This time I’m really going to do it. I’m going to put Linux on my gaming PC. Just calling it. 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop. Or at least on me.
Linux has been a perfectly viable desktop OS for ages. But gaming Now viable on Linux too. Valve’s hard work has pulled out all the stops to make Windows games run well on the Linux-based Steam deck. Gaming handhelds that come with Windows run better and have higher frame rates on Bazight, the Fedora-based distro, than on Windows. And after reading about Antonio’s experience running Buzzit on the upcoming Steam Machine and Framework desktop, I want to try it.
Apparently, my desktop works fine on Windows 11. But the usual ratio of cool new features to serious nonsense is low. I don’t want to talk to my computer. I don’t want to use OneDrive. I am sure I will not use recall. I’m tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything else trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 changed to Copilot 365, and I tried to use it to open a Word document And 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. This is disabling workarounds that let you set up Windows 11 with a local account or older hardware. It is turning Xbox into PC and upselling PC for its other businesses. This week, the company announced it was putting AI agents in the taskbar to turn Windows into a “canvas for AI.” I don’t think Windows is going to be a better operating system in a year, so it seems like a good time to try Linux again.
I’m not usually one to change frogs mid-stream, but the water is definitely getting warmer.
That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. I’ve used a Mac for work for a decade, and I dabbled in Ubuntu about 20 years ago, but otherwise I’ve been a Windows guy since 3.1. At first, it was because it was what we had at home, later because it was where the games were, and finally because of habit (and because that was 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 from here max 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 old hardware that I refuse to get rid of. I can work great on Windows, macOS, or ChromeOS.
On the other hand, my experience with Linux over the past decade has largely been a series of extremely optional tasks:
- Trying to install homebridge on Raspberry Pi. It was kind of working but it got bogged down by my home network setup and I eventually replaced it with Home Assistant.
- Installing a BP, a type of bootleg Linux handheld with a small monochrome screen and a BlackBerry keyboard. It took longer than I expected, but it finally worked, and I discovered that using a command-line interface with a BlackBerry keyboard on a small monochrome screen is my version of hell.
- Running a Linux VM on my Chromebook so I can use my favorite note-taking app, Obsidian, which doesn’t have a web interface. It was a pleasant experience and I have no complaints.
- [deep breath] Setting up three separate virtual machines using Windows Subsystem for Linux so I could create keyboard firmware: one for QMK, one for ZMK, and I think the third was because the first QMK stopped working. These were all on my old desktop, on which the entire Linux subsystem was somehow broken beyond repair.
All of those projects, except the Chromebook, took longer than expected, and cut into my vanishingly rare discretionary time. This is the time I use for gaming, reading, staring into the void, and half-finished organizational projects, so you can see how precious it is to me.
The prospect of using that time instead to try to return my computer to a baseline level of functionality – that is, as useful as it was before trying to install Linux – is attractive, but it’s also why I haven’t done it yet.
It’s a good time to try gaming on Linux. Antonio and Sean are having fun with Bazight, a Linux distro that mimics SteamOS; My friend and former colleague Will Smith is co-hosting PC World podcast called dual boot diaries With this exact foundation.
And what better device to try it on than my personal desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graphics card? I just rebuilt this thing. The Windows install is only six months old. It is working just like Windows.
So really, why No I blow him off and start again?
Based on listening to two and a half episodes of dual boot diaries And after a brief text conversation with Will, I’m going to install KachiOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and reportedly easy setup.
I don’t expect things to go smoothly. not me In fact I know what I’m doing, and Linux is still a very small percentage of the PC gaming world. According to the most recent Steam Hardware & Software survey – the best proxy we have for PC gaming hardware information – just over 3 percent of Steam users are running Linux. Of those, 27 percent are using SteamOS (and therefore Steam Deck), 10 percent are using Arch, 6 percent are using CacheOS, 4 percent are using Bazite, and the rest are split across a bunch of distros.
So if anything went wrong with my installation, it would take a lot of forum-hopping and searching on Discord to figure it out. But I’ve cleverly arranged it so that the stakes are only moderate: I have other machines to work on while my desktop is essentially off (and programs like the Adobe Creative Suite to run), and if I spend hours of my discretionary time learning Linux instead of gaming, that’s not the worst outcome.
Perhaps this will all go smoothly and I’ll report on another prophet of revolution in a few weeks. Maybe it’ll go terribly forward and I’ll come crawling back. Only one way to find out.