I’ve done this before. Sort of.

Like everyone else I’ve grown tired of Microsoft and their nonsense. It’s not the nags for services, ads in the Start Menu, tracking telemetry or even a boinked Windows update that bothers me. I mean who else would boink their own Operating System with a patch that won’t let you shut down the machine? But it’s also things like the fact that they removed local accounts (or at the very least made them very difficult to use) that’s an absolute crime. I don’t want to use a Microsoft account login because I reinstall Windows frequently. When I do I don’t want some obscure setting coming back from some online backup I didn’t ask for and causing problems. Which is something I’ve actually had happen and had no idea what setting it was. It’s also why I don’t restore from backup when I get a new iPhone or Mac.

While Windows has always been a resource hog, having a third of my ram eaten up after a fresh boot and at system idle because for some ungodly reason Edge needs to be running in the background at all times is unacceptable. Or Explorer being sluggish because in the year of our lord 2026 Microsoft still can’t figure out how to optimize its shell. I mean, now that we know they used React Native for part of the shell, it makes total sense because React Native is a heavy, unoptimized, piece of JavaScript framework trash that has no place on the web, let alone an operating system.

These days though things are very different. There is hope. It is no longer like the old days where, for someone who was just trying to get away form Windows and play some games, there wasn’t much to do. I’ve flirted with Linux since the early 2000’s. Checking in periodically to see how things were progressing. These days Valve has managed to move things so far forward with Proton via the Steam Deck it’s scary. Linux is finally a real option and people are starting to take notice.

I’ve been running Linux pretty much full time on the gaming rig since February and let me tell you: it is fucking glorious.

Which Distro?

So the first question is, Which distro do I choose? Well let’s consider one thing first: the distro isn’t as important as you think. Here’s the thing about what distro you choose: aside from major considerations like these (rolling vs atomic vs LTS vs non lts vs server vs desktop) the distro you choose almost doesn’t matter. I won’t pretend there aren’t many differences between even Fedora and Ubuntu it’s just that way deep down under the hood it’s all Linux. Your distro is a collection of choices and you need to decide whether or not you agree with those choices. You just kinda have to try a bunch and figure out what you like and don’t like. I just wouldn’t recommend gaming on a distro ment for a server like Red Hat. Kali Linux is another great example of this as it’s specific to a certain use case.

Initially my idea was to go straight Steam OS. This was focused on gaming and I figured I trusted Valve enough that if it was good enough for them it was good enough for me. Bad news was that at the time I was considering what distro to use, their hardware was mostly focused on the Steam deck and a lot of desktop hardware wasn’t supported. That’s now changed with the release of the Steam Machine. Bazzite would be the next best choice and generally is considered on par with what Steam OS is trying to accomplish. I also started listening to PC World’s Dual Boot Diaries podcast (Apple Podcasts link) and heard about an Arch based distro called CachyOS. So I figured between those two and Nobara I’ll just buy a few USB sticks to feel each of them out. I expect it to be slow and whatnot due to the fact that the OS is running on a usb stick but that’s fine. After getting them each up and running, I’ve decided on two things:

1. For now at least, CachyOS is going to be my distro of choice. I like that it feels very light and very fast and I can pretty much do whatever I want with it. It’s performance based so it’s essentially made for gaming. It’s install is also light and only really gives you what you need to have a functional OS. No email client, no calendar app… Just the basics to get the system up and running and for you to install whatever apps and packages you want. It can be a bit of a pain in that it’s a rolling distro so there’s updates daily (sometimes hourly) and things can break at any time for any reason but my hardware is a few years old and I should be relatively safe. Plus it defaults to the Limine boot loader, btrfs, and I have snapshots to help me out if something goes south.
2. Bazzite is a very close second. It’s not as fancy or slick as Cachy but it is atomic which means it should be more stable since I can’t really break it and updates should be reliable. Being atomic means the whole system gets updated at once and should something go wrong, the whole update doesn’t get applied. More than we can say for Microsoft these days. It’s geared towards gaming so most things I need are there out of the box.
3. I did try Nobara but for whatever reason it just didn’t appeal to me. I don’t remember the reason but it was pretty much an instant no so I moved on. It’s also geared towards gaming but also content creation and that’s not something I’m interested in. It’s also Fedora based but also includes an Nvidia driver. I believe it’s also atomic and a heavily modified version of Fedora.

Consider my examples above. Cachy is Arch based and gets sometimes updates as soon as they’re ready. As I said, there isn’t a lot there when you first boot in and it’s up to you decide what you want or need. Bazzite is Fedora based and probably gets them weekly. Bazzite is also designed as a gaming OS. Meaning when you load in for the first time Steam and other gaming related things are already there waiting for you. With Cachy you have to go get Steam. Nobara, since it’s geared toward content creators comes with OBS as part of its default software package. Without getting too deep into packages and package management, they both run the same software, its just a matter of how you get there.

