Tried switching to Mint yesterday, it’s a struggle as the guide kinda failed to mention some detail that i have to google a bit, and the result is it fail to boot(not a bootable drive error). Might try again tonight or this weekend. Honestly i can’t see mass adoption if it’s this PITA to get it working(not plug and play like windows), unless it’s provided by the manufacturer.
Edit: so one of a few struggle i have is the guide failed to mention i need to create an efi partition, i have to google that for the recommended size.
Another is the “primary” and “logical” partition. I have no idea which to chose so i put everything on primary, not sure if this cause the issue.
Then another one is what should i mount my “rest of the partition” with, i googled it and all the answer given is “you should probably read on what is all this about to get a sense what you should do” when i just want some simple answer to what should i do with that, like in Windows, C is for the OS, and you put everything on D or something like that. It’s akin to asking me to read the whole physics chapter when i just wanna know what speed a horse could run.
Then the final nail in the coffin for the session is “not a bootable drive”. Then i just plug in my windows ssd and go on with my day.
You will likely have to enter the bios/uefi setup with Del, F12 or something similar during boot and then search for the secure boot option and turn it off. Alternatively you may need to just properly set up the boot sequence and target the drive you want to actually boot from as the first boot option in the list.
Did you already install Linux Mint on a drive and your computer is now refusing to boot from it? Or are you actually at the step where you’ve made a bootable usb with the live iso and that’s what is not booting?
Balena Etcher work pretty well on windows to create a bootable USB live iso.
Did you already install Linux Mint on a drive and your computer is now refusing to boot from it?
This. I already tried setting the bios to boot from that particular drive and it gave me this message. Might have to try let the installer decide the partition like another comment suggested to rule it out, and try turning off secure boot if that fail.
There was not an option to autopartition the drive you picked? Having to manually make efi partition sounds suspect to me.
The only thing you should need is to be able to identify what is a partition and what is a drive. Then pick the drive you want. Then the wizard should ask if you wanna wipe it and autopartition it.
Regarding the ‘logical partition’ stuff: Unless you are using a legacy bios system, rather than UEFI, you can change the drives partitioning scheme to GPT instead of MBR, before partitioning it. Then you should not be dealing with logical partitions any more. Then everything will just be called partition.
You can do that from inside windows or from a bootable linux stick.
Who knows why your drive is set to use MBR. Maybe your drive was used in an old computer or windows set it for compatability reasons.
Worth mentioning is that your uefi might have a legacy compatability setting sometimes called CSM. Sometimes called legacy bios. If it is turned on it may be expecting MBR disks. I would turn it off and only use it if really needed.
I tried installing it on a new ssd so to separate window and linux stuff(and also upgrade from a bunch of very old hdd), the guide recommend me to select “something else” and create the partition accordingly. I follow their official guide here
At the time i’m installing, i still have my old drive plugged in so in fear of messed thing up badly and had my whole data erased, i chose to manage the partition myself. Should i unplug everything other than the new drive, and have the installer do it automatically?
Yea! If in doubt, unplug every other drive. It’s a good practice.
going with the ‘something else’ option is the option you wanna do if you have something special in mind. It kinda requires that you know what you are doing. It’s not that hard to learn. But you might need a little patience to read up on to get confidence. Since you have an entire drive for the purpose, having the wizard do it for you is just easier. The windows installer have similar options.
Should i unplug everything other than the new drive, and have the installer do it automatically?
This is what I did. Made the installer mostly a bunch of hitting ‘next’.
Plus, I don’t trust Windows to not fuck up my Linux drive, so when I used to dual boot, I would only have one or the other in the computer. Though, haven’t booted into the Windows drive for months now.
Yeah, my plan is to isolate both OS so it doesn’t interact at all. Was thinking about wiping out the old drive after backing up after installing mint, doesn’t seems to work out lol.
Idk what was your problem, but mine was not reading on filesystems when the choice occured and not knowing how awesome BTRFS is with incrimental backups.
Theres literally an option in the linux mint installer to just wipe the drive and install, and it creates all partitions for you, if you dont understand what a partition is. You literally dont have to do anything except click the bubble and choose next.
