I’m a long time Linux user that hasn’t gamed much in years. Previously I tried it by installing wine and going from there but I had to manually hunt for DLLs so I gave up. So I have recently installed Bazzite and stuff that I want is working :) But I’m not a huge fan of Bazzite outside of gaming. So how does one reasonably setup gaming stuff on another distro? Is flatpak the way? On Ubuntu you have many different ways to install Steam for example. What about Proton? I saw people wrangling multiple versions for different games.
If someone can point me to somewhere where tech landscape is explained it would be great.
Ideally, install Steam with a native package, but if that doesn’t exist, the Flatpak is always fine. You can also use Lutris if you want an all-in-one launcher for Steam, GOG, standalone, itch.io, emulators, etc. (and I know Heroic is nice if you need Epic Games)
If you use a newer device, you might want a distro with a newer kernel, but even Debian will work okay for gaming nowadays.
For most games Proton will work OOTB, but you might want to check on forums and ProtonDB for any information regarding specific tweaks for certain games. The only ones that don’t work as of yet are because the companies don’t want it to work. (plenty anticheat games work on Linux, Big Tech simply decides to revoke that functionality because money talks)
Linux gaming has had huge development over the last few years, it’s awesome!
Heroic replaces all the functionalities of lutris without being near-vibe coded.
There’s a manual install feature that allows for the same flexibility without any fuss.