Gaming Experience on Immutable Distros

I've been exclusively using Silverblue (well, Kinoite, which is the KDE version) as my main workstation OS for at least 8 months, and gaming on it is no different from other operating systems. Once you install Steam from Flathub, it all just works. The only difference is that you might need to give Steam permission to access your external drives if you want to add a Steam library on them. KDE Plasma lets you do it from the system settings app easily.

For generic Wine usage, I just use Lutris. Steam does allow you to add non-Steam games and run them through Proton, but IMO Lutris' interface is easier for doing more advanced Wine stuff without having to drop into a terminal. That's personal preference though.

As far as drivers, I didn't have trouble installing the Nvidia driver (I have a 1080 TI). I don't remember exactly what I did to install it system wide, since that was many months ago, but it was easy and well-documented IIRC.

What's more complicated is getting the driver to work in graphical apps launched from toolboxes. If you're doing development, or expect to build graphical software/games from source, you'll likely need to deal with this. Basically, you just need to install the driver again inside of the toolbox, and make sure it's the same version as what's installed on your base system. I have some scripts to automate this if you're interested, but it's not really that useful unless you're planning to use toolboxes a lot.

Overall, I'm very happy with Silverblue/Kinoite. The immutable base system gives me a lot of confidence on the long-term reliability of the system. Originally, I expected it to be a real blocker for most software, but the only thing I couldn't get working was TeamViewer (didn't try that hard tho tbh). I've even been able to get complex stuff to work like Unity, O3DE, Stable Diffusion webui, and a bunch of other AI-related stuff that is normally hard to install even on a regular system.

Fedora Kinoite: 9/10 -- highly recommend

I fully switched over to using Silverblue close to a year ago now, it's been great for my needs. I have AMD hardware so everything worked nicely out of the box.

There's some caveats to consider when switching to an immutable OS, especially if you're the kind of person who likes to make a lot of tweaks or (try) running very recent builds of certain packages. This will inherently be a bit less intuitive on an immutable system precisely because its entire premise is to not make many or any changes to the system bits -- though you can still do it if you want, of course.

There's some minor nuisances like hardware accelerated H.264 and H.265 video playback not being available out of the box for system-installed (as in, non-Flatpak) apps, but whether that's actually a real issue for you depends on your use-case. If it is, you can either switch over to using Flatpak apps (probably the recommended way), or layer the necessary packages (next-best thing).

Alternatively you could also consider using Universal Blue's container offerings, which has options for as close to vanilla Silverblue as possible but with some quality-of-life packages pre-installed, or ones with Nvidia's proprietary stuff pre-packaged, and more. Mind you, I don't have first-hand experience with Universal Blue's offerings, mostly as I deliberately stick with AMD hardware and like to keep my OS as close to vanilla Fedora as possible. Depending on what you're looking for, it might be recommended to try to stick as close to Fedora's offering too.

Ultimately whether switching to an immutable distro is the right choice for you is really up to what you do with your machine, and what you want to do. In my case it was absolutely worth the switch as I want my machines to just work. And I just love how Silverblue updates work (download new base image, reboot, done) and how it offers ease of mind and the very easy ability to revert to a previous version, should that ever be needed. I primarily consider my machines for work first, so need them to be reliable.

When I do play a game on one of my devices, they run great and I've basically never run into an issue with something not working because I'm running an immutable OS. Lutris is great for installing and managing non-Steam games, and the Steam Flatpak is fantastic. I just layered the steam-devices package so game controllerrs work as you'd expect.

Hope this helps!

Personally, I wouldn't recommend immutable distros, as I think they limit our freedoms far too much, not that the way the general stack is going doesn't do that already. Not debating that here, since it's a hot and controversial topic currently, at least in the segment of the linux using population that cares about this stuff and which picked linux for that. Imo, if we do this, we'll basically make of the OS one block, from bootloader, to kernel, to initramfs, to display manager and finally desktop, especially since I'm hearing whispers of attempts at removing the tty kernel rendering being done, which will force us into using a specific compositor, desktop and so on, so we'll be exactly like windows or mac or android, so we lost everything, and then what's the point of linux?
If you want to use immutable distros anyway, I don't recommend silverblue for gaming, but I do recommend you give ublue linux a try, it has many drivers included, even some udev rules.

I use Kinoite currently and at first I had some trouble finding out how to do certain things in rpm-ostree, when a lot of guides just mention how to do things with DNF. For example I wanted the mesa freeworld drivers, and a few other packages to get codecs working, and had some troubles but managed to figure it out.

With that, my system is essentially set up how I like it, I also have automatic updates for rpm-ostree, and since it only reflects on the next reboot it doesn't affect the current session. That's neat.

I also removed the rpm-ostree backend from Plasma Discover because it was showing as if there was an update but then Discover wouldn't display what the update was. Now I only have Discover for Flatpak apps, works great.

For gaming, Steam as a flatpak I think is the way to go on Kinoite. You avoid some issues you have have when updating the system. It happened to me once at least and so I switched to flatpak version. It works great honestly. And then Lutris from Flathub also seems to work fine, in my case at least.

Nvidia drivers shouldn't be an issue, you have to do some commands on the Terminal, but they're available in the RPM Fusion wiki if I recall correctly.

What I like the most is having the peace of mind of being able to boot to a previous working state if an update causes an issue, and it works out of the box. I could accomplish the same with OpenSUSE but I like Fedora more.

One issue I've run into with immutable Linux distros is getting the xone drivers for the Xbox wireless dongle to work. Not having that is a no go for me and gaming.