The Year of the Linux Desktop?

Oh the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, a year foretold by many redditors, where Gabe N. will save PC gaming and Linux will finally topple Windows as the operating system of choice for PC gamers (insert copy pasta about Linux not being an operating system here). 

If you’ve ever been on a Linux gaming subreddit, you’ve probably seen at least one post where someone was claiming that <date +%Y> was going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Then if you checked the same subreddit a year later, you would have probably seen someone else claiming <date + %Y +1> was finally going to be the year of the Linux desktop and that “things were different this time”. It's a bit of a running gag that every year is the prophesied year of the Linux desktop, and with recent improvements to Linux gaming, it’s easy to see why the joke persists.

In recent years, gaming on Linux has become far more accessible thanks to tools like Proton, Lutris, and the Heroic Games Launcher. The 2022 launch of Valve's Steam Deck spurred a surge in new Linux gamers, and this momentum is likely to continue with devices like the Lenovo Legion Go S shipping with SteamOS. The desktop Linux conversation recently gained further traction when Pewdiepie released a video titled "I installed Linux (so should you)" showcasing his two insanely well customized Linux PCs. With an impressive 81% of the top 1000 Steam games now rated Gold or Platinum on ProtonDB—meaning they should run with little to no tweaks through Proton—could 2025 finally be the year of the Linux desktop?

Unfortunately, the Steam hardware survey’s operating system market share still doesn’t inspire confidence. As of May 2025, the Linux user base accounted for only 2.69% of all Steam users. For context, the Windows user base accounts for 95.45%, and the other 1.85% are playing Sims on their MacBooks with the fans running at 110% (this joke was brought to you by our resident Labs macOS user Lucas N.).

Maybe the number of users doesn’t tell the whole story, and maybe this is the wrong question to be asking. Linux gaming is clearly better than it has ever been, but how good is it? For the average gamer looking to switch, how does it perform compared to Windows? In this series of articles I will try to answer these questions. This article will outline the testing methodology and the surprises encountered during the initial set up for this project, then the follow-up article will dive into the test results. 

The Game Plan

My goal for this project was to replicate the experience a novice Linux user (lovingly referred to as a Noob) might have when making the switch from Windows 11 to Linux. With this in mind, I selected Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as my distribution (aka. distro) of choice, and used an up to date installation of Windows 11 24H2 for reference. I selected the latest long term support (LTS) release for my testing because this is a stable starting point for Linux Noobs; a decision that would later come back to haunt me on a few of the newer cards. I know some people have very strong opinions about Ubuntu and its creator Canonical, but love it or hate it, Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros like Linux Mint still make up a significant portion of the user base amongst Linux distros according to the Steam hardware survey. 

I can already hear the sound of your Thinkpad keyboards furiously typing that, according to the above screenshot, SteamOS Holo and Arch Linux both actually have larger user bases than Ubuntu and its derivatives. Before you say anything on reddit or send me an angry email, let me just assure you that I am aware and this decision was made intentionally. SteamOS Holo is a very specialized distro which is meant to be used for handheld gaming, primarily on the Steam Deck, and isn't really intended to be used as a daily driver for your desktop PC. As for Arch, having recently struggled through installing "Vanilla" Arch at home (I use Arch, by the way), I wouldn't recommend the Noob do the same, no matter what the Arch evangelists might say. There are some great Arch based distros out there such as EndeavourOS or CachyOS that could be recommended to the Noob, but they currently have smaller user bases. Anyways there really isn't a wrong choice for distro and this rant could be its own article, so onwards with Ubuntu!

When building a Linux desktop PC, the common advice is to choose an AMD GPU over NVIDIA. This is largely due to AMD's superior open-source driver support, which simplifies the driver installation process by shipping all the packages you need with the kernel. NVIDIA, on the other hand, has a troubled past with its driver support on Linux, with many in the community disliking being forced to rely on proprietary drivers. On the bright side, NVIDIA has been taking steps in the right direction in recent years and is slowly paving the path towards properly supporting open source drivers on their hardware.

All of that being said, if you can get over the potential driver headaches NVIDIA can cause, how well do their GPUs perform in comparison to AMDs? Also what about Intel? I couldn’t possibly forget about their latest Battlemage architecture! Thus, I selected  the RX 7700 XT 12GB and RX 9070 16GB from AMD, the Arc B580 12GB from Intel, and the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB from NVIDIA to include in my tests.

I decided to focus on 1080p, 1440p, and 1080p with ray tracing enabled for my testing. This decision was based on the low to mid-tier range of the tested cards (excluding the 9070) and the Steam hardware survey, which indicates that roughly 75% of PC gamers play at 1080p or 1440p resolutions. I also didn’t want to cherry pick games I knew would work without issue, so I made selections from LTT Labs’ game test suite based on their ProtonDB ratings. To view the full list of games in LTT Labs’ test list and their ProtonDB ratings see Appendix A. 

