Looks like I’ll be the negative one. I gave it a solid try dual booting for about 6 months before I went back to Windows.
I think I took for granted how much is abstracted away in Windows when it came to being my daily driver for my computer. Wrapping my head around things that “just worked” in Windows proved to be more difficult than I anticipated and I dealt with more friction. Trying to learn new concepts stood in my way of fully embracing it as well as not understanding what the “Windows equivalent” was for a given feature/function/action so I could wrap my head around it better. I also had a couple of workflows that I never got working in Linux despite all my attempts at searching for answers.
And I know people will come out of the woodwork with all sorts of questions or input on how if I just tried it again I’ll get it. For the record, I tried out Pop OS since it bills itself as a dead simple. I know the problems for me were more around my knowledge, years of built up muscle memory with Windows, and limited time to game so messing with whatever my current problem was made it more frustrating and soured me on the experience.
Both were on my radar as well. I want to say I tried Bazzite before Pop but one of those workflows I could not solve was a problem on Bazzite (some virtual kvm switch software I’ve used forever). Nobara was almost where I went after Pop before retreating back to Windows :)
Could you give some examples of things that worked for you on Windows but couldn’t port over to Linux? I’m interested if they’re related more to games or just using Linux in general.
Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.
For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.
Honestly, it’s my assessment of turning my only PC, which is primarily gaming, into a Linux machine and the struggles there with day-to-day usage. I have no idea what OP’s comfort level with Linux or tech is in general but my assumption is it’s enough to think “Yeah, I could install Linux and do this.” which was where I was at too. Nothing I’m doing was exotic but the investment required in finding suitable alternatives that worked nearly out of the box was too high at the time.
Gaming was decent by all accounts. I think I had a few compatibility items that will iron out as developers support Linux more and the technology that enables gaming on Linux just gets better and better. I have an AMD card and from what I gather that’s better for switching to Linux. A lot of my frustrations were not related to gaming and I recognize the issue is time and knowledge on my part. If those are in short supply when something breaks, you could have a bad time is all I’m saying. Everyone’s got to start out somewhere and if you’ve had Windows forever, it can be a mental shift.
The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there ^_^) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it’s achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it’s mechanics that much it’s not for me.
I played with cheats almost all the time when I was a kid, but I was rarely doing it for difficulty reasons. I just got used to the idea early on of game engines just being digital sandboxes and loved seeing how far I could push things.
I don’t really understand using cheats as a difficulty bypass unless you’re there just to get the story/explore.
I use ChatGPT similarly. If I want to explore an idea without consequence, I can use it to brainstorm, but it’s not going to be how I lay out an entire project.
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
Or when you’re diving somewhere, and drivers thinking there’s an “easy button” gets people killed.
The point, I think, is that society seems to encourage “what can I get away with” while discouraging any consideration of “what should I do”. Which, well, seems pretty ass-backwards don’t you think?
Then again, we’ve never truly removed from power the progeny of those that decided beating the shit out of someone else was preferable to doing their fair share of the labor. “But what if someone tries to kick your ass? Then you’ll be glad I’m here.”
Uhh, like fucking hell I will. That kind of sociopathic fuckery has always been, and will always be, nothing but a drain on the collective effort of any society.
Tldr: I totally agree with you
Oh, and as an aside, part of me kinda hates that Re-Logic added “Journey Mode” to Terraria; I haven’t put any significant time into even one classic mode playthrough since.
I’ve fallen into this exact trap when I played the HD remaster of Suikoden 1&2 a few months ago. The games still hold up pretty well but are a bit too dated to my taste to have more than a single playthrough, so I followed guides to get the perfect ending, which involves recruiting all 108 characters into your army.
At first I was just looking at a very light guide that told me which characters were missable and approximately when to get them. Then I got impatient and looked up their location and recruitment conditions. And then I ended up following a complete walkthrough step by step to make sure I wasn’t making any mistake.
That completely took the fun out of the games and I burnt out halfway through the second one.
Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.
FANTASTIC! I love that 100% of the games I want to play work great without issue but what I love even more is the conveniences that Linux provides over Windows:
It is trivially easy to sync my configs/saves/game data across my network to different PCs with rsync -ave ssh (i.e. if I want to play on the big screen via the HTPC).
I can do the same with my phone using the FolderSync Android app (which supports sync over SSH just like rsync).
I can script stuff! Example: A lot of games (especially those with 3rd party mods) can be buggy AF and as a result of that, increase the possibility of corrupting my saves/game/world data. For these games I use rdiff-backup right there in the save/game/world directory every 10 minutes with say, 100 backups. Put that in a cron job and the worst that happens is I lose 10 minutes.
If the game has a server, chances are there’s already a native Linux version which means I can run it locally on my PC in the background or just sync my whole game over to another of my Linux PCs and run it there. No need for complicated setups where you have to manage things across two completely different operating systems (like Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 ahahaha; that’s a joke poking fun at the Windows ecosystem if you don’t get it 🤣).
