I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.
Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?
One of the reasons i am sticking with Arch is because steamdeck os is build on it, whats good enough to game for valve is good enough for me.
I have both Arch and my old windows install on separate m.2 ssds. By default i log into the arch one which uses the windows ssd as a game installation drive.
This way when i do have to use windows for some game modding or testing, i can easily access and sometimes run the games from there.
There’s a spattering of steam games that don’t list Linux support. Probably the ones I play the most are Deep Rock Galactic and Last Epoch. Outside of Steam I play TFT a lot, which doesn’t work on Linux since they added the anti-cheat software.
Those first two are reported to work incredibly well using proton compatibility on steam. Proton is not the same as native support, which is why its not mentioned in any official game Information but it is native to steam. (Also works in heroic and litrus for gog/epic/other)
A platinum (community) rating is as high as it gets, may as well be native or better then on windows.
For TFT i found they use the same anti cheat as some other games. Used to work before, no longer does now but with dual boot all your current stuff is just a minute away (windows updates not included)
If you’re a tech savvy person then I’d recomend Arch, but if you’d prefer a more streamlined approach then Baazite, PopOs, and Mint are all good starting points. As for dual booting, no matter which distro of linux you use you’ll use something called GRUB. The tl;dr of grub is that it’ll let you select which operating system you want to boot into when you boot up your pc
Just in case you are thinking this like I used to, don’t go by “unplayable on steam deck” to determine what games you won’t be able to play on a Linux desktop. While those games include incompatible with Linux games, they also include ones that the deck hardware can’t handle at a decent framerate but otherwise play fine on Linux.
no. you can play a crap load of “windows only” games on linux. the trick is to enable steam play in steam settings and use community versions of proton. works like a charm
Since your computer is running Windows 11 already, I would recommend you look for a Linux distro without considering if it’s gaming-friendly. Linux is great for certain productivity tasks.
For dualbooting, most official Linux installation guides offer detailed steps for that. Grub (the boot management program) is well tested and widely used.
It’s addicting to play. I was up until like 3 AM playing some more. Most of the bugs don’t seem game breaking though which is nice. My Linux PC’s Bluetooth broke midway through though, but that could be a Linux issue and not the Game’s fault. It’s always a mixed bag for me with these issues
I don’t care to much about steam at the moment so no real problem. But I will make the switch to linux on the machine used for gaming. No Win 11 there probably, some Arch-related, EndeavourOS is my actual choice.
I just gave up on windows gaming. If the game cant be played on my steamdeck, I just find something else. Otherwise its macos and linux for anything non-professional that requires windows. And even then I fucking hate it. Oh look at that… all my documents say “Auto-recover (version 1)” because it forcibly rebooted on me.
This! A game is a game. There are often good alternative that give as much entertainment. If a publisher doesn’t want you to play, that’s their problem, they won’t get money from you.
Even the Playstation OS is better than this. It asks you whether to update before shutdown or the next time it starts up. ‘You’re 33% there’ is gaslighting, especially when you’re just shutting down the machine to go to bed.
I already switched to Bazzite Desktop and it’s been so good. I had some pains configuring somethings to my liking, but that was more due to me not being familiar with Linux. I’m never going back.
Well, I cannot comment about PopOS because I simply don’t know how it is, but Bazzite on desktop has been great. I didn’t need to install anything related to gaming because it already comes with everything on it.
Pretty much anything I needed is on the discovery store and it’s handled like the app store on Android, so no headache of messing it up with installations or worrying about updates. Although, Bazzite is an immutable OS so anything that you need to install that’s not on the store can be a headache.
Also, my computer is an old laptop, so I got a performance boost as the system feels way smoother now than with Windows.
About games, I played some indie games on Steam and Lutris and it worked flawlessly. But do note that for more recent systems, it appears to be some headaches, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards. I only play new games on streaming services, so I don’t have those problems. But I do have some problems with the streaming service using my 8BitDo controller, but it’s not related to the system, it’s related to the service’s bad drivers. When I stream the game using Steam, it’s smooth sailing.
I have used both Bazzite and PopOs for more then a year. They are both great distros. The reason I stuck with Bazzite is ease of updates since its immutable (I am lazy and updated PopOS only when I absolutely needed, and updating bunch of system packadges after a long time always causes something else to screw up). PopOS on the other hand gives you complete control over how to install things, and system configuration.
