Switching To Linux Just Got Way Easier…

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of Windows – or more specifically all the stuff Microsoft keeps doing to it. It has never been perfect, I mean 10 is still a complete mess, but at least it isn’t a mess that is a complete privacy nightmare with AI shoved so far down your throat you need a colonoscopy to remove it. So I went in search of something better, and I think I’ve found it. Bazzite is a Linux distro that makes especially gaming on it remarkably easy, and to truly get a feel for it, I’ve been doing my best to daily drive it for over a month. Here’s what I’ve found.

Let’s start at beginning, with installation. It installs like any other OS – although here’s where the pedantry you’ll find in the comments would like you to know that technically Bazzite isn’t actually a separate Linux distro, but a few tricks added to Fedora. Still, you can download an ISO, write it to a USB stick, and install it as you’d expect. On my Asus Zenbook Pro Duo that I installed it on I needed to go into the BIOS and change the storage setting to AHCI, rather than the Intel rapid storage thing, then the fresh M.2 I installed showed up as normal. 

When it comes to installing programs, well on the face of it, that couldn’t be simpler! Open Bazaar, the flatpack app store basically, and one click install a remarkable number of programs easily. Everything from Blender and OBS to ProtonPlus and Mission Center, all just one-click installs. Amazing. Unfortunately, if you want to install basically anything else… well that’s where the Linux ExperienceTM comes in. I wanted to do some programming on this – I’ll come back to that in a bit as I’ve actually made a pretty big commitment there – so I thought I’d start with VSCode, or maybe VSCodium for the de-Google’d version. So when I didn’t see it in the list on Bazaar, I automatically put my Windows brain back on and went to the VSCodium website to find a download. I downloaded the flatpack version, and it failed to install. Then I followed the command line instructions, and I got more errors. Great. I failed at the first hurdle, again. I happened to look a bit more carefully at Bazaar and facepalmed hard when I realised both VSCode and VSCodium WERE BOTH THERE. Great. Both installed with no problems. 

Installing Davinci Resolve was much more akin to the Windows experience – just download it from their website, unzip it, then run the installer. You might need to use terminal to do it with commands like sudo chmod +x to make the .run file executable, but Black Magic’s instructions are actually really good. Or, that would be the case, if Linux weren’t doing Linux things. You ACTUALLY need to use the “ujust install-resolve” command (after downloading the zip) and let THAT do the installing. I do know that I’ve just lost a bunch of people, and this feels like a good time to say that, yeah, you are going to use the terminal. Maybe for basic stuff you won’t – the package manager is great, and Steam is simply wonderful for making this stupidly easy to use – but if you need to do anything outside that, or you need to fix an OS level issue… You’d better work on your terminal skills. As someone who has been messing with Linux for years now, I have to say that using Bazzite does feel like a step change in the experience. Pretty much everything just works (™), and those one-click installs are just beautiful. Although… well the key words there were “pretty much everything”, because there was one thing that exemplified the old typical Linux ExperienceTM, the audio. This laptop, the Zenbook Pro Duo OLED, obviously has speakers built in, and a headphone jack. Unfortunately for me, neither work in Bazzite. Bluetooth audio works just fine, but neither the speakers, nor the headphone jack will output audio. From the get-go, even the built-in microphone was bricked! Naturally I started searching for a solution. My first thought was that I was missing a driver – it’s not uncommon on Windows that a bit of hardware doesn’t just work straight out the box, and you need to go to some website to download a driver for it, so I figured that must be the problem here. Wrong. Linux has its own drivers that the totally kind and helpful people on the internet say YOU MUST NOT TOUCH OR YOU’LL DIE! Ok, next. I worked out (after running a variety of terminal commands) that this laptop has a Realtek ALC294 audio codec chip, and apparently that’s a tough one for Linux to work with. I found forum posts talking about changing some settings, running alsamixer to see if some volume or gain is turned down. Nope. Ok, so the most commonly successful suggestion is using a tool called hdajackretask to change a pin selection. Great, I’ll just run that and.. Oh.. it’s not installed. Ok, well apparently it’s in the package “alsa-tools”, so I’ll just install those. Huh, that doesn’t exist. I’ve been told to run dnf repoquery provides hdajackretask to find which repo has it… oh, none have it. Awesome. It’s been discontinued. AMAZING. I finally stumbled on the suggestion to create a file called “alsa-base.conf” in /etc/modprobe.d/ and put this line in it. The French version of Ubuntu has a list of some options you can put – I figured asus-zenbook would be a good shout (it has the same codec too!) so we have to be in business now, right? NOPE! The mic works now at least, but the audio output is still dead. And that’s about where I gave up. If someone knows what to do about this, please do let me know either in the comments or on our Discord, but after a week of fighting this, I’m out. This sort of thing brings me right back to the sort of brutal frustration of not knowing enough to fix it, and not even knowing if it can be fixed, that has been slowly improved out of the Linux experience. I know the nuance of the conversation – this is more than like Realtek’s fault, not Linux, or Asus’ – but the fact is these speakers work without any effort on Windows, and they don’t on at least this version of Linux. That, still, sucks.

