I did it. For a few years now I’ve wanted to make the jump but lazyness and a bit of worry that my main game wouldn’t work very well kept me from it.
Then some effing windows update caused ridiculous stuttering on games (or maybe it was a auto-update of some other hidden thing, I couldn’t figure it out) so I decided that if I needed a system wipe, might as well as try gaming on linux.
Honestly? Much easier than I expected. Install Steam, turn two options on and 90% of your library is ready to go. I had to tinker with getting freesync to work (ended up just switching to wayland, which just worked) but other than the plugins I use for my main game requiring a bit of more work, smooth as butter really.
So yeah, if you are a lazy gamer like I am, next time you do a system wipe or get a new computer, try installing linux first. Don’t even bother Dual booting it, if you don’t like it just reinstall (setup your usb drive with ventoy and the images you want to try out.)
I’m a pretty tech savvy guy but not a “coder” by any stretch. Pretty comfortable using terminal commands so long as the instructions are clear.
I’m considering building a gaming PC within the next 6 to 12 months, and I pretty much want it to be strictly a Linux machine for gaming. I want my hardware to work out of the box as much as possible and maximum compatibility with my games with minimal tinkering. Again I can handle getting some things to work, installing drivers, tinkering with game settings. But a lot of what has kept me from going whole hog into PC gaming is I am a dad with a full-time job and sometimes I just want to fire up and start playing. Steam deck has been nice but obviously very underpowered compared to a dedicated tower I’d build.
Which Linux OS would folks recommend? OP asking you as well haha.
GET AMD INSTEAD OF NVIDIA. While everyone talks about how Nvidia is better than it used to be and stuff, AMD basically has zero problems on Linux.
Yeah I think AMD is the route I want to go for several reasons tbh.
That has not been my experience… amdgpindriver was crashing quite often, gfx ring 0 timeout. Tons of people with that problem forums. I managed to adjust some parameters and fix it eventually.
VRR doesn’t work properly, I can get it to work, burnout is a shore every time.
I have both and nvidia and an amd GPU, and with xwayland fixed, the nvidia one can run just as well.
That said, paying 2k for a GPU to have raytracing and 24gb of RAM isn’t that attractive.
I have a 7800XT on Linux and I want to point out that I still run into their “drm_fec_ready” and “no edid read” bugs every day.
amdgpu is miles ahead of what NVIDIA is offering, but it is still a GPU driver on a second class platform. Do not expect a flawless experience on bleeding edge hardware.
As much as I want to agree to this, a part of me screams “STOP FANBOYING CORPORATIONS”
Lemme tell you a short story about bait and switch
We all know that android is a collaboration of companies to have an open handset ecosystem (which is weird, because these are companies driven for profit)
one of these companies is quallcomm, they were so nice that they released an open source “bridge” for devs to thier hardware called codeauroraforums
Thier marketshare grew and the performance of thier hardware were miles ahead the competition
Then it came when these “subpar” and cheaper semicons caught up on thier performance and also…covid happened
it shrank quallcomms earnings, made them to make some “decisions” and one of them is killing codeauroraforums, switched thier “opensource” stuff to codelinaro in which, all of the hardware supported are devkits of thier struggling snapdragon x
In addition to these decisions to increase earnings, they also made a deal with microsoft to make laptop chipsets (just like what apple did. Unfortunately, barebone windows on arm is different from windows on snapdragon unlike apple with thier walled garden wherein they’ve designed thier chips inhouse)
now they’re finger pointing who’ll support that thing, lmao
So…uhm…yea, stop fanboying corporations and thank you for listening to my ted talk
btw AMD is cool with linux…for now
If you think recommending someone a GPU brand with drivers that are easier to install when they said they wanted something that just works is “fanboying” then I don’t know how to respond.
I agree with not overly fanboying, but “they might stop support” can literally happen with any platform. If AMD stops open source support, they’re in the same boat as NVIDIA but with a leg up from having all the history an experience from the time with support.
Your favorite distro could go out of support and have the project closed tomorrow, just like Windows 10 reaching EoL. Except someone else can fork that distro and pick up the mantle to continue the project.
That game that you really want to play on Linux might suddenly choose to implement an anti-cheat or DRM that isn’t compatible with Linux, or a different game might choose to remove that block and it suddenly opens up for the Linux community.
You’ll get plenty of answers with different suggestions, so I’ll suggest checking in that community for plenty of previous answers. I would say to stick with “main” known distribution and to ditch specialized ones. https://linux-myths.pages.dev/Single-Maintainer https://linux-myths.pages.dev/Distros
I’m on Nobara but despite the fantastic work of GloriousEggRoll, it did had it’s lot of breakage which made me want to switch to the suggested uBlue Fedora atomic builds, per those criterias.
