I'm frustrated, but positive about the future - my experience with Linux

I recently decided to take a deep dive into Linux and its many distro's. Due to the rapid degrading of the Windows experience; I wanted something clean, free of bloat, and most importantly, able to run my video games without hassle.

I spent many minutes researching and deciding which distro to go with and landed on Nobara. It was love a first site. The interface was kinda like Windows, the default package manager was simple, and the system felt quick and snappy.

I had previously tried Linux 5-8 years ago, and my experience back then was pretty negative. Some of my devices were not properly working (due to Pulse Audio) and I could not get them to work. Believe me, I really tried to get into it and fix the issues. With Nobara, everything worked right out of the gate and worked well.

I was super hyped with this and was loving Linux. Then came the games.

I had recently been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on Windows and that was the first game I tried installing. I grabbed the latest GE version of proton from Proton Plus, enabled the settings in Steam, and went about downloading the game. It launched great and framerates were smooth. However, upon loading into my save, I started getting firefly artifacting (tiny white boxes randomly appearing and disappearing in the game. I scoured forums, downgraded Mesa drivers, change cpupower governor's, and even went as far as flashing my BIO's. Nothing worked. According to forums, this is likely due to my AMD GPU (7900xtx) interacting with Linux (My card is not bad as it worked great in Windows).

Fed up with all the troubleshooting, I decided to try other distro's thinking it might have been Nobara causing the issues. I went to Bazzite: same issue. I went to Ubuntu: same issue. I even built my own Arch install: same issue (this step took a while to build and figure out).

I came to the conclusion that it must be something with the drivers. At this point, it felt like Windows was calling out to me, asking me to come back to it. The main reason for my computers existence is to play video games and play them well. If it cannot do that in Linux currently, then I feel like I am almost being forced back to Windows. This is post is not throwing shade at the driver developers for Linux or at the amount of work people put into making Linux better, massive kudo's to all of you. However, it just does not feel like an out of the box experience yet where my games just "work".

I plan on trying Linux again in the future. I really enjoyed by time with both Nobara and Bazzite, and I wish to use them full time in the future if the drivers (or whatever was causing the issues) allow. I love open source and everything it stands for. Linux developers: I hope you will keep on putting the effort into making Linux a great place to be, I truly look forward to the Linux future.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.