TLDR, if you are a power user, then decide based on if you want an immutable system or not. If you are not, you can just flip a coin and choose, Bazzite has better ease of use compored to PopOS on theory, but if you encounter issues PopOS will be easier to troubleshoot because it has more users / information online.
My plan is to use my Linux box as my main PC with Steam installed so that I can remote play from my Windows gaming PC since not all titles natively work on Linux for me. That way, the only activity being performed on my Windows machine is gaming and everything else will live in Linux Mint
Since you wanna Game using network anyway did you ever thought of Cloud Gaming (aka Geforce Now) ? That way you don't have a "unsecure" device in your network. From a security standpoint even an device only used for gaming is a security risk ;)
I have used nvidia on my private PC on linux for more than a decade now. They provided a stable usable 3D acceleration in KDE1 when no other company did give a fuck about linux and voodoo had only their glide interface on the console.
As a customer i am very sad about the current state on linux and as a customer my next graphics card might be an AMD. The reasons are not only the driver but also that amd provides just more memory for the same money and i think that nvidia currently is cheating their way throu the consumer market (for real imaginary AI Pictures is a performance improvment ???).
But and thats why i disagree hardly with the "fuck nvidia" ... they deserve the respect for the support much longer than any brand out there and therefor they deserve a respectfull way to express where they imho do wrong.
They deserve respect? For the criminal methods they used back then? FCK nvidia! That’s like paying respect to MS or Intel + Nvidia to destroy the market in the long term in monopoly positions.
( First of all, this is not a criticism of the users. I used to use Intel and Nvidia myself. It’s towards Nvidia and their dirty company policy. )
That would require me to abandon half of my Steam library and pay an additional cost for games I already can play. My device is on Windows 11 so I am not worried about security updates, more so the Recall “feature” and AI training.
Upgrade tool says my hardware isn’t supported, seems like I can enable TPM on my motherboard but it doesn’t work right for some reason I think I managed to install Windows 10 without secure boot or something, not sure if those two are even related. I was thinking maybe I’d have to reinstall windows 10 with those modules enabled in order to upgrade to windows 11… Has anyone else encountered something similar?
Yeah, said I had to buy a tpm module for my mobo to upgrade to win11. My steam deck works so well running arch based Linux I searched “gaming arch Linux” in DuckDuckGo and installed CachyOS. Easier and cleaner than installing windows 10 when I built my PC and the constant updates are awesome (they also offer long term support LTS builds). Highly recommend, I have an Nvidia 2070 Super and CachyOS has been a great upgrade from Windows 10.
Those two are related. Windows 11 requires both UEFI (secure boot) and TPM. Microsoft has a tool for converting a legacy install to UEFI. (backup your data beforehand as always)
I was running mint, but had to go back to windows because of a hardware bug I’m still trying to fix where my PC will randomly not wake up from sleep and that results in corrupted drives, which windows can fix with it’s automated repair at boot, but Linux has done commands that I need to run and if I fuck it up it would fuck my computer up even more, so until I can fix the hardware bug I’m stuck on windows, but by fuck do I hate it. I prefer Linux so much more over windows, so much more convenient, efficient, personalizable and it actually works in many places where windows simply doesn’t even with a lot of fiddling around in settings and shit
I’ve even taken out the drive that I had Linux installed, windows still has the issue, it started barely happening a year or so ago but recently it’s gotten much much worse and it happens in waves(?) where it’ll not have any issues for several days and then one day it will fail to wake up every time it goes to sleep, except when I’m testing. I recall testing the drive check on both Linux and windows, but both came out clean.
My bf and I have narrowed it down to probably being the power supply (last year there were a bunch of power outages after a historical flood here in southern Brazil) but the ram is also unstable at timings that it used to run perfectly fine, but the ram test came out clean so it’s a big mess of possibilities RN. I’m just waiting for Monday to be able to buy a new power supply and a UPS to test, but even then we’re still unsure if this will truly fix it or if I’ll need to get a new motherboard.
Hey, what’s your usecase like that requires sleep in the first place? I’ve never used Sleep since I moved to using an SSD as a boot drive. My computer boots in around 12 seconds with the SSD that it just made sleep unnecessary.