I’ve said this before around here, but y’all REALLY need to stop recommending immutable distros to people who are new and just trying to figure stuff out. It’s confusing as hell for them, and counterproductive overall. Why don’t you just say “Use Fedora” if you have a suggestion.
Thank you! I messed with Mint once and it was easy enough to get up but wifi didn’t work out the box which was irritating. Is that common in your experience?
Full disclosure it was an intel MBpro lol
Mint is a good choice ! They have a decent help forum where you could ask for such help. Like this one for example. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=228884 Feel free to give more details here too, maybe i, or someone else here could help you with your specific Mac problem.
Unfortunately when I mentioned I had a Mac everyone got really nasty and told me to buy a PC/“you should’ve done your homework.” 😅
I have a 2017 MBPro that can still handle 4K video rendering. It’s already in my possession! Why would I go buy something else? But everyone was too angry at the idea of my using a Mac to care sadly.
Dicks.
Well I had downloaded a few to try out, but the first one I installed (Pop OS) just worked right away so I stuck with it.
Although if you are considering a new PC, do go for an AMD GPU. Will save you a lot of hassle (like it did me).
Bazzite and Pop are top of my list currently
It’s always the top 10 once enough people chime in, because any can work and it’s easy enough to install or select what you need on most of them. (I’d probably recommend mint).
But… hardware is probably more important. Cutting edge GPU might not have good drivers yet. AMD is probably going to be much better supported. Networking you’re probably good now, but getting more popular stuff means it’s more likely to already have had the kinks worked through years ago. If you play popular multiplayer shooters with shitass anti cheat malware it probably won’t work.
Luckily MP competitive games aren’t really my thing,n the few MP games I play are generally social/collaborative. Valheim and such.
Thanks!
Which Linux OS would folks recommend? OP asking you as well haha.
I’ll throw Tumbleweed into the pile of recommendations.
It comes with a rollback utility called Snapper configured OOTB. This was a big one for me and it’s what stopped me distrohopping. The only reason I didn’t stick with TW the first time I tried it (years ago) was because of issues getting my Nvidia card to work.
You can install Snapper yourself on other distros of course, but I’ve read that it’s sometimes not a trivial undertaking.
Note: Ventoy adds something to the boot params that causes issues for some, so heads up if you decide to try TW off of Ventoy.
I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It’s absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I’d likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they’re pretty easy to get rid of).
As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you’re used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)
I’ve gone through several installs (mint, neon, vanilla, tumbleweed, manjaro). The distro I’ve ended up sticking with has been EndeavourOS.
For three simple reasons:
- when I want to install something, someone has usually already put in the work and made it easily available on the AUR
- if something breaks, there is an easy way to recover as long as you set it up in advance (snapshots)
- bleeding edge, you get updates quickly, latest KDE, latest kernel, latest everything
Basically, the low ease of use of arch is addressed by EndeavourOS, and its “instability” is addressed by timeshift. All you’re left with is how easy it is to get your system to run whatever you might want it to run.
What I did is install EndeavourOS with btrfs, then first thing run
sudo yay -S pamacto install a GUI for managing software discovery, installation and updates.Next,
timeshift,timeshift-systemd-timerandtimeshift-autosnap. The systemd package enables timeshift to maintain scheduled snapshots, and the autosnap package automatically creates snapshots whenever you install or update something, so you can always go back to right before changing your system.Run timeshift to set it up, and you’re good to go.
Thank you!
mint. my distrohopping always ends back in mint. heard good stuff about zorin too, i intend to try that next.
I’m not amd guy… I’ve used Intel and Nvidia for ages and ages… when my last upgrade failed hardware wise… I bought a Intel minipc from Beelink with an Intel ultra 5 125h.
It came with windows 11.
I’m a dad of a 1 yr old. who is playing stardew with his wife right now.
Ive formatted a handful of times to different Linux distros to see which felt better for me on this PC.
Manjaro, kubuntu, Debian, kde neon.
Currently I’m running kde neon. Out of the box it likes to reboot on updates… so I found a non-sudo needed cli command to fix that. (It’s a setting apparently in settings)
Anyway…l say all this to say… the way steam is now… and how graphics cards are… you can pretty well run what you want.
Granted it’s antidotal from me… But as long as you’re not buying the absolute latest stuff from a hardware vendor… You’d be fine.
If I was buying now I’d probably not buy the Intel chips that are having troubles but the gen before that… and probably some 3xxx Nvidia card.
And not hesitate to run any distro I wanted.
