I've been on Fedora 39 since it was branched (in September), using Silverblue and GNOME. No issues; everything's great here.
garrett
joined 1 year ago
There are a few ways...
The easiest is using Steam, which handles everything for you (once you flip a switch in settings). The second easiest is using Bottles or Heroic, both of which lets you run Windows games and apps on Linux via Wine. The third is VMs, but that's just Windows itself running virtualized (in its own virtual machine) in Linux. The fourth way to use the same computer for Linux and games is to dual boot (reboot from one OS into the other) and stick with Linux except for particular games that might not work with other methods — which is thankfully very rare these days (as most games work in Linux via Proton or in Wine via Bottles or Heroic).
-
Steam on Linux has a switch in the settings to enable Proton for all games. Flip that on, and it's basically transparent. For setting up Steam, the easiest way is to install it from Flathub.org. Depending on your distribution, it's most likely set up for you. If not, then follow the setup guide @ https://flathub.org/setup. Once Flathub is set up on your system, you can install the flatpak of Steam from your app store (GNOME Software, KDE Discover, etc.)
-
An alternate method is to set up Wine outside of Steam. There are a few ways to do that; Bottles is the most straightforward and super easy way, letting you have different Wine environments for different apps or games (or just one for everything, if you'd rather)... Bottles is easy to use and has installers for a lot of common apps and launcher. Additionally, Heroic is also a good way to run GOG, Epic, and Amazon games on Linux. Both are on Flathub too.
-
There's a third major way, and that's installing Windows as a virtual machine on Linux. You'd probably want to use GNOME Boxes or virt-manager for that. Boxes is easier (and on Flathub) and will give you adequate GPU performance for a lot of things (however, isn't ideal for high performance gaming), but if you have two GPUs (often one integrated and one discrete), then you can use GPU passthrough with virt-manager, but that's way outside the scope of this comment. 😉 Perhaps having a Windows install in a VM just for some games that don't work on Linux is what that person meant? But that would still get you tracked by Microsoft whenever you're using Windows in that VM. (So I'm guessing they're talking about Wine instead, which is option 1 and 2.)
-
Dual boot is basically reusing the same hardware for two different operating systems, but only one at a time. When you're in Linux, Microsoft doesn't track you (unless you're using Edge on Linux or specifically using a Microsoft service). You'd want to minimize your time in Windows.
You could use any of the above or a combination (perhaps even all of the above), depending on what you want. I only use 1 and 2 myself. While I do play a lot of games, all on Linux, I don't play any that require Windows.
(There are only a few these days that don't work on Linux. The notable ones I'm aware of are Fortnite, Destiny 2, Genshin Impact, and a few others that rely on lootboxes where the maker didn't flip the switch to enable "anti-cheat" on Linux. Most everything else works these days, even a lot of other lootbox/pay-to-win games.)
There are a ton of interesting apps to use on Linux.
The Steam Deck uses Flatpaks from Flathub by default in KDE's Discover app "store".
Browse and search https://flathub.org/ to find all sorts of apps.
Are there any types of apps you're interested in or anything in particular that you're used to and want to find something similar?
You'll probably want Flatseal to adjust Flatpak app permissions (like giving apps access to more directories and such). You usually don't need this, but some apps might not support portals and may need more "holes" poked in the sandbox to access additional directories.
If you want to run VMs, then I'd suggest GNOME Boxes (just searching for "boxes" in Discover should find it. You could install a standard Linux distro inside — or even Windows if you really wanted. It's simple and straightforward, and even has Linux distro downloads from the UI (so you don't even have to hunt for an ISO to download).
If you're looking for command line stuff, then I'd suggest setting up podman and distrobox; this is more advanced, but would let you run almost everything from any distro on your Deck via containers that persist (even across Steam Deck updates): https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/compatibility.md#install-podman-in-a-static-manner & https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/09/distrobox-can-open-up-the-steam-deck-to-a-whole-new-world/
If you're doing a lot of stuff on your Steam Deck in desktop mode, please remember that it's not encrypted (so anyone can copy anything you do out of it) and doesn't even have a password by default. You'd want to set up KDE Plasma's Vault and use that for sensitive documents and/or use a VM with disk encryption. Sadly, EncFS isn't included on the Deck, so you cannot use KDE Plasma Vault (without jumping through hoops), so you'd have to set up something similar in Distrobox (although probably a different program), use something similar from Flathub (again, which requires a command line program behind the scenes currently) or use a VM with encryption (which is the easiest thing to do).
If you aren't doing anything sensitive (including browsing) on desktop mode and don't want to do anything too advanced (like command line stuff), then all the many thousands of apps available from Flathub are still really astoundingly great and super easy to use. They're basically just a click away in Discover.
I know you're making a joke, but you can install the extension today to get the proposed feature. (How to install it is even mentioned when you follow the link.) There's no need for waiting.
👍
...Is Xits pronounced "exits" or "zits"? 🤔
Note: You can actually play Halo on a Steam Deck. I've played it with friends over the internet and two of us were on a Steak Deck and Linux desktop. The other two were on Windows. It worked well.
(But, yeah, there still are a few other games that don't have anti-cheat enabled, such as Fortnite and Destiny 2.)
That scenario would definitely be the time to use SBC-XQ.
http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-sbc-xq-bluetooth-audio-codec
(I have the over the ear XM3 that don't support multiple devices, but also have a Bose 700 that does. The Bose 700 does AAC, but I find SBC-XQ better. On the Sony it's a toss-up, so I stick to LDAC. I'm using Fedora Silverblue 39 with PipeWire for reference.)