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 link to your build, that’s super helpful. The beauty of Linux is that I have some wiggle room as far as distro, as long as the save data is backed up, I can switch it up as long as it supports the hardware.
Yes, you have a lot more options for Linux distributions which in my opinion is a pro and a con. Honestly I would suggest that you stick to one distribution probably the one that works with your hardware the best (most annoying to troubleshoot). All distributions are going to have some issues and you'll need to prioritize what you need and stick to it. I'm saying this because I feel I wasted a lot of my time switching distributions rather than just working on trying to fix the issue or finding a workaround. Good luck and don't forget Linux is beautiful <3