Do you have anything else to add? Because being unhelpful doesn’t solve my issue, but to inflate your ego. Others tried, and i acknowledged my problem and will try other way to see if it helped. And you’re here to bitch about my unsuccessful attempt.
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
It wasn’t on proton but there’s a very old entry on wine. Looks like my boy Jeff’s last entry was quite recent in 2023, he rated it a silver. There’s a known bug from some graphical glitch during certain events like the protagonist meeting himself back in time and others which may prevent completion. I wonder how it works now, tempted to test it out.
Can confirm the viable gaming. Some need fairly annoying workarounds that require some regular fiddling to adjust (looking at you EA/Origin with your silly launcher), but in the end it’s definitely playable.
Had no major issues with Steam games so far on Linux mint, but I like owning my games, so I buy as much as I can from GOG, and Lutris and Heroic both have not given me exactly easy experiences :L
Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.
You own your games on steam just as much as you do on gog for like 99% of them. The majority of steam games have no form of drm.
Out of my 2000 ish steam games less then 50 actually use drm that ties them to steam and those are basically only triple A games that arnt on gog anyways.
Just remove the overlay and the VAST majority of games just work with out steam entirely.
Linux Mint here. I have had only 1 issue with a game on Linux and honestly, it was an easier fix then getting some games working on Windows which I have experienced plenty of as well. Linux really is just as easy as “Install from Steam, play”.
Drivers are easy now today too, just like Windows. Honestly, if you gamed on Windows, you have all you need to game on Linux.
I’ve found Bazzite and Arch-based distros like SteamOS tend to fare better when it comes to gaming (probably due to their different update model compared to Mint), but if what you’re after is stability and familiarity and don’t play super new games, Mint’s awesome. Glad you’re having fun with it :)
One of the most frequently suggested beginner distros is Linux mint. It’s great, it’s stable, it’s what I use and while it’s not exactly cutting edge, or necessary the prettiest distro, it’s great for beginners and will feel pretty familiar coming from windows.
Pop_os! And bazzite are more “gaming focused” if that’s more your style, but I’ve never had an issue gaming with Linux mint.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter terribly much. Pick one, install it to a new drive and try it out. If you don’t like it, pick another one.
While this is awesome we still need to have the same performance on Windows. Yes, some games run better through proton for some reason, but that’s the minority. Hopefully, proton will not be needed for new games in the future and we get native builds like CS2.
Not really surprising. Windows hasn’t had significant investment from Microsoft in a while, unless it’s cramming bullshit AI and telemetry “features” in.
I seriously can’t remember the last time a windows update added an actually useful feature for me. Its like they are actively avoiding making it any better at all.
Not sure if this is the same thing, but KDE (on a linux system) presents me with options to login with smartkey/fingerprint, so it might, I’m guessing? I dunno if thay’s what passkeys are referring to, but if yes, then I think it does.
My understanding is that window’s passkey support differs from something like what is offered by linux distros in that, instead of storing your passwords in a strongly encrypted, audited, and trustworthy store like 1pw or similar, windows instead stores them in the OS.
Which personally I consider a con, I don’t trust windows to store pictures without fucking it up, why on earth would I give them passkeys?
They might add features, but none of them are a joy to work with or use. They are usually slow and buggy and annoying.
Powershell is disgusting (my opinion).
Explorer tabs are SO ANNOYING. Coming from using dolphin at home, then windows explorer at work MAKES ME CRY. I might actually use dolphin on windows, but the builds dont seem to be properly supported (i dont think?) or at least in alpha/beta or something and I don’t wanna have a buggy file explorer thats not made specifically for an os. But come on dolphin can do it right and fast, why can’t a billion dollar company?!?!?!!?!
Powershell has some nasty little quirks, and the command naming is user-hostile, but god damn is it great to pass objects around instead of parsing and reparsing text.
I was exited for the explorer tabs and virtual desktop, but OMG they are sooo bad ! In case of the virtual desktop, they even made it worse with Win11, now the animation is so slow and can’t be configured.nyou can have either slow ass animation or no animation at all which makes it very confusing to use.
Microsoft long ago migrated Windows away from home and recreational computer users to business machines that have non-business uses. Any optimization was ignored in favor of soaking up more value from users.