I keep getting called away from my computer in the middle of whatever I’m doing and I don’t want to leave it unlocked while I’m away and I don’t want to have to reopen 4 or 5 programs including a game, if I could shut it down instead of sleeping I would but sadly I can’t
Yes, the “not supported” thing is just their terminology. They could decide to stop pushing them at any time. Though technically they could pull the plug on anything whenever, but they’re explicitly saying “we might stop supporting these unsupported Windows 11 installations at any time.”
Red Dead Online is almost always my go to Fishing Game with friends. It just does the fishing aspect really well. Bonus points when the camp is setup near a river or pond
I’m in Windows 11. I have regret it, but after so many tweaks of the system, removing telemetries, changing menus, and other Windows shit, i had not the energy to move back to Windows 10.
Only OS change i am willing to make is to move to Linux, but gaming is not there yet, and am now trying to move from big proprietary companies to FOSS, so time is needed.
Nvidia user, i saw a 10-15% performance difference (maybe more in some games), some anti-cheat do not work, so i can not install these games. I used both Mint and Nobara with latest drivers running and proton-GE.
If you ever wanna try again you should stick to a gaming distribution like nobara. A lot of performance can also get lost just because esync / fsync aren't configured correctly in the distribution. This should be fixed in the near future too , once https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/7226 is merged and people use modern kernels aka > 6.14.
Might be game dependent but nowadays games like withcher 3 run better on linux then windows for me.
Anti-cheat is admittedly a pain though. Chivalry 2 used to work and now no longer does.
Though those anti cheats tend to be very invasive so i prefer if everyone moved to a system thats is user personal security first so the market would align with that.
My experience with Linux gaming has varied pretty wildly. My old r9 290x could hardly run anything on linux. And if it did, it would run horribly compared to on windows.
Recently I upgraded to an rx 7600, and nearly everything works out of the box or with minor tweaks. And it performs similarly to windows, even better on occasion.
Gaming on Linux has never been better. Out of the top 100 (mostly Windows platform) games, only 7 are entirely unplayable according to www.protondb.com
80/100 are Gold or Platinum rated which means very playable. I often get better performance in Linux than Windows, even with the default open source drivers. I am using an AMD GPU which gives an advantage as they have better open source support, but for NVIDIA all the Linux distros I’ve used have had a documented path to install their binary drivers for better performance. My only bugbear is the game developers that actively hate Linux and that try to disable their game from working via anti cheat.
It’s true that it sometimes takes a bit more tinkering, especially if you’re using some esoteric controller or other funky hardware, but in the days of LLMs that can coach you through issues it’s more accessible than it’s ever been.
Nvidia GPUs are not good in Linux at the moment. And yeah all what you said. But i had tried Linux for gaming like something 5-8 years ago, and the situation is so much better now.
When I say they’re ‘not good,’ I mean they run slower. AMD and Intel GPUs perform nearly as well as they do on Windows, but Nvidia GPUs can suffer up to a 20% performance loss on Linux, depending on the game.
My Steam profile is apparently 30% platinum, 21% gold, 10% varying levels of broken, 39% unrated.
But Genshin Impact, one of my main games, doesn’t even appear on ProtonDB, and as far as I heard you need a custom Linux launcher for it, that results in occasional banwaves, which I will not risk :/ (Edit: if ProtonDB only lists Steam games, that would explain why Genshin is missing.)
Windows 11 -> Linux just for gaming and I am satisfied!
However, I also do not play things with big graphics requirements, kernel-level anticheat, and I do not have any fancy GPUs like Nvidia that make things incompatible. I transitioned on a laptop. So YMMV.
Got a new laptop about a month ago. Put Fedora Bluefin on it immediately. Couple other computers/server have been running Debian flavors for year or two.
My main desktop is still Windows, but I literally never use it, especially since getting the laptop. I’ll switch it over when I get time.
I’m still tied to windows for three apps. I’ve found a Linux replacement for one, I just haven’t done the work to convert the database.
Another one I’m trying to run it’s Android version in a waydroid docker, but I’m hitting walls, no time to dig deeper.
And the last one has no replacement, and it’s too delicate to try emulating, I don’t want to nuke the shared database it’s attached to, it’s not worth the headache. So I keep a Windows VM around for the once a month I need to use that program for 🤷♂️
I’m purposely being vague about the programs, they are very identifying, but trust me there’s no alternatives.
Even with all that, I’m not looking back, win11 sucks.
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