I'm relatively new to Linux and have been experimenting with Ubuntu 24.04 on several systems for the past four or five months. I now have three machines running it: a gaming PC used almost exclusively for Steam, a laptop for normal computer tasks, and my six-year-old daughter's desktop, which she mainly uses for Steam games, YouTube, and a simple drawing app.
I built the systems, installed Ubuntu and Steam, added the games we play, and otherwise made very few changes. Despite that, the systems seem to develop new problems constantly. A game may work one evening and then fail to launch the next day, require a different Proton version, or stop detecting a controller. Bluetooth controller support also comes and goes.
I had a Windows game running through Wine for several weeks before it suddenly stopped launching. One of my daughter's desktops stopped booting after a kernel update, apparently due to an HP firmware compatibility issue. Her drawing application also disappeared from both the desktop and the installed applications list.
This is frustrating because I use these machines more like consoles than general-purpose computers. I'm not browsing risky websites or frequently installing and removing software, and the systems only have Linux and Steam installed. Compared with an old sealed gaming computer that worked reliably for six years, I've spent far more time troubleshooting these machines than I expected.
Is this level of instability specific to Ubuntu, or is it common with Linux gaming? Would another distribution be more reliable? Should I disable updates and keep the systems frozen once everything works, or am I approaching this incorrectly?
4 Answers
That amount of day-to-day breakage is not what I would consider normal Linux behavior. There are several separate issues here—controller detection, Proton compatibility, Wine, kernel updates, firmware, and applications disappearing—so they should be diagnosed individually rather than treated as one general Linux problem. Hardware and firmware compatibility can matter just as much as the distribution.
You could also test another mainstream distribution such as Linux Mint, Fedora, or Debian. Ubuntu is not the only distribution that can have update-related regressions, so changing distributions is not a guaranteed cure, but a clean installation with a different packaging setup may improve things. I would keep backups and avoid disabling every update permanently; instead, update deliberately and keep a known-good kernel or system snapshot so you can roll back if necessary.
For a machine that should behave more like a console, an image-based gaming distribution such as Bazzite may be a better fit than a general desktop Ubuntu installation. It is designed around gaming, tends to provide sensible defaults, and makes the base system harder to accidentally disrupt. It still cannot eliminate driver, hardware, or game-specific bugs, but it may reduce the amount of maintenance and tweaking.
Check how Steam was installed. Ubuntu’s packaged Snap version has caused problems for some users, especially with game files, permissions, controllers, and Proton. It may be worth removing it and installing Steam through the official Debian package or Flatpak instead. That will not fix every possible issue, but it removes one common source of strange behavior.
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