I like Linux a lot and it works absolutely flawlessly on my Deck.
That said, if you want to just play games and not constantly **** around with your computer, stick with Windows.
I've tried Linux on numerous systems and it just constantly devolves into messing around with settings, figuring out why something doesn't work or some game has awful performance or whatever. In 2025, I installed Linux on two different systems, my Thinkpad P1 Gen 4 with an i7-11850H, RTX A3000 and 32Gb of RAM. It was pretty good and in a vast majority of games,
I saw a performance uplift over Windows, but there was also some
weird fiddliness that I had to deal with on the regular in Linux. There was also the issue of Tempest Rising, where it ran great in 4k under Windows, but for whatever reason, in Linux, Linux refused to spin up my fans, so the game ran like trash because the laptop wouldn't cool itself.
About a month ago, I installed Debian on my Surface Pro and while it was mostly a lovely experience, everything working great, Linux, lacking proper driver support, has no idea how to properly throttle a CPU. Playing Darkest Dungeon 2 in Linux, the Surface Pro throttles down to 200Mhz and struggles to recover from that. Under windows, it throttles itself to a more acceptable 900Mhz to keep it under its heat threshold, which allows Darkest Dungeon 2 to run at an acceptable 30FPS, versus slideshow 2FPS in Linux, which also locks down the system since the processor is stuck at 200Mhz.
This is also not mentioning using it on a previous Thinkpad, a T460 with integrated graphics, where the driver support for my wifi card wasn't there. Where I could Steam/Moonlight things perfectly fine in Windows, on Linux it was an artifacting, slow mess.
And actually, come to think of it, I also installed Linux on a third and what was to potentially be a 4th PC this year, because I wanted to upgrade my kids PC's to it, since they don't officially support Windows 11. Unfortunately, this wasn't going to really work either because now they couldn't play Minecraft Bedrock together. I did install a mod with controller support for Java edition, but it came with its own separate microtransactions and store, which rubbed me the wrong way. Not that the devs shouldn't make money or whatever, but some third party, random mod asking for money just seems...sketchy. And this isn't counting the fiddliness of getting games to run correctly; I struggled to get a couple of games just to run properly in fullscreen and had to mess with Proton versions, which is ultimately something I don't want to do on my kids computers. I want them to be able to just download a game, hit play and go.
Then there's just the fact that I often don't want to mess with my system. I have limited time to game as is and it's annoying as F*** to have to sit there and tweak, tune and sort-out random little issues when I have half an hour to game and now messing with my computer is eating into that.
All of this said, I do want to install Linux on my all AMD desktop PC, because I've read that Linux can be quite a bit less fiddly on an AMD system and my experience with the Steam Deck bears that out. But I can't afford the time investment right now. My desktop is my main server and I don't have the motivation to go through and reinstall or look for alternative software for everything I need to do with my said server.
Then there's also the fact that trying to search for answers to your particular problem, you're on different forums with years old posts that either don't relate or is some grognard calling you an idiot because you don't know the basics of using Terminal, insulting the OP of a thread and never giving an actual answer. You try different solutions you find and some may work, but often many do not and you spend hours trying to find a solution, which you may figure out or may not. Though, with the advent of LLMs, I could see that being a huge boon to figuring things out, but I haven't tried that yet.
Linux is great if you have the time and motivation to troubleshoot it and constantly be mucking about with your PC. I do love it in theory, I love that it's open source, there's all kinds of different distros, it's free, it's controllable, it feels like it belongs to me and it reminds me of computing when I was a kid. But ultimately, Windows just works. It has some minor annoyances to configure when you first set it up, such as disabling Second Chance OOBE or making sure OneDrive is disabled so you actually have your Documents folder and such on your actual PC and not uploading to OneDrive. But once you configure those couple of things, Windows gets out of the way and just lets you use your PC; to quote Apple, "It Just Works." and I appreciate it for that.
Sorry for the screed. I just...I don't agree with the idea that Linux is the path forward right now. Again, I do like it, but it's far cry from what advocates claim it is. Someday, I hope to run it. Someday I hope the driver support is there, but it's just not right now. It's certainly better than where it's been in the past when I've tried it, but it's still not there.
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