cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/63423629

Background

I use Mac as my daily driver for my work and personal machines, but for gaming I use my Playstation 5 for online or supposedly AAA games (think Call of Duty or Helldivers 2) and I use my Steam Deck for more indie titles. I’ve got some Linux experience, primarily via my old Mac Mini running Proxmox with mostly Debian VMs and messing around briefly with NixOS.

I love our Steam Deck, but it does feel a little underpowered, the battery isn’t as strong as it once was and I don’t love the docking experience with the official dock.

My wife is really into Civilization and similar games and I’d love to setup a desktop connected to our TV to use with a keyboard and mouse on our LG CX. Although I’m tech savvy, I’m not great with knowing what hardware/software to get. It’s especially more complicated with the looming tariffs and trying to make sure I don’t overspend on something I don’t need.

Question

Looking for some guidance on hardware and software to setup for this living room gaming desktop. It’s only purpose is to play games, primarily from Steam and it should have hardware which would benefit speed and performance for the type of games I’m going to list. Obviously we want the graphics to be good, but I don’t need a beast RTX 5090.

What are some hardware and software recommendations in today’s financial climate for playing these games on Linux?

What other accessories would you recommend for couch based keyboard and mouse gaming?

Honestly the game I’m most eager to get into is Dwarf Fortress, but for my wife it’s having a smooth experience with Civ6 (she was playing the Switch version for far too long!)

Games

  • Civilization games
    • My wife loves 6 and I’m a fan of 5, but we do want to eventually try 7, hoping it’ll improve with DLC updates
  • Dwarf Fortress
  • Rimworld
  • Battletech
  • Into the Breach
  • Brotato
  • Vampire Survivors
  • Balatro
  • FTL
  • Caves of Qud
  • Persona 5 Royal (although I’m struggling to get into it, pushing through)
  • Blue Prince
  • ANIMAL WELL
  • Factorio
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Anno 1800
  • Project Zomboid

This is a partial list of some of our libraries and wishlists. As you can see, some of them are more graphically, memory and processor intensive, but a lot of them are low performance indies.

  • tal
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    2 days ago

    I mean, you’re going to be fine with any new x86 system pretty much no matter what you do. CPU performance just doesn’t vary all that much today, and I don’t think that any of these are particularly GPU-intensive.

    All of the 2D games are going to be CPU-bound, not GPU-bound.

  • J4g2F@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    We use Chimera OS for our living room pc. The pc just has some old stuff we had lying around after upgrades. (A i5 4 gen, AMD Rx 470 and 16 gb ram)

    My understanding is if you want steam big picture (or how it is called now) with the game scope compositing window manager. Just like on your steam deck. You want to stick with AMD gpu’s (Rx 400 series or higher). There is now some support for Nvidia gpu’s (rtx 2000 series or higher), but it’s not stable yet. On discord some people running chimera os have some success with Nvidia, but also some big problems. I don’t know how bazzite is going on with support for Nvidia. And also don’t follow it all the time for chimera os.

    So I recommend at least a AMD card for now.

    We have a 4k tv but obviously are playing at 1080p, if you want to play at 4k you of course need a better gpu. But for us playing 1080p on the couch is good enough. (But I’m looking for some good secondhand deals for a upgrade)