Linux Gaming Is Almost Ready for the Mainstream — Here's Exactly Where It Still Falls Apart

Anti-Cheat Is Still the Undefeated Final Boss

For developers and technically-minded users, missing Microsoft Teams is annoying. For gamers, the wall is higher and made of something harder. The conversation on the WAN Show turned blunt when they got to gaming compatibility. Linus described the social cost directly: "You're going to hit the exact same thing I did at the LAN — there's seven people waiting in a lobby for me, and I can't run this game because of anti-cheat." He framed it with uncomfortable precision. A friend group that would otherwise be patient with your operating system preferences eventually stops inviting you — not out of malice, but because coordinating around one person's compatibility issues is friction that adds up. "It might happen slowly," Linus said. "But it does happen." The culprits are well-known: Riot's Vanguard, Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat in kernel-bypass mode, and BattlEye configurations that haven't enabled their Proton compatibility option [2]. The Linux kernel-level access model — which prioritizes security by design — is incompatible with anti-cheat systems that need deep OS hooks to work. Some developers have enabled Proton support (Elden Ring, Deep Rock Galactic), but competitive multiplayer titles — the games most people want to play with their friends — are still overwhelmingly Windows-first [2][3]. This is not a solvable problem in a software update. It requires game studios to care enough to add Linux support, and in 2026, most still don't.

I'm going to hit a hard wall where it's an anti-cheat thing, and I just can't run it on this system, and I'm going to go back to Windows.

— Riley Paddock, LMG, WAN Show (Feb 27, 2026) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UGVk9ST8xw

The Community Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

There's a second wall that doesn't get enough attention: the Linux community's habit of eating its own newcomers. Riley brought this up unprompted, and it resonated. She described looking up how to install Steam on Arch — a simple, practical question — and finding a Reddit thread where instead of a simple answer, the original poster got a "seven-paragraph thing about how you're a freaking idiot and you should never touch Arch and you should probably go back to Windows." Linus suggested that a subset of Linux users genuinely don't want mainstream adoption to happen, because the identity of Linux being "not for everyone" is part of the appeal. Riley was more charitable — she thinks most of the gatekeeping is just impatience from people who forget what it was like to be new. Either way, the effect is the same. A curious Windows user tries Linux, hits a rough edge, searches for help, gets treated like a burden, and goes back to what works. This matters for the technology industry because Linux desktop adoption is a real proxy for open-source health at the application layer [3]. If developers don't use Linux daily, they don't test on Linux, they don't report Linux bugs, and they don't lobby their studios or employers to support it. The adoption funnel leaks at every stage — and the community is one of the valves.

What's the actual state of play in 2026? If you're a developer who uses VSCode, Git, Docker, a browser, and Slack or Discord — Linux is ready for you right now. The package managers are better than they've ever been. Cosmic and the broader Wayland ecosystem have closed most of the gap on visual polish. Tooling that used to require workarounds is now first-class. If you're a gamer who plays competitive multiplayer titles — Valorant, League of Legends, Call of Duty, most battle royales — Linux is not ready, and the barrier isn't technical; it's political [2]. It's the decision of a studio or anti-cheat vendor not to support a platform they see as too small to matter. The honest truth is that both of these things can be true at the same time, and the conversation benefits from naming that distinction. Riley's situation at LMG is the most realistic test of Linux we've seen from a major tech channel: not a controlled demo, not a cherry-picked workflow, but an actual daily-driver trial across real corporate and gaming use cases. Her running verdict — "I haven't run into anything that would make me run back to Windows yet" — is probably the most honest endorsement Linux has gotten from a mainstream platform. The caveat is just as honest: "I expect I'm going to hit a hard wall." Watch for when that wall appears. It'll be a more useful data point than any benchmark.

Credit: This article draws from the Linus Tech Tips WAN Show (February 27, 2026), hosted by Linus Sebastian and Riley Paddock. The WAN Show is a weekly live stream covering tech news, industry commentary, and LMG internal projects. You can watch the full episode at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UGVk9ST8xw