Switcher 2026: Linux Gaming First Steps ⭐️

Linux is appealing because it’s incredibly powerful and can run on a PC you already have. But thanks to Valve’s work on SteamOS and its underlying Proton compatibility engine, Linux may also be viable as a Windows alternative for gaming. And that is quite interesting to me.

It’s also a bit of a gray area since I have so little experience with this. But I just figured out a good way to get started.

Like many Windows gamers, I have digital game collections across Steam, Epic Games, GOG, and other stores. Steam is particularly notable here, not just because of its popularity but because of the work its makers have done as noted above. In Switcher 2026: Fedora Workstation ⭐️, I mentioned that I had installed a single game, Alan Wake, using Steam and that it runs just fine on the laptop I’m using for that distribution.

That’s nice, but there are/were two issues: Steam had also mentioned that a background service hadn’t been installed and I would need to figure that out. And while I was happy to get one game going, I’d like know up front which games will work well and which won’t.

But I think both are going to work out.

For the first issue, I was looking at the support document the dialog linked to when it occurred to me to try something obvious: Just plug in an Xbox wireless controller and see if it worked. And … go figure, it works fine. So I’m going to just not worry about that, I guess.

For the second issue, I turned to Steam to see whether it could offer any assistance. I know, for example, that if I browse the Steam store (or my library) on a Mac, I can just show those games that work on that platform. Surely there is something similar for Linux.

When I look at my library of games in Steam, I can see that I have 82 titles overall. And sure enough, there’a a little filter switch for Linux at the top of that list (when you run Steam on Linux), but toggling it on didn’t change the number of available games. It was still at 82, and I’m reasonably sure not all of those games will run (or run well) on Linux.

So I started looking around the Steam user interface and I discovered something I’d never seen or thought about before: You can create collections of games that provide you with filtered lists of the games in your library. And if you create a dynamic collection, meaning one that will update itself whenever something changes, one of the options you can toggle, under hardware support, is SteamDeck compatibility. The SteamDeck being a low-end Linux-based PC running Steam OS. Interesting.

There are two relevant settings for this option: Verified Only and Verified and Playable. When I choose the former, the list of my games is honed down to 20 titles. And when I choose the latter, it’s 54 titles. Nice.

Obviously, I stuck to the Verified Only filter at first and started installing a few games, DOOM (2016) and Resident Evil Village. And while I’m not sure why this surprised me, each of them runs fine for the most part (and works with the controller normally).

DOOM (2016) is perhaps closest to the type of game I like to play, though it’s a single-player experience. I also know it to run well on just about any modern laptop, and it didn’t disappoint on Linux, with Full HD graphics (with vertical sync on and antialiasing) and smooth performance. Very nice, and it also brought over my saved games.

Resident Evil Village is the most demanding of the three games I’ve tested so. It initially ran in a window instead of full-screen, but that was easily fixed in the game settings. The game was auto-configured to run at Full HD, which is fine. And while I didn’t play long enough to get into any extended action sequences, I did at least take on the game’s first enemy successfully and it looks great and plays well.

So far, so good. I will install and test a few more games, including some that are not verified to work perfectly on SteamDeck, and see where this takes me.