Background
I use Mac as my daily driver for my work and personal machines, but for gaming I use my Playstation 5 for online or supposedly AAA games (think Call of Duty or Helldivers 2) and I use my Steam Deck for more indie titles. I’ve got some Linux experience, primarily via my old Mac Mini running Proxmox with mostly Debian VMs and messing around briefly with NixOS.
I love our Steam Deck, but it does feel a little underpowered, the battery isn’t as strong as it once was and I don’t love the docking experience with the official dock.
My wife is really into Civilization and similar games and I’d love to setup a desktop connected to our TV to use with a keyboard and mouse on our LG CX. Although I’m tech savvy, I’m not great with knowing what hardware/software to get. It’s especially more complicated with the looming tariffs and trying to make sure I don’t overspend on something I don’t need.
Question
Looking for some guidance on hardware and software to setup for this living room gaming desktop. It’s only purpose is to play games, primarily from Steam and it should have hardware which would benefit speed and performance for the type of games I’m going to list. Obviously we want the graphics to be good, but I don’t need a beast RTX 5090.
What are some hardware and software recommendations in today’s financial climate for playing these games on Linux?
What other accessories would you recommend for couch based keyboard and mouse gaming?
Honestly the game I’m most eager to get into is Dwarf Fortress, but for my wife it’s having a smooth experience with Civ6 (she was playing the Switch version for far too long!)
Games
- Civilization games
- My wife loves 6 and I’m a fan of 5, but we do want to eventually try 7, hoping it’ll improve with DLC updates
- Dwarf Fortress
- Rimworld
- Battletech
- Into the Breach
- Brotato
- Vampire Survivors
- Balatro
- FTL
- Caves of Qud
- Persona 5 Royal (although I’m struggling to get into it, pushing through)
- Blue Prince
- ANIMAL WELL
- Factorio
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Anno 1800
- Project Zomboid
This is a partial list of some of our libraries and wishlists. As you can see, some of them are more graphically, memory and processor intensive, but a lot of them are low performance indies.
I highly recommend getting a gaming laptop. You can buy a 4070 lenovo laptop at Walmart for $1k (at least in the US.)
Otherwise, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/LaptopDeals/ until you find something that fits your needs and budget. (sorry for linking to the other site)
You should use bluetooth controllers instead of ones that take a dongle simply because the dongle is unnecessary. Playstation controllers work well, but they’re expensive and I haven’t been able to find a 3rd party variant that works properly.
I also recommend getting a wireless keyboard + mouse combo.
Certainly the best choice for processor and graphics card will be AMD. I would certainly advise you to avoid Nvidia, as it is very poorly supported on Linux, and it is even worth paying extra for AMD if you use a system other than Windows.
Nvidia user here. The criticism of Nvidia support on Linux is always blown way out of proportion by AMD fanboys.
The only issue I ever have is needing to prepend
prime-runto each application I want to launch with the dedicated GPU.I’ve had significantly worse problems with AMD drivers, so much so that it really opened my eyes to how stable things were on the green team.
I’m not saying you should get one over the other, but you shouldn’t let fanboys dictate your decision. They will try to do so without admitting they’re fanboys, so we have admit it for them.
If you were planning to buy parts new and build the computer yourself, I threw together a parts list for an all-AMD system that’s appropriate for Linux (I recommend Bazzite) and has a good price-to-performance ratio; $1200 to beat the pants off a Steam Deck and be very future-proof in terms of hardware features, platform support, and general performance.
If you’re thinking about buying used older-gen parts or a prebuilt system, compare gaming benchmarks of the GPU or CPU you’re looking at to the components in this build to see if it’s an upgrade or downgrade. This is probably the best price-to-performance prebuilt I’ve found in a few minutes on Amazon, couple hundred less than the parts list above, but it’s on the older AM4 platform (5000-series Ryzen), an older generation GPU (6600), and much less storage.
Lastly, obligatory mention of the last PC build guide you’ll ever need. Good luck!
