You should prepare yourself to be the car enthusiast of computer users when thinking of using Linux at all, especially for gaming. You are the car but of computing when you dip into Arch based or other similar distributions. You will spend time looking at parts of the OS most people take for granted and can spend as much time as you want fiddling with tiny bits of the OS to tube it to whatever you want. So really it depends on what experience you want.
One of the great things about Linux is picking your distro. However, I’d suggest sticking with the latest version of Ubuntu desktop if you want to game.
Way more users means problems get solved there first (after Steam Deck, of course). File system support is good, and while I don’t use NTFS partitions anymore, they worked fine for me. The user count also means larger communities of support.
If down the road you want to branch out, go for it! But play it safe for now. If you’re used to Windows, install WinTile and Dash-to-Panel extensions in GNOME to make things familiar.
KDE is better than GNOME for Windows familiarity. GNOME feels like it’s trying to emulate the experience of MacOS while KDE feels like it’s trying to give a Windows-like experience.
That is a classical windows mentality. “gnome is cheap macos clone”. Gnome tries just to create a minimal and distraction free and polished DE. KDE tries to bulldose as many features as possible and that sacrifices stability and UX. Analogy would be similar to having a leaky water pipe in the roof. Gnome would fix the leaking pipe meanwhile KDE would give you a bucket and a few towels to clean that up in different ways.
I am heavily considering switching to Linux aswell (though from Windows). I guess I would just spin up a VM if I need to run something I can’t get to work on bare matal Linux.
Yeah, dual booting meant Windows for me. I was just more comfortable with it. On the other hand some people have something to do compared to me at that time. Taking the time to learn how to do sth. on Linux isn’t always possible.
Dualbooting is a great start for most people who want to switch but USB sticks have cheap storage controllers so they will die insanly fast if you put that kind of load on them permanentely and it will probably be slower than a HDD.
I thought about dualboot using two SSDs, one for linux, one for Windows and a VM on linux using the physical Windows SSD. Don’t know if it is really possible though…
Been using it the last 2 years and I find it great. Before that it was Mint about 5 years and PopOS about 2. Don’t think I will ever go back to a Debian based distro
It’s been good for me. It has broke a couple of times, but it seemed pretty in par for any Linux distro. For me it was time to re-install. It has a cool package called “gnome-layout-switcher” that mimics popular desktops.
I moved because Debian was somewhat boring, Ubuntu was busy trying to make stuff nobody wanted. RPM based distros were bought by Oracle or IBM and felt like “old hat”, ha ha sorry. Arch was the goal but I was feeling lazy so Manjaro it was. I’ll probably try another Arch based distro because pacman tools are pretty good.
Have you considered something like a Steam Deck. It’s a full a Linux instance, optimized for gaming but you can also hook up a keyboard+monitor and run traditional apps in desktop mode. I think most of the games mentioned are listed as playable on Deck (though large Skylines games might have issues with 16GB memory).
I switched to linux before the steam deck came out, and things were already pretty good then, but it’s even better now that more folks are invested in it. Since then, I haven’t come across any steam games I have major issues with - however, I still have issues getting my controller running (I don’t use it often though, so I haven’t really looked into that much) and on certain games I have issues if I switch windows while it’s running. Generally for me, if it runs, it runs well, aside from occasional issues from needing more ram. It looks like we have similar cpu’s, and you have a better graphics card and more ram than me. I can’t speak for everything on your list, but I did play some civ fairly recently without any problems. Check protondb for the games you play most before making the switch - and if you’re worried, check lower rated games on there for examples of issues and fixes. I suspect it would be fine for you to switch.
My recommendation would be to have Linux on the 500gb drive and then install windows directly on the other drive without partitioning. I wouldn’t install Linux on a partition as Windows likes to mess with the bootloader but if Linux is on it’s own drive you can always boot it from EFI without issues.
I haven’t seen this one before but now I have to thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’m gonna try and find some time to apply it to one of my devices and see if I run into the same flicker issues with Debian/Mint systems
I’ve tried to set up rEFInd but couldn’t get the proper configs / kernel parameters to work for my LUKS-enabled setup. If you’re willing to try another loader out, I was able to make systemd-boot work with both plymouth (flicker-less loading), luks (with graphical prompt), and secure boot too.
Oh man that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for: dual-booting two distros, one encrypted, all with secure boot and a nice graphical boot process. I just went through the fiasco of rebuilding my EFI partition and grub setups. Is switching to systemd-boot much harder?
Follow the Arch wiki. Just make sure that your distro has a hook for the package manager for signing the kernel. Eg. for Arch there’s the systemd-boot-pacman-hook aur package.
It’s not hard to set it up with a LUKS-enabled system, just put the relevant kernel parameters in your /esp/loader/entries/entry.conf file.
For example, here’s my arch.conf entry (with LVM on LUKS):
Gaming on Linux is definitely there. Most people saying otherwise simply haven’t tried it recently enough. For the last year or so, the experience has been largely flawless. There’s the occasional game that needs a flip to Proton Experimental or a launch option; even more occasionally the need for special Proton until Valve’s version catches up. But the work that has been done to get Linux gaming at parity with Windows definitely shows.
Frankly, on AMD, the experience is better than Windows. Less overhead and never have to worry about video drivers since they’re in the kernel. I’ll happily switch to Experimental occasionally as a tradeoff.
If you are looking for cheap storage, i recommend you check out diskprices.com . At least it helped me sometimes to find the disk with a low price per TB.
You can make Ubuntu based distros without including snaps. E.g. Linux Mint removes them as well as Rhino Linux. Canonical has made some questionable decisions but one thing Ubuntu does well is drivers and hardware support.
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