Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)
Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming…was horrible on them.
Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)
As an example:
Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.
Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9
But this was the best case scenario, games really work.
Is it just my hardware?
Am i using linux just wrongly for years?
Is it my fault?
Am i missing something?
My specs:
prebuilt desktop: Acer Nitro N50-620
memory 64KiB BIOS
memory 32GiB System Memory
memory 16GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 26
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
processor 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-
bridge Intel Corporation
display TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER]
storage Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD
bus Tiger Lake-H USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 x
network Tiger Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
bus Tiger Lake-H Serial IO I2C Con
i actually did try using protondb in several gaming cases, i recall tweaks there working maybe once? if at all?
and i tried quite a few games, some where i went to protondb of course to check, but for me, it sadly never helped
It is not your hardware
Not really
Not really
The main issue from what I can tell is you are trying to play older windows games which can be pretty hit or miss. More recent pc games often support the steam deck which is usually a good sign for compatibility.
Gaming on Linux has greatly improved over the last couple years (especially thanks to proton/steam deck) but if you are trying to run older games that were never designed to run to it or you want to play online games with aggressive anti-cheat it is still going to be a bit of a struggle.
I would recommend sticking to an Arch based distro like EndeavourOS (as it is similar to the SteamOS) or a Debain based distro and not swap around too much so you can get a feel for it without having a bunch of things change on you all the time like package names and the like.
All that said if your jam is older windows games and you have access to windows and are tired of messing with the OS and just want to play games just use windows, try linux another day.