What I think a lot of people new to Linux think (or at least used to think) when they consider a distro and why they do or don’t like it is that they tend to think the desktop environment they use is the distro. And that probably used to be true. Even if two distros used KDE they may have themed it differently by default to differentiate themselves. Mandrake used to come with KDE and that was it. Other distros would use Gnome. Now, you can download most distros in whatever flavor you like. The nice thing is it’s 2026 and lots of distos offer lots of options. Ubuntu lists their flavors, Bazzite gives you a picker before you download, Cachy just asks you to pick an edition but throws the kitchen sink at you during the install process. I installed Hyperland with Noctalia on Cachy one time just for the hell of trying a tiling window manager then spent the entire weekend customizing it. Toss a few on some virtual machines and give them a spin. Find one you like and see if you can toss it on a spare drive of some kind and live with it for a few weeks or months like I did.

I’ll talk about desktop environments but in a separate post. I have a lot to say about those and as I mentioned, they’re kind of what makes or breaks your experience.

Testing and Use

Over the past six months I’ve more or less been using CachyOS full time. Or as full time as gaming allows. At first I was running on a USB stick which has been its own pain point but the good news that most of that is disk I/O related. Certain reads and writes are slow and I was prepared for that. The downside is the system does hang for a few seconds and I’m never really sure if something happened or if it’s just doing work. Then I had it on an NVME in an external enclosure. I did this so that I don’t accidentally wreck my Windows install and I still have a bootable OS should something go sideways. Now I have it in my machine, on the PCIE 5 slot and is the primary boot drive as nature intended.

After installing the Cachy gaming meta and application packages, the first thing I did was start downloading and testing games. What was good for a laugh right off the bat as the games that wouldn’t start under windows started. The Witcher 2 notoriously crashes under Windows when it detects more than 8 cores. No problems here. Most games I started worked just fine off the rip. One of the older Tomb Raider games took a little tweaking but nothing crazy. Forspoken simply will not run and when it does it ether flashes like bad OLED VRR or it can’t decide if the input is a keyboard and mouse or a controller.

Otherwise there were only two real issues I’ve had so far. One was with Call of Duty Ghosts. While doing a nostalgia play through I found a spot in the game where my frame rate tanked and the game would unexpectedly quit. Looking through crash logs didn’t really find anything but, and this is the fun of Linux, turning the setting for Riley’s fur down fixed the issue and let me play the game just fine. To be clear this wasn’t an issue with my graphics card. It’s a 7900 XTX with more than enough compute power to handle a 13 year old COD title. Windows hitched but would get through it no problem. This was a Linux/Proton/Wine problem for sure. The other problem was with Doom The Dark Ages: Revelations expansion. Apparently there was a bug that resurfaced in the mesa drivers that was causing certain textures to be missing. While it was fixed within 48 hours, I did have to wait the rest of their two week release cycle for the fix and then about an additional 24 hours for it to hit the repo. Shitty but it was quick fix and not something game breaking. I also tried a demo for a game that was unreleased at the time and Cachy handled it just fine. The game didn’t even notice that I wasn’t in Windows.

Controllers work great. I’ve been able to play The Last of Us 2 with both DualSense and a DualShock controllers. Gears Of War Reloaded played fine and I was able to use an Xbox Series X controller with no issues. I did run into one problem with Gears while testing GNOME though. My OLED is always set as the primary monitor and for whatever reason Gears started on my middle monitor. The problem is the there is no setting in Gears to tell it what monitor to be on. I had to go and find a workaround via Steam. KDE hasn’t given me any problems like this¹.

Hyperland was a different story. Because it’s much younger than other KDE or GNOME I ran into a bunch of odd issues and won’t be sticking with it. I was looking into Niri as well but I think I’ll just have the same issues so I’ll just head back to KDE. Things like monitor sleep would happen mid game or while watching YouTube. Games wouldn’t always grab any mouse and so I couldn’t click anything in menus. Shooters might not let me mouse look. While you can set a lot of options in Noctalia’s settings there isn’t much for hyper land itself. Monitor stuff is a great example. My monitors were out of order and moving to the left put me on my right screen and vice versa. Not good. So troubleshooting and editing files was a dream when I could just open up windows and have things open side by side or in a three way split. I loved this and the good thing about something like this is it makes you spend the time to get it the way you want it and it truly is yours. It’s a shame I had to to tear it all down due to the issues I had while gaming.