It’s the first test bed for every developer, which means something like a headset utility is more reliably going to work on Windows. But it’s impressive even that margin is falling.
Imagine seeing Nvidia drop Shadowplay features to push their own beta app improvements, while the Linux imitator for Shadowplay still works simply and fine, and doesn’t even drop for “DRM detected” issues.
Or trying to install/update Epic/Ubisoft games needing to go through another terrible UI upgrade while Heroic and Lutris still look the same.
A year ago, I tried Linux and felt frustrated about some minor UI inconsistencies and fiddling. Recently, I tried again, and it still had stuff to work through, but I was patient for it because now I’m dealing with all that same shit on Windows.
Oh yeah, though to hotkey audio switching I ended up writing my own bash script which was clunky. Curious if anyone better than myself might take charge there.
According to the article the only significant FPS gains are in the Performance mode. In Silent mode Bazzite has two FPS more in KCD2, and… one less in Hogwarts.
In Turbo mode, the difference is 5 FPS.
And even in Performance it’s not like you’re running at 13 FPS by default - it’s 47 in KCD2 and 50 in HL.
They even provide a nice summary themselves - on average, Bazzite gains 6.6 FPS.
What do you get in return?
Not stability:
I have 512gb model and am running on low with FSR2 on balanced. The game keeps crashing during every play sessions
it has a xbox service that installs from the windows store, it is hella finnicky, ive had to do a full pc restore in the past to get it to work, no other option online helped
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games. Reviews like the Phawks points out that microsoft kinda handed it off to the handheld makers to optimize for battery life. So in the instances such as getting 8hours of battery life running dead cells because the system doesnt really need to push that much to run the game, the Windows handheld is stuck on a higher performance clock and has a significantly shorter battery life time.
This would be extremely visible if more lighter games are tested, which typically aren’t for reviews like this because its not really fun to show a bunch of games all hitting 60 if you cap framerate.
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games
Power consumption is handled by the power mode on the device. You get three modes - Silent (13W), Performance (17W), and Turbo (35W). You can switch between them at will, it’s not controlled by the game.
but a game may not necessarily need 13W, thats the point. youre using up more power than what is necessary because the CPU governor doesn’t know if its necessary or not to actually use all 13W.
The steam deck is controlled the same way(has wattage targets), but it understands when its being underused, to use even less resources to maximize battery life.
If you have a car that has gears, where gear 1 is 25, gear 2 is 50 (old cars), it doesn’t mean there aren’t usecases where you want to go 5/10. its unnecessary to always have to hit said target.
The article said the frame rates are more stable under bazzite with windows fluctuating a lot more even at low power settings
I think that, as long as the framerate doesn’t dip below 30, a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS. It’s something you’ll see in benchmarks, but not in real life. For example: a friend of mine was playing Elden Ring and and Halo on the ROG Ally X and didn’t notice any issues with stability or framerate. And he’s pretty anal about this kind of stuff.
I read through that thread you linked and I didn’t see bazzite mentioned anywhere.
True, it was about Steam Deck performance. But I had similar experiences on Garuda Linux on my PC with Hogwarts. Every now and again it would just crash and burn. Got better after a Proton patch or two, but that’s the problem with Linux gaming - you never really know what you’ll get. With Windows, you don’t have that issue at all.
You can complain about click bait all day, that’s fine, but you came in here misinterpreting the article and then posted a non-relevant link to support your argument, followed by another back-pedaling comment to say “frame rates don’t matter as long as it’s over 30fps” LMAO.
I think you’re arguing just to argue, seems a little more childish than anything I said honestly.
You definetly do notice the fluctuating fps if it’s more than 10 fps at these frame rates. It feels like it’s speeding up then slowing down over and over. That’s why you should just lock your fps to something the device can maintain.
You will notice “average” 30 FPS plenty when it fluctuates. If it STAYS above 30FPS the whole time then sure but if 30 is the average that shit is struggling and you’ll be getting like 20-40 FPS
They did, yeah. Stupid move, especially just before the Ally release, but shareholders must be appeased.
