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.

  • mlody@szmer.infoEnglish
    31·
    8 hours ago

    Certainly the best choice for processor and graphics card will be AMD. I would certainly advise you to avoid Nvidia, as it is very poorly supported on Linux, and it is even worth paying extra for AMD if you use a system other than Windows.

    • gradual@lemmings.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Nvidia user here. The criticism of Nvidia support on Linux is always blown way out of proportion by AMD fanboys.

      The only issue I ever have is needing to prepend prime-run to each application I want to launch with the dedicated GPU.

      I’ve had significantly worse problems with AMD drivers, so much so that it really opened my eyes to how stable things were on the green team.

      I’m not saying you should get one over the other, but you shouldn’t let fanboys dictate your decision. They will try to do so without admitting they’re fanboys, so we have admit it for them.