Experience: I have a bit of experience with Linux. I started around 2008, distro-hopped weekly, decided on Debian until around 2011, when I switched to Windows as I started getting interested in gaming. Tried switching back around 2015, this time using Arch Linux for about a month, but had some bad experiences with gaming and switched back to Windows. I have had a Debian and Arch VM in Virtual Box since then for testing different applications and a more coherent environment to work with servers.
Understanding: Which brings me to now, I am really interested in using Linux for gaming, I know there is Proton from Valve and that they have been really pushing Linux gaming forward with it.
Thoughts: I have been contemplating dual booting by installing Debian to an SSD and simply using the UEFI boot menu to choose instead of having to install to the EFI of Windows.
I guess, I should just do it, as it won’t affect my Windows installation, and I could test different games and if all works well, move over. This would also allow me to try different distributions, though my heart is for Debian, I even like Debian Unstable.
Note: I am sorry for the wall of text, I am just kind of anxious I guess.
Long story short, it REALLY depends on the games. The vast majority of them will work perfectly fine, but there are a few that will have weird things, and a few that will not work at all. The problem is that the ones that won’t work at all are competitive multiplayer, so if you’re into that you’re going to have a bad time, if not it’s very likely that almost anything you try will just work (quite a few games are better with ProtonGE, more as a heads up than anything).
iv moved to linux for over a year now when proton started getting rlly good and iv enjoyed it so much i started a small youtube channel lmao. software has gotten rlly good aswell in the foss universe with package managers like flatpak and some amazing gtk4 apps
gaming on linux is a breeze and with valve making more deals to get companies to support proton for linux/steamdeck
its going to continue to get better and better until windows will not be required anymore
Just lower your expectations and dive in. Unless there is a specific game that you REALLY want to play… then search if (your most wanted game) 100% works on linux and then do it.
All in all, its just a matter of not expecting much and be willing to ditch some things here and there. Get used to “do it yourself” and you’ll be fine.
The games that don’t work are typically (not exclusively) games with anti-cheat systems or live service games. Most everything else works out of the box on Steam with Proton.
Been running Arch exclusively on my gaming rig for 3 months, now, with no issue. Thanks to Proton, the only blocker is games that use anti-cheat solutions that don’t work properly. Everything that’s relied on VAC or EAC work fine, though.
This is my third attempt at making this move on my gaming rig. The first try was back in 2016. The second was in 2018. This time, I think I’m here to stay. The Steam Deck’s success was the final ingredient.
The steam deck is almost entirely responsible for my migration to Linux, am in a similar boat to you of having attempted a number of times and written it off as impossible to use for gaming
Bought a steam deck (and received it a year later lol) and that was what made me want to give it another go. Now I don’t even have windows installed on my PC and boot into it on my laptop maybe once a month to test something for work
I would say yes. I wanted my desktop to run linux in 2015, but the gaming situation was the biggest hurdle. I had been running linux on my laptop since ~2013, but I was constantly trying new games and couldn’t tell friends “sorry, I can’t run that, we have to pick something else”. These days, 99% of everything I want to play runs fine using proton on arch. There are occasional times that I need to try a different build of proton, or suffer a bit of pipeline compilation, but that’s about it. I don’t do a lot of modern competitive games though, so anti-cheat might be a deal breaker for you. I’ve been able to do some EAC games without issue though (ex. Hunt: Showdown runs fine).
@teawrecks@mouse gaming on Linux has come such a long way fr. I can count the games I play regularly that still don’t run on Linux one on finger (ie there is one game I still keep windows for), whereas a few years ago it was a 50/50 if a given game ran
That said getting some of those games to run required me to do some pretty heavy tinkering. Genshin for example requires you to download a third party launcher to disable some of the anti cheat checks. So I unfortunately don’t think it’s time to recommend linux wholeheartedly to the everyperson who isn’t very good with tech.
The hard part is, idk if the anti-cheat front on Linux will ever get better than it is. Most anti-cheat fundamentally relies on the user not having root access to everything happening in their machine so that the OS, game dev, and anti-cheat SW can communicate behind the user’s back to make sure no cheats are happening. Meanwhile, Linux is fundamentally about giving the user full control over any part of the OS they want. The two ideas seem mutually exclusive.
Personally, I think if I played on a dedicated Linux gaming device (ex. Steam Deck) I would be ok with giving anti-cheat root access. At that point it’s no different to me than a gaming console. That might be the only feasible solution here.
I’ve been trying Linux since before Ubuntu existed. I switched this year to Crystal Linux (arch based), to make it short: I’m not going back to Windows ever again.
@warmaster Interesting. I’ve been using Manjaro as my primary for a while and I like it a lot but I’ve had some unpleasant interactions asking for help on the forums so I keep an eye out for other options.
