NVIDIA’s native GeForce NOW client for Linux left beta on August 13, seven months after it first appeared in January. It runs as a supported application on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, installed and updated through its own Flatpak repository.

Why the Flatpak repo matters

During the beta, installation meant a standalone installer, which also meant updates were something you had to think about. An official Flatpak repository turns both into routine operations handled by the same tooling as everything else on the system.

flatpak update

That is a mundane improvement and it is the one that determines whether people keep the application installed. Cloud gaming clients need to track server-side changes; a client you have to manually reinstall is a client that quietly falls out of date and then stops working.

It is also a reasonable vote of confidence in Flatpak as the distribution mechanism for commercial Linux software, from a vendor with no particular ideological attachment to it. Worth noting alongside this month’s Flatpak security release, which is a reminder that the runtime carrying that software needs its own patching discipline.

What else changed

• DLSS Frame Generation in the cloud has been optimized to reduce latency
• Performance tier members, on 8 vCPU and 28 GB RAM instances, get CPU optimizations for higher frame rates in computationally intensive games
• Chromebook support was added
• Nine new cloud games

Where this sits for Linux gaming

Cloud gaming solves a different problem than Proton does. Proton runs the game on your machine and translates Windows calls; GeForce NOW runs the game on NVIDIA’s machine and streams you the result. The tradeoffs are the obvious ones: cloud gaming sidesteps every compatibility question and introduces a hard dependency on your connection.

For anticheat-protected titles that Proton cannot run at all, that tradeoff is often the only option available. Having a first-party Linux client that NVIDIA considers stable, rather than a browser tab or a community workaround, is a genuine change in the situation.

flatpak install com.nvidia.geforcenow

Ubuntu 24.04 or newer is the stated requirement, though the Flatpak will run on other distributions with a current runtime.