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I've got a single computer still running Windows, a PC I use exclusively for gaming, and I've been wondering if I should just switch to Linux on it rather than "upgrade" to Windows 11... And lately I've been seeing a lot of people recommend Bazzite, a SteamOS-like Linux distro, and I realized I've got a spare NVMe drive in that computer that's mostly empty, so I figured, why not give it a try?

And hey, it's actually working pretty well! Installing it was pretty smooth, hardware drivers all worked with no issues, and I've only tested it with Dragon Quest III and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous so far, but they both just started up and worked immediately. Pretty slick, maybe I can finally give Windows the boot for good.

I've only had a few issues. The first is purely because I've got a really weird setup; I've got a 4k/120Hz TV connected to a 5.1 speaker system through an AV receiver, which doesn't sound too weird, except my receiver doesn't support passing through 4k/120Hz to the TV, and my TV's eARC port doesn't pass 5.1 channel audio to the receiver and downmixes everything to stereo. So I've got one HDMI cable running from the PC to the TV for video, and another HDMI cable running from the PC to the receiver for audio; but because HDMI audio is a kludgey hack in the first place, you can't send audio without video. That means the PC thinks it has two monitors, one at 4k/120Hz and another at 1080p/60Hz, except nothing should ever use the second one. Steam on Linux seems to have issues with this when running in big picture mode and has really awful performance. Disabling the second "monitor" fixes the issue, but also means right now I'm only getting stereo audio. I can "fix" this by just getting a USB-to-SPDIF adapter and using that to send audio to the receiver instead, but that's annoying because I'll have to buy more hardware...

Second issue is that by default, Bazzite puts the PC into suspend mode after 15 minutes, and keyboard and mouse events do not wake it up. That's annoying because I have to walk 8 feet and reach under my TV to hit the PC's power button. I easily fixed this by writing a udev rule to flip the flags on the USB devices to enable my keyboard and mouse to wake the PC from suspend, but I admit that is way beyond the skill level of anybody who's not a Linux nerd.

Third issue is another thing that won't bother 99.99% of PC, which is that I have a custom water cooling loop that is connected to both the CPU and GPU. The pump and fan speed should be controlled based on the water temperature, but... I haven't found a way to do that. There's a GUI that seems like it's supposed to be able to control fan speeds, but my fans don't show up there. It seems like they're being controlled based on the CPU temperature, which is maybe fine, but there's the possibility that something that is hitting the GPU really hard but not the CPU could cause the water temperature to rise to dangerous levels because that wouldn't result in the fans ramping up. Dunno if this is really a problem, but I might have to go digging through documentation to see if I can figure out how to control my motherboard's fan speeds properly.

On the other hand, suspend/resume work way more reliably in Linux than they do in Windows, switching audio devices is easier, and I can do cool things like set the DPI of games individually to adjust text/cursor sizes, which is a little awkward but isn't even possible in Windows, so that's a win.