Gaming on Linux 2025
Wed Oct 08 2025
Some time ago, my fiancée took my laptop because she needed it for her studies; as a result, I was excited to have an opportunity to splurge on a new one. I had never owned a gaming laptop, so this situation seemed like a prime opportunity.
I'll spare you the details of me researching which one to pick, but I eventually arrived at the 2025 Asus Zephyrus G14. It soon arrived; I unpacked it and set it up, and now I have a gaming laptop.
To break it in, I decided to game write a blog post on it.
The end.
Well, not really. The laptop came with Windows, and I really wanted to install Linux on it. With my previous laptop that wasn't an option since it's shared and my fiancé needs to use proprietary Windows-exclusive accounting software. But now that I have my own laptop again, I'm free to pick any operating system.
I wouldn't call myself an advanced Linux user, nor am I a beginner. Something in the middle. On my desktop I use an arguably old-school (or rather, outdated) setup—Ubuntu with the i3 window manager. It's a lot of fun to use, lightweight, and fast.
I also game on this setup. The experience is fantastic. No special configuration needed. I just run Steam with the standard Proton builds. The last game I beat was Fallout 4. The game didn't crash a single time. Now I'm occasionally cruising through Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.
When I play non-Steam indie games my friends have made or when I try out game jam entries, I just run them through the default WINE prefix and don't even think about it. This is in stark contrast to how things used to be. I remember having to do all sorts of ungodly things with my computer to get Starcraft 2 running on my Arch Linux setup years ago.
With all this experience in mind, I was eager to nuke Windows off of the laptop. Thankfully, we're at a point where installing Linux on a laptop isn't a soul-crushing experience. I remember desperately trying to get WiFi to work on an older Acer laptop, configuring wpa-supplicant, all that.
Before the laptop arrived, I did check out the Zephyrus' laptop subreddit to see if there weren't any glaring issues with Linux. The biggest complaint was weird audio bugs with the speakers being at max volume as well as the volume buttons not responding properly. That wasn't a deal breaker for me since volume control still worked via the terminal. And this laptop came out recently, so those issues should be fixed soon.
I also knew that I wasn't entirely on my own, as I had come across asus-linux.org. It also influenced me to get an Asus laptop. It had guides for Arch Linux and Fedora, which gave me confidence.
So, I found a weekend where I and my SO didn't have any real plans. I got cozy and flashed CachyOS to a USB stick, pretty excited.
For starters, the guide on asus-linux.org told me to turn on "hybrid mode" before I begin with the installation. Good start. The what? Turns out, "hybrid mode" in this context means that both of the laptop's GPUs are active. Then it's up to the OS to decide which one to use. Gaming laptops are cool!
Feeling empowered, already having learned something, I rebooted into the CachyOS live environment. It greeted me with tiny letters, not having set the display scale correctly. I also confirmed the volume control bug I mentioned before, but it's not like I needed audio for the installation. I fixed the display scale, entered WiFi credentials into the network applet, and dove into the installation wizard.
The process was just as I expected. It asks you the usual questions—how to use your disk, what the created user should be, etc. I loved that there's such a large choice of desktop environments and window managers. Obviously I picked i3wm to match my desktop. The install went smoothly.
After rebooting I was greeted with a session manager I hadn't seen before, called Ly. It had an ncurses-like terminal interface, and I love software which makes me feel live a 1337 hacker. Whenever I'm reinstalling my desktop, that's what I'm going to use there as well. I submitted my credentials. The screen flickered, and Ly's login form showed up again. X11 had crashed.
At that point it didn't occur to me that "hybrid graphics" and Xorg might be a millenium apart technologically.
Ly allowed me to log in straight to the shell. On login, by default CachyOS outputs a fastfetch screen to the terminal. In case you don't know, fastfetch is a utility that prints out a nice-looking system summary—processor, RAM, GPU info, etc. I think its primary purpose is flexing on r/unixporn, but for me it worked as a diagnostics tool since it confirmed that the OS detects all hardware.
I didn't want to give up on i3 right away. I tried to google my way through it but gave up after some time. The world had moved on to Wayland and left Xorg behind. I was fine with that.
Cue my first reinstall. I didn't want to give up on i3, so I figured I could try Sway. I had never used it, but I always kept it in mind as my i3 replacement once I inevitably got an AMD GPU. The laptop does have an Nvidia GPU, but I wanted to try anyway. In case you don't know why the video adapter manufacturer matters, this post by the original author of Sway will certainly clarify it.
So I go through all the reinstallation steps, get to Ly, and enter my credentials. I see a flash of black. And we're back in Ly. Ugh. Not that I expected it to work right away.
