1w ago

What changes are required to setup Fedora for gaming?

I have a flatmate who is making the switch from windows 10 to linux and I Fedora is a distro that I trust to provide a good stable experience. I however use Nobara which comes with all the gaming related tweaks already done. I dont want to recomend Nobara because its package management is intuitive.

The changes i think I need to make is, remove fedora flatpak store. Enable non free software repo. Install proprietary nvidia driver. Install steam, wine, lutris, heroic store.

Is there anything that is required for a smooth Fedora gaming experience?

29 comments

nothing i don't think, you did everything to make it a functional gaming system. install the drivers if applicable, then your game launchers.
dunno why you removed flatpak, it should be fully functional if your friend is to use it like he does his windows machine.

I just use Bazzite because it’s Fedora with all the gaming tweaks preinstalled (including NVIDIA drivers and displaylink drivers for docks). Best part is it’s immutable so you can’t mess it up irreparably by deleting something or putting some random commands into terminal. This doesn’t quite answer your question but since you mentioned this is for a roommate who is switching from w10, I figured I’d chime in with my usual shilling.
- This.
  I am freaking happy I switched to Bazzite. It rocks HARD. I have never ever used a PC OS as stable as this, everything works out of the box, and the best of all is that it doesn't need any maintenance.
  I cannot recommend it enough.
- Can I still install fedora repo packages? Using dnf?
  
  No you will need to use rpm-ostree and ujust for console commands
- +1 for uBlue (Aurora, Bazzite).
  Everything you want and need is already set up for you, and the OS is just in the background for your games and other software to run on. No need to install any codecs, or even updating it, because it's already done for you. And if something breaks, then you can just roll back in seconds.
  Very user friendly.
  
  I’ve been toying with Linux since 2011 and this is the first easy no maintenance Linux. I’ve been running it for a year and a half without any needs to reset or urge to distro hop
- Seconded. I recently moved my gaming rig from Nobara to Bazzite because this machine is only occasionally booted, and I don't want to spend the little time I have available for gaming doing maintenance instead. Except from a mounting error for my secondary drive that I made (bc after 20+ years on Linux I still can't be arsed enough to learn how to fstab), I was in Cyberpunk 2077 in less than 5 minutes.
  Pros:
  Easy setup, everything works out of the box
  A lot of preinstalled gaming-related packages and tweaks, plus a lot of QOL improvements over Silverblue/Kinoite
  Ready to game as soon as it's installed
  No updates, no maintenance! Full system images are downloaded and installed in the background and are applied at reboot.
  Immutable so "impossible" to fuck up.
  uBlue projects are not distros but a delivery system, all the work is actually done by Fedora. No risk associated with a single-maintainer project like Nobara.
  Cons:
  Immutable so "impossible" to fuck up.
  Pro tip: don't keep your Steam games on a Windows partition. They won't launch.
- I mostly recommend Bazzite because it comes with fractional scaling, a tiling window manager, and seamless background updates out of the box.

Why remove flatpak?
If your flatmate is new to Linux, it will probably be helpful.
If he is using the gnome de, then install whatever extensions you need to give the windows a minimized button, or point him towards the plasma spin.
- Specifically, it is Fedora Flatpaks, as there have been several problems with Fedora Flatpaks being broken where the official Flatpaks are not.
  
  Ohh, gotcha. Yeah. Just enable flathub for him. It’s super simple, but I’m sure you know that.

Just go with Bazzite.
- my daily driver!
- Isn't bazzite designed for mainly gaming only? So any productivity work is not well suited for it?
  
  Yeah, I couldn't set up a compiler :-/ The official discord server suggested using the built-in Arch container but that did nothigg and I simply switched to regular Fedora

that should be all the basics covered

I am using stock Fedora for casual gaming. Most games I play have a native linux port. Just install Steam, enable Proton in the menu and you are good to go. Heroic should also come with its own Wine version preinstalled. I never had the need to setup Lutris, Bottles or a system-wide Wine install.
Depending on the games you play, using X11 over Wayland might be the biggest change needed. CS2 with AMD on Wayland stutters a lot, has mouse glitches and random crashes. With X11 the framerate is x2 higher and a lot smoother (though still a lot worse than Win10).

Honestly just proprietary driver, steam and proton works really well for me on stock Fedora workstation.

I also have bottles installed https://usebottles.com/

Beyond removing the fedora flatpak repo so your app store prefers flathub, there isn't really anything I think is necessary since steam sorts it all for you nowadays.

You can get everything from the store btw.

My knowledge both of Fedora and Nvidia are both a bit dated. So if anyone "um actually"''s me, probably defer to them. But last I knew you want to get nvidia drivers from the rpmfusion repo. Relevant link: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA.
As others have mentioned there's no need to remove flatpak.
Otherwise, sounds like you're on the right track to me.
Edit: I just read a comment about breakage with Fedora flatpaks. So perhaps prudent to remove if so.

Man why not just use Kubuntu and be done with it. You get proprietary drivers out of the box along with proprietary codecs and all.
Steam, Heroic, etc all install great with the packaging system of your choice (deb, snap, flatpak, appimage whatever)
Seriously, I complained about snaps at first, but as a daily user for several months now as a gaming system it works fucking great. And it's stable as heck so I NEVER have any problems.

I always recommend PonyOS.
It runs anything and looks fabulous doing so.
- I put this on their computer im getting beaten up the second they boot.
- So, I assume your greatest competitor is TempleOS...

29 comments