TL;DR
Switched from Windows → Debian → Bazzite. This is part appreciation post, part personal journey. Bazzite just works, and I love it.
Long story
Over the past few years, I had heard great things about Proton and Bazzite, so I decided to give them a shot. Over the course of about 6 months I migrated my gaming rig from Windows to Debian, and eventually to Bazzite.
I was stuck with Windows for years because, let’s face it, games are built for it. But I knew most titles ran just fine on Linux, and I was curious to see how it actually holds up. I started with Debian since I’ve used it on other machines and didn’t want to deal with extra admin work when I just wanted to game.
Of course, I hit a few snags, mostly thanks to Nvidia still deserving the middle finger, and my fancy gaming mouse pulling some weird non-standard click shenanigans. After switching to AMD and a simpler gaming mouse, Debian actually worked pretty well. Initially, I thought I was stuck with Steam games, but Heroic Games fixed that as well. Things have really gotten a lot better in Linux gaming!
Well, almost everything worked. Space Engineers 2 was the one holdout. I tried every trick in the book to get it running, but eventually realized I was spending more time troubleshooting than actually playing. That’s when I backed up my saves and took the plunge with Bazzite.
I’ve always kept secure boot disabled, but Bazzite’s modern installation made me reconsider. The official guide didn’t fully solve my issues, but I winged it and got it working anyway. Turns out, ignoring secure boot for years meant I had some learning to do. Better late than never.
First boot into Bazzite, and of course, I had to tweak KDE to feel like home. Still love how customizable it is after all these years, and Wayland support is surprisingly solid now.
And guess what? Space Engineers 2 just worked. No hackery or trickery required. Kudos to the Bazzite devs. Keep it up!
Lesson learned
Sure, you can game on Debian, and it’s perfectly fine for most games. If you want it to just work, Bazzite’s the way to go.
Are you saying that secure boot is what fixed Space Engineers 2, or was that just an unrelated aside?
Secure boot was just a side quest. Long ago, I learned to disable it, because Linux distributions at the time didn’t utilize it at all. Turns out, Fedora/Bazzite finally do. Haven’t been following the news on that.
Anyway, I don’t think that has anything to do with the way games run. My guess is, it’s either the newer versions of everything or it’s the custom tweaks Bazzite does to make the experience smoother. Usually, having older drivers and libraries is fine, but there are edge cases where that actually makes a difference.