What kind of graphics card are you using and have you run into many issues for multi display and/or high refresh rates (assuming you're running this)?

I'm so close to dumping windows and my final concern is gpu and multi monitor support. I only ever run linux on servers or VMs, so no real experience on bare metal.

Not the person you asked, but I run Kubuntu with an RTX 4080 and a 4K 144hz display and every single thing works out of the box. Not every game I want to play works with Proton, but close. Gaming performance vs Windows has been indistinguishable, and it boots up much faster. My Windows drive sits at a half-loaded desktop with no icons for like a minute... No idea why.

Dual monitors will work well if they're similar, but I wouldn't mix hi-dpi with low-dpi or different refresh rates. I've heard most of that doesn't work or is poorly supported.

I am on an ancient 1080 ti but that still gets the job done on the games I want to play (Total War series, RDR2 and some indie games).

About high refresh rate games: I have gamed on 144hz/120hz (one gaming monitor and another OLED TV) but I prefer to lower it so I can increase quality of graphics.

Multi monitor I can't say I have much experience with them connected at the same time but I have used the OLED+Gaming monitor few times but I can't say I do it often.

What I do very often is to leave the machine running and use RDP/Steam client to connect to it and game/work.

Linux support, and Ubuntu and Gnome for that matter, improved leaps and bounds since last LTS.

I've been looking more and more at this since I got a Steam Deck and found surprisingly good compatibility on almost every game. If Steam OS was made available for your run-of-the-mill gaming rig I'd install it in a heartbeat and give it an earnest test run.

That said, there is still a latent unease from my last misadventure with a Linux gaming PC from 2017, which ended in a LOT of restarting into Windows whenever the guys wanted to play a game I couldn't get working

I haven't tried it yet but: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

My only speedbump at this point is non-steam games, specifically in my case overwatch2 and diablo4. Can I run the battlenet launcher and it's games on steam os .. can i do it and not be banned by their 'anti cheat' spyware?

I saw that page right after I made the comment and googled it, but it seemed a little light on details and I was suspicious that it was the old Steam Machines distro as opposed to the frankly quite pleasant distro on the Steam Deck.

EDIT: Yep [1], it looks like that page is for the old SteamOS

[1] https://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/README.txt

Try Bottles (use bottles.com).. I smashed through the Diablo 4 Beta on VanillaOS and Bottles and can also confirm that Overwatch, Hearthstone, StarCraft and Diablo 3 works. The scaling / DPI for the BattleNet client is a little small on my 4K monitor, but other than that, it works well.

> This is all to say that my main gaming rig runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Gnome, heavily tweaked, to look and behave like MacOS and.... Its a dream.

Would you mind sharing your setup? I would absolutely love to get something like this going on my Linux boxes.