The games selected for testing were:

• Black Myth Wukong

• Cyberpunk 2077

• Forza Horizon 5

• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

• Strange Brigade 

I chose Black Myth Wukong to represent a modern triple-A title with a platinum rating. Cyberpunk is gold rated on ProtonDB and was selected due to its rich repertoire of features such as ray tracing and upscaling technologies. Forza Horizon 5 was selected to represent a game with a silver rating on ProtonDB. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has a native linux runtime, but is also rated gold through Proton.  Finally, I included Strange Brigade because it uses the Vulkan API which should (in theory) translate to better performance when run through Proton. To keep things consistent across systems, I tested all of the games through the Proton-Hotfix branch.

Setup

I set up two identical test benches with the following components:

I configured the Windows system according to our usual GPU testing procedure:

• Updated the motherboard to the most recent BIOS revision, F6b at the time of writing.

• Installed Labs’ “Golden Image” of Windows 11 24H2 and updated it to the most recent version before pausing updates for 5 weeks. 

• Installed the most recent chipset drivers from AMD’s website and installed the correct graphics drivers for the card on the bench. The list of drivers for each graphics card can be found in Appendix B. 

• Set the Windows settings as follows:

  • Set the power mode to Best Performance

  • Set the display scale to 100%

  • Disabled HDR

  • Set the refresh rate to the highest available option (165Hz)

  • Disabled variable refresh rate

  • Disabled optimization for windowed games

  • Ensured hardware accelerated GPU scheduling was enabled 

• Disabled GSync in the NVIDIA Control Panel (NVIDIA cards only)

For the Ubuntu 24.04 system I had to improvise since Labs didn’t have a standard procedure for setting up a Linux based system for GPU testing. My setup went as follows:

• Updated the BIOS to the F6b revision

• Installed Ubuntu using the image available on Ubuntu’s website. 

• Configured our installation settings through the interactive installer as follows:

  • Opted for the default selections of apps

  • Installed the recommended proprietary drivers

  • Erased the entire disk to install Ubuntu

  • Skipped Ubuntu Pro

  • Chose not to share data with Canonical

• Updated all predownloaded packages using sudo apt-get install update

• Set the Ubuntu Settings as follows:

  • Set the refresh rate to 165 Hz, 

  • Set the display scale to 100%

  • Set the Power Mode to Performance

  • Ensured the Screen Blank and Automatic Suspend settings were set to Never and Off respectively

• Disabled GSYNC in the Nvidia Settings GUI (NVIDIA cards only)

• Installed Steam using the most recent .deb file from Steam’s website

GPU Installation - First Impressions

The Good

For the 7700 XT and the B580, no further steps were necessary as the open source drivers are already baked into the kernel that ships with Ubuntu 24.04. The kernel used for the tests on Ubuntu 24.04 was Linux 6.11.0.25-generic. Note that you can quickly check your kernel version using the uname -r terminal command. The 4060 Ti required just a smidge more tinkering and I had to pick the nvidia-driver-570 proprietary driver from the Ubuntu's Additional Drivers application. After a quick restart of the PC, everything just worked on both the 7700 XT and the 4060 Ti (more on the B580 later). This was quite the relief given the horror stories you hear around the digital campfire about NVIDIA drivers on Linux. It was nice to see that things have moved in the right direction.  

The Bad

Setting up the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti was closer to one of those aforementioned horror stories. At the time of writing, the NVIDIA 5060 Ti has only been out for about two months. As such, its drivers weren’t yet shipped with Ubuntu 24.04. This meant that to get the 5060 Ti working on Ubuntu 24.04, I needed to install the drivers from NVIDIA’s website. This is not a recommended step for the Noob as it can cause conflicts with your distro’s NVIDIA packages.

Thanks to NVIDIA’s recent attitude shift towards Linux, the open source drivers on NVIDIA’s website did support the 5060 Ti and I was able to get the system up and running. The installation did require running a Bash script, but was fairly painless since the script launched a guided installation process within the terminal that could be navigated with the arrow keys. This script does flash a few warnings during the installation process that could easily discourage a Noob, especially when it starts talking about cryptic sounding words like Xorg. Hopefully NVIDIA will one day follow AMD and Intel’s lead and ship their drivers with the Linux kernel, alas that day is not here yet and Nvidia’s Linux drivers continue to feel like an afterthought. 

The Ugly

As for the 9070, unfortunately it wasn't supported by the kernel that shipped with Ubuntu 24.04. Having only been released on March 6, 2025 this result wasn’t entirely surprising as open source drivers can take some time to mature.

