Can you simrace on Linux?

• 07 July 2025
• gaming

Can you really simrace on Linux? The short answer is—yes, as long as you have the right hardware.

Hardware

Hardware Compatibility

I wanted to start simracing so I started looking for the options available on the used market, and I found a Logitech G29 for £140. I didn't think about Linux compatibility at the time because I assumed all hardware would work fine, but thankfully that wrong assumption didn't come back to haunt me.
Some wheels don't work without extra drivers and on Bazzite, that'd be a pain to manage and set-up due to it being atomic, so I was very happy that mine wasn't one of them.

Setting up the wheel on Linux

The first day of setup was painful. I had forgot to plug in power to the wheel so I ended up trying every single troubleshooting step, even installing Windows onto my PC to test it, to no avail.
Eventually I realised my silly mistake and plugged in the power, and from there it worked almost flawlessly, requiring some setup at the beginning:

• I needed to set my wheel to PS3 mode to get it to be recognised by Assetto Corsa
• I need to have the Oversteer app open when I use the wheel if I want force feedback to work. After using my setup for a few days I realised that this is unnecessary, it usually works fine, and if it doesn't, I can restart the game to fix it.
• The LEDs that show the revs don't work without extra configuration, but this didn't really matter to me, so I didn't bother with it. Since writing this, I have found this script which makes it surprisingly easy to get working

Assetto Corsa on Linux

How does the game run?

Getting Assetto Corsa to work on Linux was slightly harder, although not by much, all I had to do was run it with Proton-GE 9-20 and that fixed any issues that I had with trying to start the game.
Also, the launcher opens a seperate game window that doesn't raise to the top automatically, I spent about 10 minutes waiting for the game to load, only to realise it had already loaded and was running underneath the launcher window.
Performance isn't an issue, my FPS is always above 60, sometimes above 150—depending on the circumstances, with my GTX 1660—which is getting quite dated at this point—being 6 years old.

Mods

I haven't tested out Content Manager for Assetto Corsa yet, but I have seen guides on how to get it working and they seem pretty simple. I have also tried out Content Manager using this guide and it works mostly without issues. It rarely crashes, and the font rendering is sub-optimal, but these are minor problems.

To answer the question in the title:

Yes. Overall, it wasn't bad, and pretty easy to get going, but I didn't expect anything different from the Linux gaming ecosystem in 2025, we've moved on from a lot of issues and I'm glad this is one of the issues we have moved away from.