Crystal has a Discord server and a bridged Matrix room, support is instantaneous and people are awesome. I’m super happy with it. I also tried Manjaro, I don’t like their GUIs, and their work ethics.
@kratoz29@mouse I have heard this for the last 20 years…but i don’t care . it has been for me since 1995 (when it was really hard to get x-windows going)…started with slackware…
I do this exactly. I have a Pop Os installation on its own drive and the original win 10 drive, plus they each have their own secondary storage drives. I switch using the BIOS but honestly I find myself doing that less and less.
I used to have a larger NTFS storage drive both systems could see but it kept getting marked as read-only so I gave up and just got a fourth one for Pop Os.
Sometimes when I boot up Pop Os after having been in Windows it can’t see any USB devices until after login or until I plug and unplug them.
So there’s some minor annoyances to this setup but at least windows doesn’t overwrite the bootloader every couple updates.
I’m very much considering never getting windows 11 (or 12 lol). The only games I have issues with are some AAA multiplayer games - like Borderlands - and even then they run they just don’t play nice with other players.
I am in doubt about running Linux on my gaming system. As I need it to be as close to 100% compatible as possible for running games. Because I still have a lot of games on Steam that I haven’t finished. So I don’t want to lose the ability to play some of them.
One option if you still want to use both, is a Linux laptop. You could use that as your daily driver and then use Moonlight/Sunshine to stream from your gaming rig to laptop. Use a loopback HDMI plug on the rig and you largely have what amounts to a gaming server on your network.
Average added latency on my setup is 4ms so this works very well. I stream games at 120FPS at 1080p. Then when I’m done playing, I close the window. No dual booting annoyance and fully functional Windows 10.
As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it’s easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I’m using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it’s usable. I’ve found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it’s still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven’t had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren’t displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn’t know what a display server.
If you’re tired of Windows spying on everything you do, this is a great time to switch to Linux. If you believe it’s ok that Windows spies on you because you have nothing to hide, then you need to do some more growing up lol.
It’s a great time to game on linux. I my personally use arch and everything works fine for the games I play be it with steam and lutris. I also have an nvidia 3080 and it works fine.
I recommend pop! Os for your first distro. It’s a very good distro that is newb friendly and it’s ready to go from the first boot.
It’s a perfect time to get your toes wet and there’s plenty of places to get help when your stuck. The popos subreddit is full of people with the knowledge to help and most important here at lemmy.
Long story short, it REALLY depends on the games. The vast majority of them will work perfectly fine, but there are a few that will have weird things, and a few that will not work at all. The problem is that the ones that won’t work at all are competitive multiplayer, so if you’re into that you’re going to have a bad time, if not it’s very likely that almost anything you try will just work (quite a few games are better with ProtonGE, more as a heads up than anything).
iv moved to linux for over a year now when proton started getting rlly good and iv enjoyed it so much i started a small youtube channel lmao. software has gotten rlly good aswell in the foss universe with package managers like flatpak and some amazing gtk4 apps
gaming on linux is a breeze and with valve making more deals to get companies to support proton for linux/steamdeck
its going to continue to get better and better until windows will not be required anymore
Just lower your expectations and dive in. Unless there is a specific game that you REALLY want to play… then search if (your most wanted game) 100% works on linux and then do it.
All in all, its just a matter of not expecting much and be willing to ditch some things here and there. Get used to “do it yourself” and you’ll be fine.
I was suggested to look at ProtonDB, and it looks like all my games will work fine. I will be giving it all a test in the coming days.
The games that don’t work are typically (not exclusively) games with anti-cheat systems or live service games. Most everything else works out of the box on Steam with Proton.
Heck yeah man get in there and get linuxin. I been in the Ubuntu for a year now and it’s great stuff.
Been running Arch exclusively on my gaming rig for 3 months, now, with no issue. Thanks to Proton, the only blocker is games that use anti-cheat solutions that don’t work properly. Everything that’s relied on VAC or EAC work fine, though.
This is my third attempt at making this move on my gaming rig. The first try was back in 2016. The second was in 2018. This time, I think I’m here to stay. The Steam Deck’s success was the final ingredient.
The steam deck is almost entirely responsible for my migration to Linux, am in a similar boat to you of having attempted a number of times and written it off as impossible to use for gaming
Bought a steam deck (and received it a year later lol) and that was what made me want to give it another go. Now I don’t even have windows installed on my PC and boot into it on my laptop maybe once a month to test something for work
I would say yes. I wanted my desktop to run linux in 2015, but the gaming situation was the biggest hurdle. I had been running linux on my laptop since ~2013, but I was constantly trying new games and couldn’t tell friends “sorry, I can’t run that, we have to pick something else”. These days, 99% of everything I want to play runs fine using proton on arch. There are occasional times that I need to try a different build of proton, or suffer a bit of pipeline compilation, but that’s about it. I don’t do a lot of modern competitive games though, so anti-cheat might be a deal breaker for you. I’ve been able to do some EAC games without issue though (ex. Hunt: Showdown runs fine).