I have a T14 gen1 ryzen 7 (only 16G of ram for now), with integrated graphics running bazzite. Civ 5 and 6, rimworld, FTL run flawlessly. Anno 1800 is a bit laggy, but playable. I also do some sim racing and no complaints there either, if graphics are set just right, so I think that the bar for hardware is pretty low. As for hardware, not sure what I’d go with, but I’m sure there is no need to go overboard. For software bazzite is amazing if you want near hassle free gaming.
As for accessories I have a keychron keyboard which was a worthwhile investment and a Mionix 3200 mouse that’s over 10 years old, still amazed at the build quality and value for money. A good keyboard mouse combo is invaluable.
An AMD GPU and Bazzite would be great for you. The AMD GPU makes installing any Linux system easier, cause the drivers are already there.
Check ProtonDB, e.g. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Civilization and that, even though very useful
initially startedfor the SteamDeck it is also a very reliable source to know if a game will work well on Linux. Overall the vast VAST majority of games do work unless there is a kernel level anti-cheat which is mostly for competitive online games only.Now in terms of performances, get the GPU you can afford but overall its comparable with other OSes (not to name them) and sometimes even better, so on average, you can trust whatever the publisher is recommending.
Source : been gaming on Linux, in VR and on “flat” 3D for years now, pretty much daily.
Few months ago I built a gaming PC and chose to not use Windows for multiple reasons. I would suggest sticking to AMD as it would better supported on Linux. For the OS I’m using Arch Linux which is base for a lot of gaming Linux distributions. 99% I have never felt like I was missing out by not using Windows. Wine/Proton works really well OOTB. I highly recommend it if you want to get into Linux gaming. Like others have mentioned, ProtonDB is also a great resource for finding game specific information.
Thanks for the link to your build, that’s super helpful. The beauty of Linux is that I have some wiggle room as far as distro, as long as the save data is backed up, I can switch it up as long as it supports the hardware.
Yes, you have a lot more options for Linux distributions which in my opinion is a pro and a con. Honestly I would suggest that you stick to one distribution probably the one that works with your hardware the best (most annoying to troubleshoot). All distributions are going to have some issues and you’ll need to prioritize what you need and stick to it. I’m saying this because I feel I wasted a lot of my time switching distributions rather than just working on trying to fix the issue or finding a workaround. Good luck and don’t forget Linux is beautiful <3
Bazzite is probably the best Linux distribution for this purpose. It’s practically made for it. In terms of hardware, get an AMD GPU. Intel might also be ok, but they are pretty new so might have hidden caveats.
CPU, whatever you can afford I guess.
Do you have a budget?
Thank you for the reply!
Yeah I’ve seen Bazzite come up frequently and it sounds promising, essentially it’s Steam OS. I was also leaning towards AMD GPU due to the compatibility, heard the NVIDIA drivers aren’t the best.
I’m going to be irritating and say “I don’t really know” as far as budget, I’d like to avoid spending $2-3k on something to play Indies. But I’m also ok with under $2k or even less for something that is fairly future proof.
Am I right in thinking CPU/RAM are more critical for games like Civ or Dwarf Fortress? More simulation than graphics intensive tasks?
Just FYI: I’ve never had an AMD Gpu (thanks to Blender’s support seeming poor) and while it j5as been spotty in the past, I’ve used Fedora, PopOS and Bazzite with zero Problems on NVIDIA. Drivers have come a long way in the last years.
That is good to know! I use my Mac Studio for my Blender stuff (works surprisingly well for what I need). Maybe I shouldn’t rule out NVIDIA as quickly as I have!
I have two PCs, one with an RTX 3080TI the other one has an RX 7800 XTX.
The difference is real. For example, Gamescope on Nvidia is a buggy mess, and Nvidia on Linux performs worse than on Windows. AMD works better on Linux.
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Nvidia 575 beta drivers fix the freezing issues with gamescope.
Also, the performance hit on Nvidia is only in DX12 games. Vulkan, OpenGL, and DX11 (and older DX) all perform similarly to windows.
Yes, while it’s vastly better than it was not long ago, there’s quite a bit of catching up for them to do. On Bazzite gamemode on Nvidia is quite rudimentary.
However, Nvidia is progressing fast, I bet I’ll have no issues with it in the near future.
