Linux

This is the story of how I have ended up on Linux for a large amount of my computer use, and all of my gaming. It’s a personal story, but I do genuinely believe that the carrot of really great gaming compatibility on Linux in 2025, along with the ever larger sticks that large tech companies are wielding against their users is fomenting an environment that makes this kind of change attractive. This is not a “How To”, this is a story.

I’ve only ever owned MacBooks as personal computers. My first was the aluminium unibody MacBook in 2008, followed by a 13” retina MacBook Pro in 2013, and an M3 Pro 14” MacBook Pro that I bought in 2023. Interspersed between that, I’ve had a collection of work computers, all of which have been Macs. I know the operating system really well at this point. I like it. I like my collection of indie apps. However, a need for digital sovereignty has been growing within me in the last couple of years, and there is one real area that macOS doesn’t excel in as a general purpose computing platform: games.

I’ve been a lifelong PlayStation kid. I’ve owned (or had a parent who owned) every single PlayStation iteration. I was never on the bleeding edge, I loved the slim versions. The ones that came out a couple of years after the mainline release, and packed the same performance into a much smaller frame. I took my PS2 slim around with me everywhere. I moved my PS4 slim across the world. Then I bought the PS5 slim.

Have you seen the size of that thing? Moreover, a pretty serious knock to my wallet for a single purpose toy.

Enough was enough. As I began my third international move, I resolved to sell my PlayStation 5 Slim (which I could not reasonably fit in a suitcase) and not repurchase it. A huge factor in this decision was that Sony makes it impossible to move an account to a new region. I have games on my British PSN account, and I have games on my Australian one. To continue using this platform, I would need to create a third account, a Canadian one, to be able to continue purchasing things. I have been unable for years to play online, because I cannot attach a working card to my British account. So I’m losing those games. At some point, you just have to accept that you’re losing access to content that you are supposed to own, because the gatekeepers are so actively hostile to their users. You’ve got to make a principled stand some time.

So what now?

A custom gaming PC. I built a PC! Just for games! It’s amazing, I can play the original Witcher games, and I can play the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I can play just a slew of other titles that were previously inaccessible to me. It’s been a cornucopia of PC-exclusive games for me to play. The fun doesn’t stop there, either. It seems like Sony recently started publishing their PlayStation exclusives onto Steam. I’ve been able to set up PCSX2 and have several very fun strolls down memory lane as I play Sly Cooper or Gran Turismo 3 (still the best one).

It works great. It’s perfect and I love it and it’s small and cool and fast and cute and I learned a lot about computers while I made it. It worked great. Except for one thing: I installed Windows on it. I had to! I wanted to play those PC exclusives, and that’s the way you play them. I accounted for that. I did not account for how hateful Windows is.

Windows 11 is truly horrendous. I couldn’t uninstall any of the crapware it came bundled with. Or rather I could, but they came back with every update, no matter how minor. I think I disabled all of the flags to show me ads on my desktop, on my lock screen, in my start menu, but I really had to hunt. I initially installed Windows without signing into a Microsoft account. That worked perfectly until I signed into Minecraft and it took my entire computer with it. Perhaps I’m the problem. Perhaps I’m holding it wrong. But at every turn, it felt like the operating system was fighting me, like it wasn’t for me.

At the same time, I was consistently hearing the same thing from a number of different sources:

Try Linux!

So I tried Linux. And everything just worked. Thanks to the Steam Deck, you can play most games just fine on Linux. So I installed Fedora 42 KDE on my second drive and I copied everything over and would you believe that it all worked perfectly? Every single game runs just as well as it did on Windows. I’m truly stunned.

To jump back into the real world for just a second, there are two caveats that I feel the need to point out:

• I don’t play any competitive multiplayer games. I suck. Not for any other reason, but it means that I don’t have to worry about kernel level anticheat and things like that. If you suck less, or care less about sucking, this will potentially be an issue for you.
• There is one issue that I’ve found in Timberborn: I use a Logitech MX Master 3S, and had configured the back/forward buttons to rotate the camera, and my thumb scroller to raise and lower the camera. In Linux, under Proton, Timberborn interprets these mouse buttons as the same. My operating system distinguishes them perfectly, and so did Windows. I’ve tried fiddling with Steam input settings, and I truly have no idea what’s going on or what levers I can pull. My hope is that this bug is obsoleted by Timberborn someday supporting the standard “move around in 3d by holding the middle button down”.

This probably isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone who has read even one other article on my blog, but gaming is not all I do on a computer. One of the appeals of building a PC was that I would have a general purpose workstation: something I could use to develop on, something I could use to develop things that I couldn’t develop on a Mac! It turns out that Linux does everything I want to do in this arena better than Windows as well, all without making me curse technology and everything it has wrought.

So I use Linux now. Not full time, because I have my MacBook, but damn close to it for everything I sit at a desk for. For this to work out as splendidly as it did, a few things had to line up for me:

• I have been growing increasingly frustrated and angry at the toll that large tech platforms are taking on my life, and the lives of the people around me.
• I am similarly increasingly keen to avoid the privately-owned algorithms that govern so many of our digital experiences.
• Linux is in a place where it is viable to use it to do all the things I want to do on a computer.
• I had computing hardware that supports Linux well! I’ve run Linux before, and it’s especially tricky now in the wake of Apple Silicon, but using Linux on Macs has always been Linux on hard mode.

I will have a lot more to say in the future about all three of those points, because I have projects underway to reclaim control over my digital presence, to be more deliberate about how I engage with computers, and all of the exciting things I can do now that I have a computer that just runs Linux things with minimal hassle.

On that last part, I’m truly off to the races now. I’m back into tiling window managers, I’ve disabled graphical logins, and I’m charting a course that moves me away from Fedora and onto something where I have even more control over my platform. Right now, I’m evaluating Gentoo. You can expect to see more edits to my dotfiles as I continue on this journey.

It is such a joy to be excited about computers again. It is such a surprise to find myself wanting to play, explore, and experiment. There is utter delight here for me, and I am so grateful that these initiatives exist.