Fedora Linux for my gaming PC
Back to Linux
For two years, I was running Arch Linux for gaming and general-purpose computing on my downstairs "fun/family" computer. I never stick with rolling release distros for very long, so it was inevitable that I’d be switching to something else. It just took a while.
I would never have picked Fedora except I’m a fan of Liam Squires-Hand’s GamingOnLinux website. So I thought I’d see if there was a recommendation there, and sure enough:
Despite what you read elsewhere - you don’t need to go with the latest random "gaming" distribution. The best thing to do is to stick with the crowd, and go with the bigger more well-known distributions.
For a desktop distro, he recommends Fedora with KDE Plasma:
So I got the 3Gb install image with Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 loaded on a USB stick and installed it.
The installer image is super nice. It starts you off with a live desktop environment, so you can check things out before starting the installation. Then the installer walks you through everything and explains everything as you go. I have absolutely no complaints.
I’m generally a lightweight window manager user (current favorites are spectrwm and XFCE), but I’ve always been a fan of the software that comes out of the KDE project (from Krita to Kstars). I gotta say, the KDE desktop is extremely nice. It’s incredibly polished and reminds me of what Windows could have been if Microslop had just kept improving it for the last decade instead of making it as obnoxious and abusive as possible.
Since I run AMD hardware, there were zero driver installation steps. My GPU just works.
The computer also sleeps properly and it’s fast and responsive. Nice!
Installing Steam
I’m still a fan of Valve’s Steam after all these years (I was an early skeptic, but have been pleasantly surprised to find it a net positive, especially for us non-Windows gamers).
Getting Steam installed is the only part of this process that will probably seem utterly baffling for newbies.
Fedora uses DNF ("Dandified YUM") and the official Fedora package repositories (rightly) do not include non-free software.
So these steps include adding the RPM Fusion Nonfree repo to DNF.
Wait, what’s RPM Fusion?
"RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship."
It’s a legit organization with a steering committee and everything.
Here we go (note the '44' in the initial package URL):
$ sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-44.noarch.rpm
And now installing Steam is just:
$ sudo dnf install steam
That does all the work of installing 32-bit libraries (also known as running multi-arch) and the Steam launcher itself. Nice!
I highly recommend running Steam from the terminal for the first time so you can see the update progress (otherwise it will look like nothing happened for a long time!).
$ steam
I played Minesweeper (installed by default) while I waited for Steam to finish the initial update in the background.
Afterward, Steam can be found in the Games sub-menu and pinned to the taskbar, etc.
I’ve had zero issues playing games on this machine and I’ve been super happy with this setup so far.
The whole thing took just a couple hours from start to finish.