Ps I like apt… because that’s what I’m comfy with. So I tend to use distros that use apt. Tho manjaro is nice because of the aur… But they have issues company wise
As far as user friendlyness for new users I usually recommend Mint (Cinnamon desktop) / ZorinOS Core (customized Gnome desktop)/ TuxedoOS (KDE Desktop).
Choose accordingly to your preferred desktop environment and enjoy.
You’ve basically described my situation exactly. I built a PC 6 months ago for Linux. I distro-hopped for a good while and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now I’ve put OpenSUSE on my laptop too. I would highly recommend it.
I went for an AMD GPU and have never had any problems with it. Linux is not as painless as Lemmy would have you believe though. Be prepared to learn some hard lessons and keep your data physically disconnected from the PC while you do it.
You’ve asked about WiFi drivers further down…on my PC, the only distros that had the correct WiFi drivers out of the box were EndeavourOS and ZorinOS. The rest all needed wired LAN to get them going.
I was in the same boat a month ago. I decided to get a System76 desktop. While a bit more expensive than building my own, the time and grief saved has been wonderful. They are great machines if you can spend a little more to save headaches.
Ngl these are pretty slick. I think I’d rather try my hand at a build but if it had more disposable income I’d probably go for it.
I recommend endeavouros - it’s on arch (personally my favorite, btw), has a bunch of desktop environments you can pick from that come configured nicely out of the box, nice presets and well commented configs, etc. Install and setup are super easy, they also include installing your driver’s and such.
For getting games to work, most games work out of the box on steam (just make sure to enable proton for all titles and you’re set). Some games will require some changes to the launch command which you can super easily find with just searching {game title} Linux. There are some that straight up don’t work, and most likely no tinkering will fix that - but it’s primarily fps and competitive games with kernal level anticheat. It’s getting better with fewer and fewer games using it though. Since you already have a steak deck you already know the process most likely so you should be able to hit the ground running
I have Linux mint on my gaming desktop and it’s been great. I’d say that is a good entry point. But i tried a couple distros via live USB before choosing.
I’ve been bouncing around Linux distros since 2007.
I’ve been a big Ubuntu fan but Bazzite has absolutely blown me away, especially for gaming. Everything just works out of the box. No tweaking, no driver installations, no troubleshooting.
My multi monitor display and dock with peripherals (including webcam and wireless headset) just works with a single USB connection on the dock.
Call me a shill for bazzite but if you are just using the pc like a windows user would to play games, you won’t go wrong with it. I could basically say the same for any Ubuntu or Fedora distro but from my experience, those require some tweaking for everything to work nice.
I’ve seen a few bazzite advocates here so it’s definitely top of the list for checking out right now. I’m a big fan of SteamOS and wish I could just install that lol but this seems like a great alternative so far
I just watched this YouTube video last night of someone setting up Bazzite on a mini pc to create a sort of Steam Machine, might be nice to check out. https://youtu.be/f45hDPOrzFI
Wow thank you!
I’ve been gaming on endeavour OS for 3 years now and I love it. 10/10 would recommend.
If you value your time and want to save money before you go the hardware route try a cloud gaming platform like Geforce Now. Get the top tier account, you will always have the best graphics, you can run on any of your existing hardware, and you can fire up additional rigs for your children/friends. If the games you like are available, you never have to wait for updates. If you enjoy modding games this is not for you. All that money you were going to throw at the cpu etc can, if you want, be put towards a really nice monitor and controllers both of which typically outlast the cpu anyway.
I have a founder’s account at $5/mo so I have no interest in upgrading lol. As for updates, I remember with BG3 frequently having to wait for updates to go through in the early months specifically on GFN after release while my steam deck could just get right back into it.
I like GFN but some games are unplayable with the latency, despite how impressively low it is. And while the library is pretty decent it’s definitely not comprehensive.
I’ve been juggling steamdeck / GFN / Xbox for years and I’m sort of ready to just go whole hog on a $1500-$2000 tower.
Same thing happened to me recently, like literally 2 days ago. I’ve been wanting to switch for good for years, but always ended up having some problem pop up that I would try to deal with, and eventually go back to windows.
Well, 2 nights ago, I’m playing a game on steam. Middle of a boss fight, my computer just shuts down to start installing windows updates. When it finally finished, not only did I lose my progress, but because the game was not shut down correctly, it corrupted several files and needed a reinstall.
I literally used Chris Titus Techs Win10 tool to disable windows updates until I choose to run them, as well as ShutUp10 to disable ALL M$’s bullshit.