But, other than the price, it’s been pretty great while I used it. Lots of day one releases, lots of less known titles I would never have tried if not for GP.
Games don’t crash on Windows >because of Windows<. Games do crash on Linux >because of Linux<.
As in: games are inherently compatible with Windows, while on Linux you need Wine/Proton, which is just an extra layer of complication that can cause problems.
I think that, as long as the framerate doesn’t dip below 30, a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS.
This is complete bullshit, 30 fps is playable for most games, and I have in the past bumper graphics until fps dip to 30/45 because depending on the game 30 fps on high is a better experience than 60 on low for me. But to say that a regular human won’t notice it is bullshit. There’s a game I play on my deck, for some reason it’s very sensitive to disk usage, so if I’m downloading stuff it dips to 30, and I always have to go and stop the download, because if you’ve been playing at 60, 30 feels very sluggish.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote again, you clearly stated a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS as long as it doesn’t dip below 30, and I’m saying that is bullshit, I (and everyone else I know) can definitely see a deep to 30 fps even if it doesn’t go below it.
First of all, read again, no one is talking about below 30. Secondly, yes, you can definitely notice dips even if for a moment, it makes the game feel choppy, or more precisely like a weirdly encoded video that goes slow momentarily and then catches up.
it’s weird, and refreshing, to find someone who actually reads the article and don’t base his comments only on the header, and also provides some additional info.
my opinion isn’t based strictly on the header. because to argue that the default is silent mode, when its very reasonable to assume that the middle tier performance mode is the default usecase, because it has a 80W/h battery when compared to typical other handhelds. Steam deck for example uses a 40W/h battery. 17W, which is seeing the chunk of the performance gain, is a very reasonable target for a 80W/h battery. Because it would roughly be equivalent to a steam deck at 10W on its 40W/h battery.
Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
Yeah, I was able to play through most of AC: Odyssey on my deck, thanks to Lutris. I also use Heroic just because I’ve never wanted to install Epic’s launcher.
My source is just an example of gaming experience on Linux.
I run Garuda (Arch-based) which is a distro “for gamers”. The experience is great, I love it. Everything works fine… most of the time.
But, until Proton got a couple of updates, I was just unable to run Mafia. Until Proton got a couple of updates, Hogwart’s would crash randomly. Right now Cyberpunk runs fine… until it crashes during loading sometimes.
That’s the gaming experience of Linux.
All that for a +6.6 FPS average, and no GamePass.
You lose access to Windows store
Windows Store is irrelevant, you lose the XBox (App)-installed GamePass games, which means that you lose access to a tonne of XBox games.
New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly
gets updates literally on the same day every month with 14 days time before a forced update
complains about getting interrupted by constant updates
Sigh… I’m not even going to comment on this. Can’t fix fundamentalism.
but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested
Because, overall, Windows 11 is badly optimised and MS already fired all the competent developers, so, yeah, it’s going to happen. But what Windows gives you, is the guarantee that if you have the hardware to handle a game, it will run. Any issues will be on the side of the game, not the OS.
I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews
That’s also part of the “Linux gaming experience” - with all the distros flying around, almost nobody will have the same exact experience. Sure, if everyone installs Bazzite on the Ally, it should be a relatively uniform experience, but - again - I fail to see the point in going through all this, losing the (apparently) excellent touch UI and a unified gaming library, just to get… 6 FPS extra. In one power mode.
Your source for stability issues in Hogwarts Legacy is a single user in the Steam community with other users in the same thread not having issues at all. Seeing that Hogwarts Legacy is one of the most played games on Deck (ranked 11th at time of writing ), I think many more people would report issues if crashes were common.
Furthermore, your TONNE of optional game stores is one. I can‘t really think of a game store, besides Microsoft’s, that doesn‘t work on Steam Deck.
These early performance comparisons definitely have limited value for comparing Windows/Linux performance on the device. But I’m sorry to say that your arguments have even less.
I tried to make sure it got quoted but my app doesn’t do well with copying the user so I did it this way so people would know it certainly wasn’t me who saw the flaw.
If it helps UFD tech on YouTube also reported off the Tom’s Guide article, spouting the same flawed data as the headline.
tomshardware.com
Aktywne