I actually have the power to control where my sound goes on the fly and it actually fucking works (unlike Windows where you get to pick one device at a time and good luck keeping that one active if you have a Bluetooth audio device that likes to lose its connection from time to time… Ugh). You can actually do weird shit like send your audio over the network to a whole home’s worth of PCs (or stream it over the Internet I guess) but I only ever did that once and man was it cool, haha. Still, it’s nice to have the option (some open source dev worked really hard to make sure that works; and fantastically well too).
Multiple applications can use the GPU at the same time (if you’re using Wayland) and that actually works properly. Unlike in Windows—where if you enable “hardware acceleration” in an app like Discord it can suddenly become slow AF scrolling when you’ve got a game open in the background.
You have vastly more control over gamepad/controllers in Linux than you do in Windows. In Windows—if your controller is detected properly (which hopefully doesn’t require that you download a ~4GB of driver/bloat app bullshit)—you can test the buttons in the Settings/Control Panel. But that’s all you can do. The X button is the X button is the X button. You want that button to send something else? You need sketchy proprietary 3rd party software for that! In Linux, you can do whatever TF you want with that button and there’s several ways to do it (qjoypad gives you a nice GUI—right there in your distro’s repositories for quick install).
No “You need to reboot your computer” popups in the middle of gaming/streaming!
You don’t need sixteen bloated system tray/processes running at all times (slowing down your PC) to keep all your stuff working! If you use a Linux desktop for a few weeks then go back to Windows you’ll get annoyed AF pretty fast at all those pop-ups, “Why did I put up with this BS?” 🤣
Privacy by default: HP, Nvidia, Dell, Logitech, Razer, and Microsoft can’t see that you’re playing that game that just got banned by MasterCard/Visa 🤣
Also—generally speaking—Linux is just more fun to use! Customize TF out of your desktop experience. The only thing stopping you is… you.
Is there a co-pilot like function that can pair to controllers together? That feature with my Xbox Adaptive Controller is kind of keeping me on Windows. Or I have to give up those games.
Through the Xbox Accessories app you can enable co-pilot mode between two Xbox controllers. So both are seen as one device. So I can use Left trigger and right trigger with my feet on the XBAC while keeping my controller in my lap and disabling the triggers on it so they are accidentally pressed.
I started out using an old Nvidia Geforce 1060 TI and an i5 whose model number now escapes me. My experience was terrible, on Mint, Ubuntu, and Bazzite. Most games didn’t work, and researching the error messages I found in my logs just directed me to Nvidia forum posts from 6 months to a year ago where a user described my exact issue and received no response.
Then, I purchased a new pre-fab computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D processor and a Radeon RX 9060 XT GPU. I still had a handful of issues on Ubuntu, so I switched to Bazzite and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. I can run the vast majority of games through Steam, and use Bottles for anything else.
The lesson I learned was fuck Nvidia. Team Red 4 lyfe.
its not NVIDIA’s fault that Mint, Ubuntu and Bazzite can’t implement a driver properly. I have never had a problem with the multiple NVIDIA cards I have used with my Arch installs.
I had the same experience on those three and popos with my 2070. Then I switched to Endeavoros and finally things worked. Since then, my Nvidia card works just as well as Windows.
Its a kernel level rootkit, so if you have that installed your computer is no longer yours. They could in theory, read your RAM and use it to read encryption keys and have full access to your system and you would never know.
A kernel level rootkit for windows though. What is it going to have access to in Linux? Isn’t it just reading Proton’s windows files that are created for each game ran through it?
My understanding is that actual kernel-level software would have to at least have a Linux-specific driver included. Otherwise if it really is running entirely through Proton, it’s somehow faking the ring 0 access. I’m not entirely sure, but I do think that anti-cheat must work differently from the big ones like FACEIT and Valorant.
So far, everything mostly works. Occasionally I have to tinker with some environment variables to get some games working, but so far everything I have tried has been playable.
I have ryzen 5800x3d, 32 GB ram, rtx3090, 1440p 120hz gsync screen, nvme + bunch of other drives. Running Arch (wayland, kde plasma), games installed from steam/gog + few standalones from regular installers. Mostly I use proton-ge, but some games run fine with just wine. ntsync + wayland enabled.
some games (eg. PEAK) have MASSIVE flicker unless I explicitly disable wayland support for them (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0), and then it’s fine.
Only thing really lacking is performance, eg. Cyberpunk 2077 with RT is slower than on Win10. It still does about 60 fps, but the dips below are way more harsh. AFAIK this is a thing accross the board with DX12 games with current nvidia driver, supposedly there’s a fix cooking, but we’ll see.
I don’t play competetive pvp games at all, so I can’t speak for those. But so far friends only co-op & single player games have worked just fine.
are you using the env variable to enable it for the game? AFAIK it’s not enabled by default, and It dawned on me that I have it enabled on /usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-ge-custom/user_settings.py (the config file for proton-ge). But it could still be nvidia issue, wouldn’t surprise me
I use Arch and its fantastic! Sure some of the multiplayer games with bullshit DRM won’t work (only because the companies will ban you even though the tech is working as expected FU EPIC)
Once you get your system functioning the way you want it, you almost never have to worry about a patch breaking your shit. That is unless you customized your video drivers or the kernel.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne