PSA: the folks over at My Life in Gaming have put together a really nice video showcasing how they built a Linux gaming PC. I like how they primarily approach this from a console gaming standpoint, and show all the benefits and drawbacks from that perspective.

This is part one, focusing mostly on building the system and choosing the right components. The second part will show the actual gaming experience.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-02-26, 14:27:

PSA: the folks over at My Life in Gaming have put together a really nice video showcasing how they built a Linux gaming PC. I like how they primarily approach this from a console gaming standpoint, and show all the benefits and drawbacks from that perspective.

This is part one, focusing mostly on building the system and choosing the right components. The second part will show the actual gaming experience.

Depending on what games you are looking to play, you can greatly simplify things with AMD mini PCs. You can get Zen 4 CPU cores, and RDNA 3 graphics. One that has 780M graphics is recommended. The CPU and GPU cores will be the same as the higher end Z1 Extreme era handheld PCs. And it can natively boot an unmodified SteamOS recovery image, or put whatever Linux distro you desire. The handhelds you get soldered RAM which lets them run 8000Mhz or so memory so they have higher memory bandwidth. But the CPU and GPU can be clocked higher versus running off a battery.

GPU performance is between a PS4 and PS4 Pro which is in line with what the Switch 2 can do. But the CPU is more powerful than even the PS5 Pro.

Current RAM pricing has screwed pricing on these, but you can get a complete system for $650-700 USD which is under 1/2 the price of MLiG's $1,500 budget. It's less performance, but also a much smaller PC being under 5"x5"x3". The main drawback that affects all PCs, is you don't get that console ease of use of picking up a controller and turning it on causing the console to wake, and TV and audio to power on a switch inputs. That's some of the magic secret sauce Valve integrated into the upcoming Steam Machine. But hopefully other PC hardware will start including the necessary hardware to also do that.

The hardest game I tried running was has been Hogwarts Legacy at 1080p 30fps with the Steam Deck performance profile. Older games have no issue at 1080p, and may be fine at 4K.

I also use one as a daily driver running three monitors with Windows, and lots of RAM to run VMs to use for work. It's weird having the displays being multiple times the power draw of the PC they are connected to.

I have a small pc that is console only, for the last 2-3years, been updating/prepping it recently. Looked if anything is new with distros also tried Win10 on it, but decited to stay on linux, works a bit better with the gamepad only and no random window opening somewhere that you have to click with a mouse. Theres no mouse or keyboard connected to it and its tucked away behind the tv.

Got a 5gen i7, 16GB of downloaded ram and a Radeon rx570 in it. This machine was once ment as an XP machine then it became a hackintosh and last couple of years is a pc-console 😁. Basicly linux vs windows you dont really need to cherry pick any hardware, except a bit better support for amd/radeon cards, but new-er nvidia is also decently supported. The only thing I done is Ive modded the bios on the gpu a bit, so the power consumption is lower.

There are 3 popular "console-gamepad-experience" distros currently.
- SteamOs that is based of Arc, tailored for the steamDeck.
- Bazzite, that is based of Fedora, got quite popular recently, guess cus of the catchy name. Is updated with the latest drivers and ported some stuff from steamOs
- ChimeraOs, that is based of Arc. Is updated with the lastest drivers and ported some stuff from steamOs. Has a nice web client, that can be accessed from the machine or from the network.
Thats the one Ive been using and recently been looking at all 3 again and will continue to use 😁

All 3 are "immutable" distros, so no access to the root/system (with exceptions ofc).
Not that long ago (few weeks?) they/gaming distros "united" under https://opengamingcollective.org/. To share, not to each do its own/same thing. Good!
All 3 also boot directly into Steams big picture, and have quick acccess settings menu for the basic stuff, showing stats(fps), enabling global FSR, 2d scaling options ...
All 3 also have a minimal desktop you can swith to. You do need it from time to time, maybe to setup something or add non-steam games and so on, first login to other stores.

I decided to stay on chimeraOs for its Web interface, its really handy to load games from other stores (epic/gog), also nicely setuped for emulation. All the artwork for steam gets easily added when adding the game.
And the buttons are big, so handling the mouse with the controllers (I use sonys ds4) touchpad is easy.

Emulation is handled with RetroArch and its different cores.
I use a standalone (Eden) for switch.
Other than that, most games from steam/epic/gog are compatible. But not all, I know atleast one!!!! called Rime, that doesnt work, or I would have to play with the compatibility layers to find one thats working.
Have one native linux game(Jazz jackrabbit 2), works great in co-op and with controllers(which is a problem with the OG one). Have a few windows copied games, also no problem.
Steam also has gamepad profiles/mappings from users if you dont like the default one for each game, that you can easily apply.

The only issue I currently have is a bit noticable input delay on the gamepad. Ive only noticed it now that I play Dead cells, since Im used to the game and I play a lot worse with a bit of input lag.
Think bluez and playstation bluetooth driver are fighting and the pooling rate taken is too low. Think I have the solution and gonna try it the next time when Im close to the pc 😁
(as it turned out, I had to set the tv to "game" mode. And now its fine)

Would recommend ChimeraOs to anyone that is looking for a console-like experience. Its pretty much plug-and-play. In general, linux really became great for gaming.

Running Supermario Wonder

Ringding wrote on 2026-02-23, 10:37:

Something very similar happened to me recently. I also have an 8th Gen Intel desktop (i3-8100), without Turbo Boost, acquired at the time because it was cheap. I am running cinnamon on Fedora, and after I upgraded Fedora to 43 in November, I noticed sluggish behavior and stuttering, which sent me on a journey of trying out various things, such as configuring the "intel" driver and customizing its options "TearFree", "TripleBuffer" and "SwapbuffersWait". None of which helped; as a result, I suffered horrible lag for a few weeks. Which is when I noticed that the Fedora upgrade has also installed some kind of power-optimizing service that basically pinned the CPU to 800 MHz instead of 3.6 GHz. I don't remember exactly what it was: Either upowerd or tuned. After getting rid of that and reverting to the default X11 driver, everything went back to being reasonably smooth – driving an 8K display with this kind of setup is a bit of a stretch, but it works well for the most part.

That sounds interesting. I'll have to check for some kind of over-aggressive GPU power management. The strange thing is that in 2024, it was only Mint that performed so poorly. Now every distro I try (including Ubuntu LTS derivatives that work fine on an i3-7100) has that high GPU (not CPU) usage and stuttering. I currently have EndeavourOS (Arch-based) installed with KDE, and it was running smoothly a year ago. The clocks do adjust based on usage, but the GPU clock is lower than my laptop's i7-9750H (also UHD 630 graphics).

lti wrote on 2026-02-22, 16:38:

I haven't figured out the performance problems on my 8th-gen desktop. 3D performance seems to match Windows, but in basic 2D desktop usage, the "blitter/3D" usage is abnormally high, and videos drop frames when they shouldn't. From what I've read, it's a common problem, but everyone seems to want to accept the answer that integrated graphics are incapable of basic desktop use, no matter how many people say that it performs much better in Windows.

lti wrote on 2026-02-28, 21:57:

The strange thing is that in 2024, it was only Mint that performed so poorly. Now every distro I try (including Ubuntu LTS derivatives that work fine on an i3-7100) has that high GPU (not CPU) usage and stuttering. I currently have EndeavourOS (Arch-based) installed with KDE, and it was running smoothly a year ago. The clocks do adjust based on usage, but the GPU clock is lower than my laptop's i7-9750H (also UHD 630 graphics).

The i3-7100 (7th-gen Core), 8th-gen Core, and i7-9750H (9th-gen Core) all have the same Gen 9.5 Intel graphics. I think what you're saying is the i3-7100 works fine but the 8th-gen desktop has high GPU usage and stutters though its clocks are lower then the i7-9750H. I happen to have an i3-7100 running Rocky Linux 9 with XFCE and desktop usage is fine, with or without the xfwin compositor enabled. Plays 4K HDR 60fps VP9-encoded video smoothly, albeit downscaled to a 1440p monitor.

I suggest starting a separate thread with more details if you want to dig deeper.

More fun with Mint on my desktop, can't get any sound out of Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus because the damned thing doesn't let me select the correct output port.

Edit: Figured to disable jack detection using HDAJackRetask. Last time I tried doing that with onboard sound by the means I no longer recall, I crashed the whole audio stack.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-03-27, 07:56:

More fun with Mint on my desktop, can't get any sound out of Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus because the damned thing doesn't let me select the correct output port.

Edit: Figured to disable jack detection using HDAJackRetask. Last time I tried doing that with onboard sound by the means I no longer recall, I crashed the whole audio stack.

as much as i like Mint i am not a "real" linux enthusiast, if some hardware doesn't work I have about three or four attempts by searching forums etc - if a few quick things from there don't solve it then i don't persist. Sounds seems to be a bugbear for linux for years, lately i've been fortunate enough though

Oh it wasn't that difficult, though this time, asking ChatGPT gave all more complicated and non-working solutions! Interestingly, some bells and whistles you find on Windows in Sound Blaster Command program for that card are actually there on Linux and can be changed through alsamixer (can't avoid the terminal). It's actually why the card sounds strange out-of-box due to all excessive post-processing enabled by default.

Though I don't know at this point if these settings are even persistent across reboots and if not, how to make them so.

Next time, I might try if OpenRGB can change LED lighting of its LED strip. The older version I can install on KUbuntu 21.10 (the one Linux I have permanently installed) doesn't support it. Newer might, but can't be installed. Because Linux requires even more conscious thought in compiling something to work on older distros due to all revisions of C runtime library as compiling with distro's compiler tends to produce binaries that only work on distros with that particular glibc version or newer.

Not Linux Mint specific, but Linux, I noticed the guy developing AIMP music player published beta version that runs natively on Linux. If I remember right, he wasn't interested in the platform in the past. Win11 must be really causing the exodus. Win32 version still has the most bells and whistles, but it's a progress.