The sway logs tell me that I have to run it with the --unsupported-gpu argument. I guess it's obvious. It's a pleasant surprise to learn that editing Ly's entries is very easy—just a bunch of .desktop files in a directory. A part of me speculates that there's probably a way to make Sway run on the integrated GPU, ignoring the dedicated one. That's not a solution, though, as eventually I'll need to use the dedicated GPU for the very thing you're supposed to do on a gaming laptop, i.e., gaming.
The --unsupported-gpu argument doesn't work. I google some more resources and try some cryptic environment variables, but I don't get it to run. I admit defeat faster than I did with i3wm. It's late evening by now.
I've given up on i3. At this point I just want to see a desktop. Second reinstall. I'm picking Gnome this time. It's mainstream, it's safe. I'm coping that I'll rarely do work on this machine and it's strictly for gaming, so it doesn't actually matter what drives the desktop. I'll install tmux if I have to work.
The installation completes. This time it's not Ly that asks for my password, but a full graphical screen. I do notice that it's not just a screen. It's a screen that showed up in the native resolution, correct scale, and refresh rate. I enter my password, press Enter, and it's not a flash of black, but the intro screen of Gnome that appears.
At this point it's hard to believe that I've gotten here. It feels hella good finally having a functioning operating system from the get-go.
I eagerly do the rest of the setup. I install the Asus-specific utilities like "asusctl" for general laptop preferences like keyboard lighting and "supergfxctl" for switching between the internal and external graphics cards. They work perfectly out of the box.
It was already late, so I queue Cyberpunk 2077 to install and go to bed.
I should have checked the default power settings. On the next morning I discovered that soon after I had left the laptop on its own, it had also gone to the proverbial bed and gone into a suspended state. I resumed the download and went to do some errands.
The download finished, and I excitedly started the game only to discover that it went at the pace of a slideshow. I figured that I just have to force it to use the dedicated GPU. So I used supergfxctl to switch. The laptop took quite a while to boot into the desktop; nevertheless, I launched the game, and … black screen. The sound did play, making me feel like the device is mocking me for the failing of my efforts.
I thought maybe that's a one-off. I can just play CP2077 on my desktop computer, no big deal. I'll just try something else.
The rest of my Sunday was spent installing random games. I didn't get a single one to run through the external GPU. I'm fairly sure I tried both the hybrid mode and the exclusive mode and considered more esoteric methods like sacrificing an animal in the name of a random deity. The internal GPU ran stuff like a champ, though!
I remembered that there's a Fedora guide on asus-linux.org. At the time it was listed as the recommended OS of choice. Ironically, on the same evening, I noticed that they changed it to "not recommended," with Arch Linux being the recommendation now.
I was exhausted and apathetic because I certainly didn't expect this to take so long. Certainly, "skill issues" were at play, but I was sure this would be simpler.
Reinstall number three. I flashed the Fedora Workstation ISO onto a USB stick. As expected from a mainstream, corporately backed Linux distribution, the installation process was quick and straightforward, and in not too long I was back in Gnome. I installed the Nvidia drivers and the Asus tools, as well as Steam. The first thing I tried was booting into the dedicated GPU mode, which didn't even get me to the LUKS decryption screen. I remember feeling totally unfazed by this experience, as there was no room for disappointment anymore.
Many of you will be upset at the next sentence. It was only now that I learned about being able to force a program to run through the dedicated GPU. Of course it's done by using some classic Linux hocus pocus—random environment variables. So, I forced hybrid mode through the BIOS, just so I'm able to boot into the OS again, installed a game, set its Steam launch parameters, and, holy shit, it runs. Everything I try runs. I have a Linux gaming laptop.
Maybe knowing it sooner would have saved me from a reinstall. Less random guessing and more googling next time? I would be lying if I said that I'm not curious to try CachyOS again.
I spent the rest of Sunday setting up my new and shiny environment, set the GPU mode to "integrated" to save my battery, and went to bed. On Monday I wrote a good chunk of this post on this very laptop, which was originally going to be an installation guide, but since I hit a roadblock at multiple steps of the way in an almost comical fashion, It took the shape of a blog post instead. I save the draft, back it up, and head to bed.
Tuesday evening. I'm ready to finish the post. Just a couple paragraphs left to write. I'm slightly embarrassed to publish it because it's a story of failure in problem-solving. At the same time I did get to my goal. I have a Linux gaming laptop now.
I boot up the laptop and enter my password at the LUKS decryption prompt. Fedora starts loading, and a tiny message appears above the Fedora logo.
"Nvidia kernel module missing, falling back to nouveau."