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.
Thanks for the reply!
No strict preferences on distro, cpu/gpu manufacturer, open to suggestions. Although I’ve heard AMD is best with Linux due to the NVIDIA drivers and I’m hearing good things about Bazzite. I’d like to avoid excessive tinkering and configuration, hence why I’m ruling out NixOS for this build. As for budget and what I said in another reply, I’m going to be irritating and say “I don’t really know”, I’d like to avoid spending $2-3k on something to play Indies. But I’m also ok with under $2k or even less for something that is fairly future proof.
Most of my gamer friends are not PC players (console mostly), but I’m definitely open to looking into the used market.
Am I right in thinking CPU/RAM are more critical for games like Civ or Dwarf Fortress? More simulation than graphics intensive tasks?
One thing that will be the biggest general qol for your new build is likely to get a M.2 NVMe for your games and OS
Civ 6 is pretty flexible and dwarf fortress will run on a potato, basically anything remotely in the gaming market will play them fine. Civ 7 is more intense, but being turn based cpu tends not to be the bottleneck
Just saw your edit!
So if Civ7 is a benchmark for what I want to eventually play, would it be sensible to go with…
Those are both solid pieces of hardware. However, I would suggest getting a Ryzen 5600 for a notable per-core CPU buff over the 3600x, which should help quite a bit with games like Civ’s AI turn time. And since that CPU, Motherboard socket isn’t latest-gen either, you can buy used for cheap still.
Ryzen 3600x vs Ryzen 5600.
On a slightly different note: The 7k series Ryzen CPUs get you on the latest slot, AM5. This will get you future upgradability if you want it, but it will also come with higher costs as AM5 is the newest socket, so people aren’t unloading them onto the used market in quantity. Such cost considerations are best determined by you. Both are a solid choice though.
For the GPU, I think the Radeon 6600 is a good choice. Radeon stuff works better in linux and that particular one is plenty strong for what you listed.
I highly, highly recommend PassMark’s benchmarks for comparing hardware. They are the first place I look to get relative numbers. And from there I determine what I need/want.
Single-thread CPU chart
GPU Chart