// ITS FOSS ā LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
I Spent Time With GeForce NOW to See If It's Gameable on Linux
Linux gamers are used to being treated as second-class citizens, and Ubisoft recently gave everyone a fresh reminder when they pulled Linux and Steam Deck support from For Honor.
They blamed anti-cheat limitations, even though the game's anti-cheat software had supported Linux for years.
Meanwhile, cloud gaming has been slowly building up as an alternative, even for people who can't afford to build a gaming rig thanks to inflated RAM and storage prices. While growth hasn't been anything remarkable, people who can afford a subscription have been signing up for such services.
Geforce NOW is one such name that has managed to carve out its slice of the market, recently moving its native Linux app out of beta and into general availability, officially supporting Ubuntu at launch.
Instead of storing games locally, like when using a game launcher like Steam or Heroic, GeForce NOW streams them from NVIDIA's RTX GPUs in the cloud. This way, a laptop or desktop gets GeForce RTX-level rendering without needing to have any of that hardware itself.
Games come from your existing library, not NVIDIA's own store. Link Steam, Epic, GOG, or PC Game Pass, and you can launch anything you already own. All updates and installs are handled on the cloud gaming rig you get access to via the service.
Contrary to what the official system requirements say about using the Xorg session on NVIDIA GPUs, I managed to get the GeForce NOW client running on the Wayland session of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
My laptop has a GeForce RTX 3050 with 6GB of VRAM, and the system was running with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers rather than the open source Nouveau. Don't worry if you have a less powerful GPU on board, as the app only needs a local GPU to decode the incoming video stream, not render the game itself.
While I kept my testing limited to Ubuntu, I have a feeling this app can run on other Linux distros too.
š¬ Why not test it and let us know in the comments below?