@teawrecks @mouse gaming on Linux has come such a long way fr. I can count the games I play regularly that still don’t run on Linux one on finger (ie there is one game I still keep windows for), whereas a few years ago it was a 50/50 if a given game ran
That said getting some of those games to run required me to do some pretty heavy tinkering. Genshin for example requires you to download a third party launcher to disable some of the anti cheat checks. So I unfortunately don’t think it’s time to recommend linux wholeheartedly to the everyperson who isn’t very good with tech.
The hard part is, idk if the anti-cheat front on Linux will ever get better than it is. Most anti-cheat fundamentally relies on the user not having root access to everything happening in their machine so that the OS, game dev, and anti-cheat SW can communicate behind the user’s back to make sure no cheats are happening. Meanwhile, Linux is fundamentally about giving the user full control over any part of the OS they want. The two ideas seem mutually exclusive.
Personally, I think if I played on a dedicated Linux gaming device (ex. Steam Deck) I would be ok with giving anti-cheat root access. At that point it’s no different to me than a gaming console. That might be the only feasible solution here.
I’ve been trying Linux since before Ubuntu existed. I switched this year to Crystal Linux (arch based), to make it short: I’m not going back to Windows ever again.
It all just works. There’s minimal tweaking.
@warmaster Interesting. I’ve been using Manjaro as my primary for a while and I like it a lot but I’ve had some unpleasant interactions asking for help on the forums so I keep an eye out for other options.
Crystal has a Discord server and a bridged Matrix room, support is instantaneous and people are awesome. I’m super happy with it. I also tried Manjaro, I don’t like their GUIs, and their work ethics.
I have heard this is the year of Linux, so I’d say yes /s
@kratoz29 @mouse Every year is the year of Linux. Poor Windows, let’s see when it’s his turn.
It’s the year of the Linux desktop
In other news half life 3 might be coming out soon
As you didn’t include “/s”
I’ll trust you with my heart.
@kratoz29 @mouse I have heard this for the last 20 years…but i don’t care . it has been for me since 1995 (when it was really hard to get x-windows going)…started with slackware…
I do this exactly. I have a Pop Os installation on its own drive and the original win 10 drive, plus they each have their own secondary storage drives. I switch using the BIOS but honestly I find myself doing that less and less.
I used to have a larger NTFS storage drive both systems could see but it kept getting marked as read-only so I gave up and just got a fourth one for Pop Os.
Sometimes when I boot up Pop Os after having been in Windows it can’t see any USB devices until after login or until I plug and unplug them.
So there’s some minor annoyances to this setup but at least windows doesn’t overwrite the bootloader every couple updates.
I’m very much considering never getting windows 11 (or 12 lol). The only games I have issues with are some AAA multiplayer games - like Borderlands - and even then they run they just don’t play nice with other players.
I am in doubt about running Linux on my gaming system. As I need it to be as close to 100% compatible as possible for running games. Because I still have a lot of games on Steam that I haven’t finished. So I don’t want to lose the ability to play some of them.
One option if you still want to use both, is a Linux laptop. You could use that as your daily driver and then use Moonlight/Sunshine to stream from your gaming rig to laptop. Use a loopback HDMI plug on the rig and you largely have what amounts to a gaming server on your network.
Average added latency on my setup is 4ms so this works very well. I stream games at 120FPS at 1080p. Then when I’m done playing, I close the window. No dual booting annoyance and fully functional Windows 10.
As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it’s easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I’m using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it’s usable. I’ve found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it’s still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven’t had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren’t displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn’t know what a display server.
If you’re tired of Windows spying on everything you do, this is a great time to switch to Linux. If you believe it’s ok that Windows spies on you because you have nothing to hide, then you need to do some more growing up lol.
There’s never a bad time to switch to Linux! The best time may have already passed, but the second best time is now!
I love the positivity!
It’s a great time to game on linux. I my personally use arch and everything works fine for the games I play be it with steam and lutris. I also have an nvidia 3080 and it works fine.
I recommend pop! Os for your first distro. It’s a very good distro that is newb friendly and it’s ready to go from the first boot.
It’s a perfect time to get your toes wet and there’s plenty of places to get help when your stuck. The popos subreddit is full of people with the knowledge to help and most important here at lemmy.
If you can handle there being a few games that you just can’t play, the time to switch to Linux began a couple of years ago.