I don’t expect the average Linux Noob to want to change the kernel on their operating system, but I wanted to try installing AMD’s proprietary drivers from their website and a newer kernel was a prerequisite. This initially seemed like it had solved my problem, and the GPU was recognized as “AMD Radeon™ Graphics” by the operating system. This is unfortunately where my luck ended as attempting to launch games resulted in a host of different Vulkan errors.  For example, here's the error I got when attempting to launch Strange Brigade on the 9070:

I wasn't satisfied with ruling the 9070 a DNF due to being the newest kid on the block so I looked to a later version of Ubuntu. At the time of writing, the latest non-LTS version of Ubuntu was 25.04 which I installed. Presto! The 9070 was immediately detected by the new kernel's drivers and was reported correctly by the OS. I decided to proceed with testing on the 9070, with the (not so minor) caveat of this newer OS. The kernel used to conduct my testing on Ubuntu 25.04 was Linux 6.14.0-15-generic.

Finally, remember how I said the B580 worked without issues out of the box? That was a bit of a lie. In fairness, everything seemed to work out of the box. The card was correctly reported by Ubuntu 24.04, the scaling was immediately correct, and I even got into the Cyberpunk 2077 settings menu without so much as a stutter. This is fine right?

Oh how naive I was. When I launched the Cyberpunk benchmark it quickly became apparent that the drivers still needed some work. See the video below to see what I mean (warning there are lots of flashing lights).   

Black Myth: Wukong was a similar story, with textures that loaded incorrectly and water that looked unrecognizably pixelated. Forza Horizon 5’s benchmark refused to launch at all, and even crashed the PC a few times before I ultimately gave up on running its benchmark. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was probably the weirdest of the bunch, where immediately upon launching its benchmark I was greeted with some green noise. Now that’s some riveting gameplay!

Thankfully, I did manage to get some games running on the B580 – primarily those with native Linux runtimes. Strange Brigade, which uses the Vulkan API, ran without issue on the B580. Switching Shadow of the Tomb Raider to the native Linux runtime fixed the fuzzy green noise issues I experienced with Proton. Note that the native Linux runtime doesn’t support HBAO+ so I did have to adjust the tested game settings for this particular test. Having had some luck with native games on the B580, I also decided to throw a quick DOTA 2 benchmark into the mix just to see what might happen. I was pleasantly surprised when DOTA 2 ran without any issues. 

The gaming performance on the B580 was disappointingly low compared to its Windows counterpart. Windows performed anywhere from 20% better in Shadow of the Tomb Raider to 100% better in DOTA 2. This wasn’t entirely surprising given the state of the driver and the bugs we encountered in Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. Hopefully the performance will get better as the drivers mature. 

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with these results. So I also tried rerunning the B580 on Ubuntu 25.04 with the very same kernel that instantly recognized the 9070. More on these results coming up in the next article. 

Next Steps

Before having collected any performance results, I was already more satisfied with the experience of installing Intel or AMD graphics cards on Linux than NVIDIA. It was refreshing to not need to install graphics drivers, and in many ways the process of getting the AMD and Intel cards running on Linux was simpler than on Windows. Other aspects were frustrating however, such as the variability in the quality of the graphics drivers. In particular, the RX 9070 was completely unusable in Ubuntu 24.04, the RTX 5060 Ti required running a Bash script from NVIDIA’s website, and the B580 “works” with the major caveat that not all games will be playable. To be fair, newer hardware is not always supported on distros with an LTS release schedule since they don’t upgrade to the newest Linux kernel versions as frequently as other distros with rolling releases. That being said, as a new user who may or may not be aware of this, it would be extremely frustrating to have your brand new GPU not work. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you if this sent you running back to Windows altogether. 

So far, it seems that if you want to game on Linux, your best bet is to use slightly older hardware and to hold off on buying the newest GPUs right at launch. If you absolutely need to run the newest hardware on a Linux system, consider a rolling distribution such as Manjaro, OpenSuse Tumbleweed, or CachyOS to have access to the most up to date kernels and drivers as they are released. At the very least, maybe don’t use a 1.5 year old distribution like I did. Tune into the next article where I’ll dive into the results of the tests and provide a quantitative analysis, rather than my initial thoughts. 

As always, we'd love to hear any feedback about our testing and visualization. Feel free to visit our forum and let us know what you thought of this article. If you have ideas for Linux related things Labs could explore next, we'd love to hear them!

References

Image Credits:

Image of Holy Gabe Newell: https://wallpapercave.com/w/wp4544260

iCarly Linux Gaming Meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/o9mpbr/linux_desktop/

Master Oogway NVIDIA Meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/unlz89/finally_2022_will_be_the_year_of_the_linux_desktop/

Luke Skywalker GIF: https://tenor.com/view/luke-skywalker-every-word-wrong-gif-13200532

Frequently Cited Sources:

Steam Hardware Survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/

Ubuntu's Website: https://ubuntu.com/

Appendix

Appendix A

Appendix B