I switched to macOS pretty for all my day-to-day, development and work uses, but still have a Ryzem+RTX (I do use Ray tracing features) desktop that I only ever use for gaming anymore.
I play games from Steam, GoG, Epic, and occasionally Xbox Game Pass.
The big problem here is I’m visually impaired and need a desktop environment that will let me consistently use a lime green mouse cursor and zoom in full screen via keyboard and scroll shortcuts.
At the risk of 1) nobody having actual experience and 2) the current Linux distro/DE ecosystem being hopelessly broken, what should I try?
I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.
I’m perfectly happy with “you’re outta luck, buddy, just suffer through Windows,” but I figure it can’t hurt to ask…
I’d recommend Ubuntu mostly because it’s going to be the easiest to get working. I recently started playing with Proton on Ubuntu, and it was surprisingly painless. There’s been a lot of improvement over the past few years.
Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ and search for your games. It’ll let you know how difficult they are to get working and give you tips on helping them run.
Here’s the visual impairments page for stock Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/a11y.html.en#vision
There’s stock magnifier support. It’s not great to be honest, but it does allow you to enable crosshairs that will make it easy to find your cursor.
A little more searching found Magnus which might be a better option.
It’s also pretty trivial to install gnome tweaks https://itsfoss.com/gnome-tweak-tool/ and install custom theme elements like high contrast icons and cursors that can help.
If you really are using your PC exclusively for gaming and do everything else on your Mac, I wouldn’t bother.
I’m a fairly big Linux advocate, but when it comes to accessibility, there’s still a way to go in Linux. And some form of customization still requires some tinkering. Linux gaming specially isn’t yet as seamless and easy as in Windows just yet. But, I really hope this changes one day.
Despite many people in this thread saying KDE, GNOME has been recently been financed to work on accessibility with the STF fund contract work, so major advancements in accessibility are likely to hit them first. They are also looking into getting more contract financing for it. KDE might be fairly equal right now, but I foresee GNOME getting more stuff sooner. Especially in regards to screen readers and just general app accessibility with changes to Libadwaita.
That shouldn’t be a problem, both Gnome and KDE gave decent accessibility features as far as I’m aware. Or at the very least, it’s got zoom, and the cursor can easily be changed to something of your liking. I think KDE’s also got the macOS “shake cursor to make it extra large so you can spot it” available.
I’m more concerned about
I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.
That’s not a lot of time, and if you’d rather not spend it tinkering I would stick with Windows.
I would at least make it a dual boot setup, so you can switch between Windows and Linux as needed. Don’t have time to tinker? Just do it in Windows until you have time.
As much as I want to speak in favour of Linux.
It’s just not ready for this situation combined with gaming. Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.
Many games do work out of the box on steam. However, features like ray tracing and HDR can be touchy. And I’m not confident screen reader software will play nicely.
Epic Games and Game Pass do not work without much tinkering (The game pass streaming feature might work well but I’ve not tried it myself.) and you’ll likely need to stay on top of that as each update could potentially break it.
Outside of games it’s ready for a wide spectrum of accessibility needs and could potentially be a better experience than windows.
Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.
Yeah, this is flat out not true. I play many games on my system that I just hit the launch button on. As one other person said you only need to make sure that Steam Play is enabled first. This is even on an nvidia gpu based system. Not to say that EVERY game is going to work out of the box, but to say that they all need to be tinkered with is just wrong.
If you continue to read what I said I explained my point that games do tend to work out of the box on steam. But OP was asking about multiple platforms and I have no way to know which games op intends to play. So the experience will vary from user to user.
Ok fair enough - however if you in one moment say :
Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.
And then in another you say :
Many games do work out of the box on steam.
Kinda sends mixed messages don’t you think?
Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.
Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.
Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.
If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.
All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.