Otherwise I generally use it as I would Windows. Email, browsing, YouTube watching. Aside from missing my Apple Passwords² and a few other things I was doing ok. But we should talk about those things because some have answers and some do not. In some of those cases though in true Linux fashion, we have options.

Winboat For When There Just In’t Enough WINE

Not everything has a Linux client or equivalent. Sometimes there really isn’t a good solution and there’s just nothing you can do. Ask anyone reliant on Adobe or Microsoft Office software. Enter Winboat. Winboat uses docker containers to run a Windows 11 instance locally. Testing Winboat on the USB stick was really difficult due to the space and disk I/O limitations. So I pulled the 1TB NVME off of my Mac Studio and installed Cachy on it. Now this feels more like an OS should. You can RDP into it if you need to but what I feel like the intended way to use it is to just start apps from the applications list and run them as you would any other app. They still look like Windows apps but they work just fine. I was able to play music with the Apple Music app and watch video with the Apple TV app. If you’ve ever used or seen screenshots of Parallels on the Mac this is exactly what Winboat reminds me of. Windows apps running and looking like Windows apps on a different OS.

At the moment I’m only using it for my Apple Music subscription. I’d love to use it for iA Writer as well. It’s the software I use to write the long form posts (like this one) for this site. I can install it in Winboat without a problem but because I sync my markdown files for blog posts through iCloud using the Windows app for iCloud I’m very hesitant to use it. I’m just not sure I want my full iCloud there in case something goes wrong. Winboat does take some time and some patience to set up and isn’t as easy as just installing packages but the instructions are fairly easy to follow. Just remember to have your docker service (not the container) start on boot with the OS or every time you go to start Winboat it’ll think it needs to install Windows again until you start that service.

Rough Edges But Fine. Mostly.

The one thing I haven’t really tested and I’m not sure how to is iA Writer. It’s my long form writing app of choice. I have the Windows and Mac/iOS versions of the app and I sync my markdown files with iCloud. This way if I want work on something while I’m in Windows, at home on the Mac Studio, or away from home on my MacBook Pro, or hell, even in the gym from my phone, I can and it’s all saved and up to date. I’m just not sure I want to install the iCloud windows app in Winboat and let that have access to all my personal stuff there. But that’s a me problem.

Gaming wise, aside from that one issue with Doom The Dark Ages DLC and the oddity with COD Ghosts, I really haven’t had any issues that were Linux specific. And even with those, things are getting better day by day.

The only real question or concern that I have is buying new hardware. I know it can take some time for drivers and things to be added to the kernel as opposed to most hardware manufacturers having windows drivers on day one. I’m not usually a day one buyer for most hardware anyway. I’ll usually wait a good three to six months for CPUs and GPUs anyway but it would be nice to know that it wouldn’t be a problem if I wanted to do a day one upgrade. Perhaps being on a rolling release will help. Perhaps not. Either way, spending most of my gaming time in Linux has been a pretty positive experience. As Valve releases more hardware, keeps improving SteamOS and Proton, I see Linux continuing to become a viable option over Windows.

The Only Real Problem: Anti-cheats

I should, at least briefly because I’m sure everyone is aware, talk about the anti-cheat/multiplayer situation. Frankly, if multiplayer games are your primary focus, this isn’t for you. Most games simply don’t work due to the anti-cheat they use. However, the more people at least experimenting to see if this is the right move for them, the more pressure it puts on publishers and studios to make their anti-cheats work under Linux. At some point something has to give. With the Steam Machine out there, and all the talk around Linux and gaming focused distros, you would think they at least start to test having their anti-cheats working under Linux should this train actually leave the station.

Granted, the Steam Deck probably isn’t the place to play multiplayer games. I know I wouldn’t want to try to play a shooter online using one. Though something like Street Fighter 6 with a controller might work. I guess you could use a controller for a shooter too but to me that screen is too small anyway.

The Steam Machine, if they can ever get it right³, feels like the thing that should push everything forward. The other side of that is continuing to make SteamOS easier and easier to use and install. It needs to be kept up to date and it needs new hardware support on day one , just like Windows. I’m hoping that Valve gave us a taste of this with the Steam Controller working under both out of the box on release. It would be nice if Valve could influence at least AMD to have drivers available for new hardware and maybe they are given that’s the hardware they’re using for the Steam machine and Deck.

So yeah, if you’ve got an old ssd or something sitting around that you aren’t using, go for it. The best way is a dual boot with two separate drives since Windows will most likely at some point override your boot loader. Tinkering with Linux has made me rediscover why I love computers again. And it’s moved me one more step away from Windows which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.