Update happened anyway, and sure enough, all their spyware had been re-enabled. At that point, I started asking around online for recommendations on what would work best for my use cases, with a few specific tools I needed. In the past, I had used several distros that really didn’t do what I needed, or would get me 90% of the way there. Problem was, that other 10% was a pretty important 10%. Someone told me to try just regular old vanilla Fedora. I did, actually learned how to setup, configure, and use Gnome extensions to get it to look and feel the way I want it to. Been having the best experience ever; EVERYTHING just works out of the box. At this point, I have successfully and fully converted!
Edit: grammar and typos
Are you me? It pissed me off that the system was obviously designed to disregard my wishes one too many times. Luckily, gaming support has been very good.
This was me a few months ago when I started seeing ads in start menu. I love Linux and use it for work but was worried about things like VRR, scaling, HDR support, periperhal support etc. While a lot of those things are still a WIP I have had no major issues (except occasional anticheat borked but even then rarely).
I ended up going bazzite and I’m really liking it. What distro you go with OP?
I went Pop OS but I had Bazzite, Nobara and Endeavour on the usb drive ready to go if I didn’t like it.
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Maybe it sounds overdramatic but if the point of a computer is to play games (and I did spend a lot of money for it) and it stutters consistently to the point that the “80” FPS I’m getting looks worse than a consistent 30, then yeah, I’m going to do something about it. And since the simplest way was wiping the system and reinstalling, then going for linux at least at first makes sense.
Maybe I wasn’t clear in the OP but it was not a bit of stuttering: I could go to certain areas in game and get consistent stuttering and frametime problems, which is worse than just lowered but consistent FPS.
@lorty Did the same (and discovered Ventoy) just recently myself too. So far, on a “secondary PC” but it’s going so well that I will probably do it on the primary one as soon as something bad happens to it.
Congratulations!
Nice! I left Windows behind a few months ago as well. Had been dual booting Ubuntu and Windows since Windows 7.
Tried to primarily game on Ubuntu about a decade ago but it just didn’t work out well at the time so I had to keep Windows around. Fast forward to this past year with Windows 10 quickly approaching EoL and (me personally) not being a fan of the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu I started looking at other options.
Ended up learning about Bazzite and haven’t looked back. Was able to play almost my entire game’s library without much effort. I had planned on dual booting two Linux operating systems so I could separate work from play, but decided to stick with one.
I always knew there was still good in you.
Congratulations!
As someone who dual booted, I agree, don’t bother. If you’ve got any important files, back em up to a cloud or something, and wipe. Dual booting gave me so many issues, and eventually I broke my windows install somehow anyway. Just go with a full wipe, it’ll save you a Lotta trouble.
Depending on the distro, look that Vulkan is set up.
Some tips for lazy Linux gaming setup:
Install flatpak and flatpak steam
Install the ProtonPlus flatpak if you need custom proton versions for some games, I usually just add the latest proton-ge and don’t have to bother with anything else
Fedora, Arch, EndeavourOS, Nobara and Bazzite are all pretty good bases for a gaming setup. They all have their pain points so I’d boot a couple and see how you like them before making a decision.
I wouldn’t describe rolling release distros where you need to fix breakages for lazy gamers.
99% of breakages on a rolling release distro are solved by downgrading the broken package until a fix lands so it’s not much worse than windows. You want to be chasing recent releases of pretty much everything if you want the best performance for gaming. You could run Debian but you’ll be waiting 18mo for any new performance improvements to land.
They’re specifically talking about being lazy though.
Install the Steam deck OS and pray I guess, they’ll curate Arch for you
Exciting! Sort of interestingly, I never dual booted or anything, I just jumped straight to Linux.
Honestly, it’s really not that bad. Linux has come a long way since I started out, and while I usually make it harder for myself than it needs to be, I’ve seen young middle schoolers installing and using Linux, I’ve seen retired professional musicians with no technical background install and use Linux. Especially with all these new fancy atomic desktops, like Silverblue, Bazzite, and Kinoite. Admittedly, I have managed to break a Kinoite installation (doing stuff I probably shouldn’t have been doing), but fixing it felt magical. Just roll back to when it wasn’t borked, then update it.
I did a lot of not so nice things to that installation (it was a bit of a test, to see how fragile it was), and it’s still running now!
I’ve used linux on the side for years. In my experience, people talking about it usually forget to mention issues that might be fatal flaws for someone. Like audio sources not being saved between reboots or monitor resolution seeming a bit off. You have to go in expecting problems and being comfortable with that. If you’re the kind of person that’s going to blame linux when the first thing goes wrong, it will and you’ll want to go back to windows. And then windows will also have problems but more people will be able to help you.
Same for me! Happily used Nobara for the Season start of my main game Path of Exile and will never look back. Btw is it your main game too by any chance? I was also worried to switch because for that game you need some community tools to work properly. Had a few bugs but it all works perfectly now.
