk to my computer. I do not want to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not going to use Recall. I am tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Copilot 365, and I tried to use it to open a Word document and it didn’t know how.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10, including security updates, forcing people to buy new hardware or live with the risks. It’s disabling workarounds that let you set up Windows 11 with a local account or with older hardware. It’s turning Xboxes into PCs and PCs into upsells for its other businesses. Just this week, the company announced that it’s putting AI agents in the taskbar to turn Windows into a “canvas for AI.” I do not think Windows is going to be a better operating system in a year, so it feels like a good time to try Linux again.
I’m not normally one to change frogs midstream, but the water sure is getting hot.
That’s not to say I know what I’m doing. I’ve used Macs for a decade for work, and I dabbled in Ubuntu 20-something years ago, but otherwise I’ve been a Windows guy since 3.1. At first, that’s because it’s what we had at home, later because that’s where the games were, and finally out of force of habit (and because that’s where the games were). I brought a desktop to college instead of a laptop (so I could play games), and I’ve been building my own PCs for 18 years. I started my journalism career at Maximum PC magazine, testing gaming PC components.
I try to stay familiar with all the major operating systems because of my job, so in addition to my work MacBook I also have a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and a collection of older hardware I refuse to get rid of. I can work pretty well in Windows, in macOS, or in ChromeOS.
My experiences with Linux over the past decade, on the other hand, have largely been as a series of extremely optional Tasks:
- Trying to set up Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi. It sort of worked but was stymied by my home network setup, and I eventually replaced it with Home Assistant.
- Setting up a Beepy, a kind of a bootleg Linux handheld with a tiny monochrome screen and a BlackBerry keyboard. This took longer than I wanted, but it worked in the end, and I learned that using a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a tiny monochrome screen is my version of hell.
- Running a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I could use Obsidian, my preferred note-taking app, which doesn’t have a web interface. This was a pleasant experience and I have no complaints.
- [deep breath] Setting up three different virtual machines using the Windows Subsystem for Linux so I could build keyboard firmware: one for QMK, one for ZMK, and I think the third was because the first QMK one stopped working. All of these were on my old desktop, on which the entire Linux subsystem somehow broke beyond repair.
All of those projects, except the Chromebook one, took longer than expected, and cut into my vanishingly rare discretionary time. That’s also the time I use for gaming, reading, staring into the void, and half-starting organizational projects, so you can see how precious it is to me.
The prospect of instead using that time trying to get my computer back to a baseline level of functionality — that is, as useful as it was before I tried installing Linux — is tempting, but it’s also why I haven’t done it yet.
It’s a good time to try gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been having fun with Bazzite, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; my friend and former colleague Will Smith is cohosting a PCWorld podcast called Dual Boot Diaries with this exact premise.
And what better device to try it on than my personal desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graphics card? I just rebuilt this thing. The Windows install is only like six months old. It’s working about as well as Windows does.
So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?
Based on listening to two and a half episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and a brief text conversation with Will, I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.
I don’t expect things to go smoothly. I don’t really know what I’m doing, and Linux is still a very small percentage of the PC gaming world. As of the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey — the best proxy we have for PC gaming hardware info as a whole — just over 3 percent of Steam users are running Linux. Of those, 27 percent are using SteamOS (and therefore a Steam Deck), 10 percent are using Arch, 6 percent are using CachyOS, 4 percent are using Bazzite, and the rest are split over a bunch of distros.
So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out. But I’ve cleverly arranged it so the stakes are only medium: I have other machines to work on while my desktop is inevitably borked (and to run programs like Adobe Creative Suite), and if I end up spending hours of my discretionary time learning Linux instead of gaming, well, that’s not the worst outcome.
Maybe it’ll all go smoothly and I’ll report back in a few weeks, another prophet of the revolution. Maybe it’ll go terribly and I’ll come crawling back. Only one way to find out.