Of course that hasn’t put me off using Linux, or Bazzite, because it’s still a pretty great experience on the whole. There are a few other quirks, like how this is a dual touchscreen laptop, but Bazzite can only map the touch input to one display – so if I set it to the main display, touching the lower display moves the cursor around on the main display, while touching the main display works as expected – but that’s not the end of the world at least for me. For gaming though, man Valve has put in some serious work. Any game they list and Linux compatible just works – even Rainbow Six Siege installs everything and runs as you’d expect! Performance is pretty decent for a 3070 laptop chip and a 60 hertz OLED. There’s some stuttering, although that might actually be the mouse I’ve been using. I tried Dirt Rally 2.0 as well, and that’s excellent – it looks amazing on this super vibrant OLED as well – and even Trackmania works flawlessly. Compiling the Vulkan shaders took a minute, but after that it was smooth as butter. The only game that Steam listed as “works on Linux” but flat out doesn’t was Skate. That installs and even launches, but thanks to kernel level anti-cheat (seriously, who is cheating in skate??), it boots with this error message and that’s it. Game over. Anti-cheat is the bane of Linux gaming’s existence, especially being treated as a cheater by default. While there are plenty of games you absolutely can play just fine – even multiplayer ones – if games from Riot or EA are on your daily rota, well you’ll still need at least a dual boot of Windows in your life. That sucks, but as more people adopt Linux, more effort can be put into making games work not just through Proton, but natively. 

If you need to do professional things though… well that gets more complicated. Programming, especially web development, is obviously completely unchanged (in fact 45it’s better on Linux), but video editing? Well that’s complicated. Adobe’s suite is a no-go, and even Davinci Resolve – at least on this laptop anyway – is a mixed bag. Once you do get it installed, it does launch fine. But I had to restart it several times (and install the Studio version, luckily I already have a key for that) just to get my footage to show up. The audio still didn’t show up, and of course I’ve been having to use my Bluetooth headphones to actually hear anything. I’m sure you can get this to work – especially with an AMD GPU – but that’s not a viable option for me right now. Other creative work might also suffer a little, mostly thanks to the Adobe suite of apps not being available – you’re not only learning a new OS, but a bunch of new programs? That’s a tough sell. Blender is still Blender though.

I mentioned at the beginning that I made quite the commitment on the programming front here, and I have. I thought that the best way to properly immerse myself in Linux was to write software for it, and seeing as how I’ve been wanting to make especially the open source latency testing tool (OSRTT.com) multi-platform, I have STARTED (only started, there’s a hell of a long road to go) to make a Qt app for Linux. Right now all I’ve got it a button that lists serial ports to the terminal and increments a label, and a button that fails to run a terminal command, but I’m getting there. I’m learning a whole new framework here, and I’m very ill, so please do not expect anything any time soon. But I’m trying, and learning. I’m learning that you need to give read and write permissions to serial ports to make them work (you don’t on Windows), and that writing for Linux is a minefield because what might work on Ubuntu doesn’t work on Fedora. Nightmare. 

Honestly though, if you just want to give a new life to an old machine that is just going to do basic web browsing and office work, Linux is 100 percent ready to use. The base experience is genuinely better than Windows – assuming your hardware works out the box anyway – and that’s amazing. If you just game, well that’s a good 80 percent the way to a seamless experience already. Valve has done truly astonishing levels of work to make it that way, so truly hats off to them. Really, if you forget about anti-cheat, games just work – some even perform better! That’s a huge win. If you care about games that have anti-cheat though, you will need to keep Windows in your life, which sucks, but at least you now have the option to have that just be a dual-boot that is off most of the time. For pro stuff, unless you are programming, it might be rough. Your hardware config – and possibly even what Linux distro you use – is likely to be a deciding factor there, and unfortunately I don’t have many answers for you on that front. I can say that the programming experience is decent though! 

I think, for me anyway, trying to switch to Linux in what is now 2026 is both a totally viable option, and also a path to losing all your sanity amazingly quickly. The base experience is actually really polished and slick on Bazzite, and assuming you stick to the basics and use hardware that is well supported, you will never look back at Windows again. It is a measurably better, safer, more secure, and frankly cheaper experience, so yeah it feels like a no brainer. The problem I see is that that polished experience can create a false sense of security that means when you fall into one of the cracks, you realise it isn’t just a crack, it’s the Laurentian abyss, and you better be a surgeon with the command line to climb your way back out. I am a pretty technical person. I understand how these systems generally work, and I have a decade or two’s experience in not only using computers, but writing sometimes very low level software for them. I have some familiarity with the Linux command line, and yet I couldn’t fix my audio issue. God help anyone who isn’t as technically savvy as me if you run into an issue like that! That’s the crux of the Linux experience for me.

The issue with anti-cheat is, I think anyway, mostly a problem of capitalism. There isn’t currently enough demand for publishers to invest any time and effort into designing Linux-compatible anti-cheat solutions, although I can’t ignore the fact that that’s a chicken and egg problem. The more of us gamers install a Linux distro like Bazzite or cachyos, the more studios will be willing to invest in making their games available for Linux. And yeah, if that means dual-booting for a while, I’d consider that a worthwhile cost.

In short then, Linux is ready for the mainstream consumer, proving that consumer is willing to trade the convenience of ‘it just works’ for the freedom and privacy of ‘this computer is actually yours’. It can be a brilliant, smooth and blissfully private experience, with some occasional truly teeth-pulling experiences. Despite that, I think 2026 might actually be the year of the Linux desktop. Or, at least I hope it is.