Hi Reddit,

I’m planning to set up GPU passthrough on my Fedora 42 system to run Windows-only games like League of Legends and Rust, which require anti-cheat support.

My setup:

• CPU: Ryzen 7 5700X3D
• GPU: AMD RX 6950 XT
• Motherboard: B450M Steel Legend
• Only one GPU available (so I’ll be passing through the single GPU to the VM)

I’ve searched for tutorials but feel a bit overwhelmed by the jargon and steps involved, especially since I don’t have much experience with virtualization or passthrough. I understand this will be a challenging setup, and I’m ready to invest the time, but I want to make sure I don’t miss any crucial details.

I’d appreciate any step-by-step guides, advice, or pointers to community resources that can help me avoid common pitfalls.

Thanks!

EDIT: looks like I'm gonna have to dual boot 😭

My son has just bought small form factor PC with a separate Graphics box attached via oculink cable...

BOSGAME M4 Plus Gaming Mini PC Ryzen 9 7940HS (8C/16T,Max 5.2GHz), 32GB DDR5 1TB NVMe SSD

BOSGAME eGPU GVP7600 External Graphics Card Docking Station AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT, Oculink Port
we have just set it up.

Comes with Windows 11 pro, we will dual boot using the second Nvme slot using Garuda Dr460nized Gaming iso. The External Graphics Card comes with an extra M.2 slot which we intend to put in a 4TB NVMe SSD to store the games. (couldn't see the drive until we formatted it with exFAT)

Yesterday I discovered Bazzite Linux and wondered if this would a better option in this setup. I have heard Garuda can be a bit unstable. My son has had to reinstall it a couple of times in past couple of years. I myself have only ever used Debian and Arch based distros, e.g. Debian, Mint, Manjaro. I understand Bazzite is based on Fedora but I don't think this would be a big learning curve for me?

any feedback would be appreciated. thanks.

Hello penguin gamers!

I have been exclusively on Linux for around 4 years now and it has been amazing, the freedom is amazing and loved all the tiny tinkering i have done with it. I have experineced some hiccups; biggest ones being peripheral support (some games not recognizing my wheel or joystick correctly), modding capabilities (can go to greater lengths on windoodoo), and some odd crashing in coupe games. Couple major things i swtiched to Linux for was privacy and freedom. Now that i have stumbled upon software that allows me to take those back on windings too i'm considering to go back for less-hazzle-with-niche-stuff experience.

So i ask you guys what could i be missing if i go back to the soulless windongs? There is a package manager and wins*xtoys or whatever it's called for my needs of customization and all apps i use have windork versions etc.

Hey guys, we’re going straight forward and here are the positive things first and then the negative(the reason I was going back to win11 as a gamer)

My rig: RX 9070 XT R5 7600x 32gig of RAM 6000mhz

Positive:

Performance: The first time in my life since Darktide came out I had the smoothest experience. I played darktide on windows back then with a 5700xt, 6700xt, 7800xt and now with the 9070xt. On windows it was through and through a bad experience. Bad frametime, dropping randomly from 120 fps to 30 fps and all that shit on windows. On CachyOS it worked, no drops, very good frametime, constant 120 fps(capped). All games I played were running way smoother on Linux then on win11 and not only this, I didn’t got a single hiccup.

Workspace was super smooth, smoother than any winDOWS I EVER HAD.

Now we come to the reasons why I still can’t do the change.

Negative:

Sound: I have a steelseries arctic nova pro and it was bad, on win11 it worked out of the box with its surround-sound. On cachyOS only stereo and mono for mic, I searched AUR for a solution, never found one in 8 hours and the station from my headset didn’t worked either. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care if I can setup my mouse and keyboard, but I play a lot of hunt showdown and I need the good sound quality. Hunt showdown looked way better on Linux and worked smoother with 10-20 fps more on same settings, but I prefer the better sound over fps, over all. I found a package in AUR but it was outdated and I never got it to work, sadly. Pipewire was very bad to setup, so I gave up.

I wished I could make the switch and I will do if there will be a package to fix my headset.

Thanks for hearing me out, hope you will have a nice weekend

Edit: wanted to change the title to „Linux is bad for me and here is why“

I would like to ask a few questions about running Linux for gaming/regular desktop. I was thinking of using Bazzite, but would like to hear feedback on that. Another thing is how the whole "getting a game to work" works. I was on ProtonDB and I see games sometimes require different versions of ProtonDB and was wondering if it gets tedious? Like if im playing 2 games interchangeably, do I need to switch Proton versions everytime or is it a one time thing for that game? Let's say Portal 2 (Native) and God of War (Gold). Last thing is how well (if even) Nvidia is supported. As in its overlay and dlss.

Thank you. Any additional notes is appreciated or things I missed but would be a concern.

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to share that Umamusume: Pretty Derby officially launched on Steam in June 2025 with full Linux support through Proton. It's even Steam Deck Playable verified!

I've written a comprehensive guide covering:
- Steam + Proton setup (works out of the box with 9.0-4)
- Alternative methods (BlueStacks, MuMu Player)
- Performance optimization tips
- Troubleshooting common issues

The anti-cheat (CrackProof) is now Linux-compatible, so no more workarounds needed. Performance is excellent and installation is straightforward.

