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.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    2·
    17 hours ago

    I have a i9-9900K with a 2080ti and 32GB of RAM (I had to check because it’s so “old” I didn’t remember) and honestly, until I buy the ONE game that needs better specs, not just for ever so slightly better graphics but because it wouldn’t run properly without, I’m holding on to this rig.

    I don’t have AMD vs NVIDIA recommendation. I use both (as I also have a SteamDeck) and have no big problem with either, I just work and play, no worries. For CPU/RAM I don’t think it matters much, what does though is making sure the hardware is compatible, e.g. if you have a top of the line CPU with a low-end GPU or vice versa, you will have a bottleneck and won’t use one fully. So just be coherent with your purchase and again check what are the recommended spec for your favorite games.

    Regarding the distribution, I’m on Debian stable so if you are familiar with that and have no need for anything specific, I don’t recommend changing, stick to what you know.