Can You Play Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce NOW on Linux? Yes — Here’s the Omarchy Setup

Yes — both of the big cloud gaming services now work on Linux, and 2026 is the year it stopped being a hack. NVIDIA shipped a native GeForce NOW app for Linux this August (a real one, out of beta, with its own Flatpak repo), and Xbox Cloud Gaming runs in the Chromium browser that Omarchy already ships. That means the leanest desktop you own can stream the same AAA catalog as a $2,000 gaming PC, using someone else’s GPU. Here’s the honest state of both services and the exact setup on Omarchy or any other Arch-based system.

GeForce NOW: the native app is real now

For years, GeForce NOW on Linux meant spoofing your browser’s user agent and hoping. That era ended in 2026: NVIDIA’s native Linux client left beta in August after months of testing, distributed through an official Flatpak repository. The native app is the full experience — up to 5K at 120 fps, or 1080p at up to 360 fps on the top tier — not the capped browser version (browsers max out at 1440p/120 for Ultimate subscribers).

One honest asterisk: NVIDIA’s official support target is Ubuntu 24.04 and later. Because it’s a Flatpak, it runs on Arch-based systems like Omarchy too — Flatpak bundles its own runtime precisely so the distro underneath matters less — but if something breaks, you’re technically off the supported path.

Install it:

1. Make sure Flatpak is installed: sudo pacman -S flatpak (skip if flatpak --version already answers).
2. Add NVIDIA’s repo and install, per the instructions on NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW download page — the app lives in NVIDIA’s own Flatpak remote rather than Flathub.
3. Launch, sign in with your NVIDIA account, and plug in a controller — or just use keyboard and mouse, which GeForce NOW supports natively for PC titles.

What it costs (reported as of this writing): a free tier with waits and session limits, Performance at $9.99/month, and Ultimate at $19.99/month. The big January 2026 change: paid tiers now cap at 100 hours of play per month, with extra 15-hour blocks at $2.99 (Performance) or $5.99 (Ultimate). A hundred hours is over three hours a day — most people will never touch the cap, but heavy players should know it exists. The other thing to know: GeForce NOW streams games you already own on Steam, Epic, and other stores. It’s a rented GPU, not a Netflix catalog.

Xbox Cloud Gaming: the browser is the app

Microsoft has no Linux app, and doesn’t need one. Xbox Cloud Gaming runs at xbox.com/play in any Chromium-based browser — which on Omarchy means it works out of the box, since Chromium is the default browser. Firefox is the one that gets turned away at the door.

Set it up:

1. Open xbox.com/play in Chromium and sign in with your Microsoft account.
2. Pair a controller over Bluetooth or USB. Xbox, PlayStation, and most third-party pads work; some titles now support keyboard and mouse, but a controller is still the safe assumption.
3. For the console feel, install the page as a web app so it launches fullscreen in its own window with its own icon — Omarchy makes this a one-hotkey trick, which we cover in our guide to turning any site into an app.

The catalog model is the opposite of NVIDIA’s: a Game Pass Ultimate subscription (reported at $16.99/month as of this writing) gets you a big rotating library streamed from Xbox Series X hardware, including day-one first-party releases. You’re renting the games and the hardware. Free-to-play titles like Fortnite can be streamed without a paid subscription in supported regions. This year Microsoft has also been rolling out 4K streaming and regional edge servers in select areas, which noticeably helped latency.

Which one should you pick?

• You own a Steam library: GeForce NOW. Your existing games, better image quality, native app.
• You own nothing and want everything: Game Pass Ultimate. One subscription, huge catalog, zero installs.
• You’re not sure: Both have free doors — GeForce NOW’s free tier and Fortnite on Xbox Cloud. Try before you pay a cent.

Either way, the bandwidth floor is real: plan on 10 Mbps minimum, 25+ for high quality, and use Ethernet or 5 GHz Wi-Fi. Cloud gaming is a latency product; the fastest GPU in the world can’t fix a flaky connection.

Honest caveats

Cloud gaming on Linux works, but go in clear-eyed. Input latency is fine for shooters at the casual level and noticeable at the competitive level — if your ranked ladder rank pays your rent, stream nothing. Image quality is a compressed video stream: excellent in slow scenes, visibly softer in fast ones, especially in foliage and rain. GeForce NOW’s Ubuntu-only official support means an Omarchy update could theoretically break the Flatpak until NVIDIA catches up — it hasn’t been a pattern, but it’s possible. The 100-hour caps and prices above are volatile; both companies adjusted pricing within the last year, so check the current numbers before subscribing. And game publishers can pull titles from either service, which stings more on GeForce NOW where the game you own simply stops being streamable.

None of that changes the headline: an Omarchy laptop with no GPU worth mentioning is now a legitimate way to play this year’s releases. The idle-at-a-few-hundred-megabytes desktop and the AAA catalog turn out to be a great pairing — one machine doing almost nothing, borrowing one that does everything.

Related reading: Omarchy for Streamers: OBS Screen Capture Works on Wayland · Omarchy Isn’t an AI OS — It’s DHH’s Opinionated Linux Desktop · How to Install Omarchy on Windows