For anyone interested in trying this popular anime horse racing game, here's the full guide:
https://gamertagzero.com/how-to-play-umamusume-pretty-derby-linux-2025/

Has anyone else tried it yet? Would love to hear about your experiences!

Hi all!

I recently bought a GPD Win2 out of curiosity (Win 2, not Win MAX 2. This has a relatively old Intel chip specifically an m3-7y30).

I installed Linux on it, (since I use it anyway), and was somewhat surprised about the extremely poor game compatibility. (more on this further). Bazzite didn't want to install for some reason, I prefer Mint or Ubuntu anyway, but running or not running Wayland made no difference whatsoever. (Which makes sense tbf).

The graphics processor in this chip is an HD 615 which is "old" and "entry level", but according to these specs has pretty decent 3d performance https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-615.174029.0.html . What I'm saying is that it is not a display adapter. It has DX12 and Vulcan support.

And yet, almost any game I tried, on any runner straight up crashes on startup. (Cursed to golf, Horizon chase turbo, Xpand Rally Xtreme, Flatout Ultimate carnage, Crazy taxi, Call of Juarez Gunslinger). I'm convinced all of these games would run on Windows. I managed to get a handful of games to run, (Crash time III, Slay the Spire, the original Flatout through Heroic)

I installed Wine, the i386 build flag is enabled, I messed around with different Wine versions, and Proton builds (The latter of which did yield some result, Crash time and WatchDogs managed to at least launch (and run alright-ish on proton 9)

However all unity games crash with a Wine Access violation such as this:

Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000010 in wow64 32-bit code (0x75a7cfd8).

I have the full dump, but honestly it seems rather low level, and pretty general so I doubt anyone would be able to look at it and present a solution, Still if you need it I can publish it.

This isn't the end of the world, I bought it more as a UMPC, but it has a gamepad built in, and it would be fun to play games on it, but more importantly I am a bit dumbfounded on the 'why'. I had an old Latitude 5470 which had the HD 530 Intel graphics (which I am fairly sure is basically no different architecturally), and I don't remember games refusing to even launch.

I searched a bunch on google, and came up short. Is there something I don't know? Are there some fixes for HD graphics? If this is as good as it is gonna get, can someone explain why? Basically please help my hyperfixation on this issue, I need to move forward with my life.

Thank you.

i have a acer nitro 5 AN517-54 (Laptop) with this specification, but I can find a way to increase the fan speed, someone can help me?

https://preview.redd.it/5se08rihw5ff1.png?width=740&format=png&auto=webp&s=4bd10b18cebec15fd5af45aca812c7f623beb55b

I just ran Skyrim via Steam and where the SteamLibrary is where I installed it, there is a compatdata pfx for each installed game separately. That can't be right. I install a certain WINE/Proton version for Steam, tell it to use it for all games, but surely it cannot be right (because huge storage space need) that it installs many hundreds of MB of that for each installed Steam game. I had to patch it with xact to have vocal audio in the game and had to do it into that, not some system-wide WINE.

Can you clear up my beginner confusion?

I use Debian 11 (bullseye), using a laptop with ChromeOS (I didn't think first before buying, oops) and I will respond with any required info if needed. I am not using Proton.

My system is a i7 4500u that got both the integrated intel gpu and another integrated gpu which is a radeon HD 8600M(which seems to be the main one for apps and games), i have recently installed Linux and was able to enjoy a great fps boost in roblox with sober, however the only thing i cant fucking run for my life are Proton games.

Currently, the only games(that i have interest and tried to run in the Linux system) are bloons td 6 and Dead by daylight, which both seems to need directx11, i also tried vampire survivors, which worked without me having to do anything at all, so thats great.

Yes, i have tried using most Proton versions, from GE, experimental, 10, 9, 5, 3, Yes, i tried to enable wine3d in all of them, no, it didnt work, dbd opens the anticheat but doesnt do anything after in most Proton versions, or it just show a message talking about directx, bloons is also the same but without the EAC of course.

I am aware that Proton needs vulkan which might not support completly or even half for old gpus, or something like that im not sure, but since Linux seems to have billions of workarounds, i come here asking for it, also if it would be able to stretch res that would be great, in case i needed to increase my fps.

I currently use ZorinOS with Xorg, in case someone asks.

Well, I know that every day on this forum there is someone asking this. Which distro do I choose for games? I've recently been looking to move away from Windows and I'm looking at every tool I use on Windows to see if it runs on Linux and now it's time for games. I play light and simple games like Celeste, Cuphead, Undertale and Hollow Knight. I know there are tools like Wine and ProtonDB. But I worry about gaming performance, whether the system can handle it. I know this depends more on the hardware, but a fear still comes to my mind that these games won't run well or won't run properly on Linux. I'm between ubuntu, fedora and arch for me to use, and I know there are distros focused on this like nobara, bazzite, cachy os, garuda, anyway... tell me your opinions please!! Furthermore, there is the issue of game emulation that I am curious about. But my biggest concern is the games in my Steam library.