I’m as happy as you all, but having a teenager that starts to mod games, I realize the whole modding ecosystem of many popular games is Windows only.
Many peoples say you should play on pc because of modding. I would say from a Linux perspective, having the modding community switching to Linux is the next big step.
What kinds of things are you having a hard time modding in Linux? I generally stay away from AAA games and especially AAA games that don’t have mod support. There’s gimp. There’s blender. There’s audacity. There’s an abundance of good text editors. Almost every file explorer is easier to use and more powerful than the one in Windows. Java development kit kind of sucks in Linux with that export path variable nonsense that never ever works correctly but other than that, I don’t think I could do half the modding in Windows that I do in Linux.
When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.
An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine’s AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.
You mean mod managers? A lot of those actually still work under WINE and you can even run them in a game’s prefix using Winetricks and Protontricks (which is how a lot of us do it)
It performs exactly as expected, all mod managers really do is automate putting files where they need to go.
Do not use RAID… anything for an OS that is not designed for it*. Especially not RAID 0 (which barely deserves to be called “RAID”) where you are mostly just increasing the odds of a failure taking out all of your data. A good rule of thumb is to have a smaller drive/partition for the OS and then put the vast majority of storage on a separate drive/partition. That way, if the OS fails it is a fast recovery with minimal data loss.
Things may have changed over the years (the last time I tried was four or five years ago?) but I strongly discourage from any form of dual booting. Windows has a tendency to find ways to completely destroy the bootloader with the most random of updates and then you are stuck having to fix grub and the like. I THINK you can get away with putting each on their own partition, but I am a big fan of one OS per drive and just mashing del as you boot up to pick which drive or doing shenanigans with telling the bios what to boot into on the next reboot while still in linux/windows.
(time to piss some folk off!) Honestly? If you are asking these questions, I suggest not going with Arch. It is a really good distro, but it expects a lot more knowledge of linux from users. People around here hate debian/ubuntu with a passion, but do keep an eye out for some more newbie friendly distros to get your feet wet and learn what YOU care about and want from your distro. Bare minimum, consider Manjaro since that tries to put a more user friendly layer over Arch (and kind of succeeds?)
*: And, somewhat controversially, I would argue that any OS that is actually designed around running across multiple drives (beyond “I guess that could work? Maybe?”) is probably not the best choice because… there is pretty much zero reason to ever do this. Storage should definitely be distributed (and redundant). OSes are disposable and any good OS has a way to rapidly recover in the event of a failure or a corruption.
I’m a software engineer, and I know my way around Bash have some familiarity with Linux- mostly Debian. My understanding of how very low leveled stuff happens on my computer is very incomplete though, hence why I ask for help.
If you recommend something that’s not Arch, I’m happy to try it, though.
Typing commands into a terminal and administrating a system are very different beasts. Arch gets a bit of a bad rep, but it very much still considers a desktop to be a “linux system” rather than “a computer”. Ubuntu and Mint tend to be pretty far on the other side of the spectrum as they do their best to make things seamless to the user and put the vast majority of (pertinent) config settings in GUIs and the like.
On its own? Looking up what to run and how to fix problems is not the end of the world. But a lot of the greybeards out there will insist on ONLY answering the specific question asked and nothing related. So you either need to end up cross referencing and researching twelve different aspects of an answer that MAYBE is correct, or you are bowing and asking for help so that said greybeard will paste the rest of the answer they held off on to feel good about themselves. ChatGPT goes a LONG way toward avoiding this, but you still have the “so… is this even correct?” problem that you only really learn from experience and “thinking like a linux distro”
I already suggested Manjaro if you really like Arch but want something more user oriented. But your best bet is to just go browse “linux getting started” on youtube and watch a few videos on the install and configuration process for various distros. You’ll obviously find people who insist you need to be doing manual systemd calls and doing sudo emacs for every config file in Ubuntu, but this should give you a good idea of what the “philosophy” of each distro is. Which then lets you figure out which one(s) you want to try.
Personally? All servers should be Debian or some form of RHEL. As a desktop, I used to use Mint but went back to Ubuntu a year or two back. I don’t want to be a sysadmin when all I want to do is play some games or watch some media and most of my work is on servers or involves manually building out dependencies anyway. But everyone is different and that is the beauty of linux. Hell, you can even be a complete psychopath and insist on using BSD instead (not sure how that works with Steam though).
And if you set up your partitions (or just drives) correctly, changing distros is a 20 minute process with zero data loss. I mean, I am increasingly looking at alternatives because the Ubuntu snap obsession is increasingly pissing me off. Not a huge deal, but also… changing distros is not a huge deal.
Yeah, but as far as I know, if you want to run Linux applications, they run in a virtual machine after you enable and download Linux support in ChromeOS. Otherwise you are limited to the Google Play store.
How much of that unknown is linux tho? I feel like linux computers are most likely to be unidentifiable (ignore the 5 ppl who use templeOS and freeBSD)
The bump in Unknown is Windows. If I recall correctly, there was a Windows update (in March, I believe) that caused it to stop registering as Windows with the site. A subsequent update fixed the problem. That’s why, if you look at another chart on the site, you’ll see an equivalent increase in Unknown as Windows decreases during that same time period. Then it reverses after the update.
This isn’t the whole reason, and likely only a small fraction of it. There are a whole lot of other OSes that don’t fit into these categories, or that simply refuse (on purpose) to share their OS type. That wouldn’t be Windows.
I edited to include the chart I’m talking about (here). It includes a section for Other as well. I’m not saying it’s the whole picture, but it’s the reason for that bump in Unknown which may be increasing the overall percentage depending on when that data in the OP was pulled.
The gaming support is what got me to completely switch to Linux for daily driver. Havnt used windows in 3 years thanks to proton. My computing experience has never been better.
Can I ask what got you initially interested, and were there any speedbumps you had to deal with on the way? As a long-time Linux user, I see a lot of pushback against it from gamers online, and I’m curious to hear about your pathway.
Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.
In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don’t come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.
As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn’t all fun and games for sure.
I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who’s coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren’t interested. It doesn’t help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don’t get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i’m forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.
Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It’s just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.
My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you’re a linux intermediate by default and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.
Did you try the Nvidia version of PopOS? IME the “out of box” experience is loads better than Windows, and the install/configuration takes like 1/4 of the time.
I see – arch just seemed like a huge management pain to get all of my different software stacks working and playing nicely together when I last played with it. It’s also pretty easy to switch desktop environments regardless of your distro, but I don’t mind gnome (plus gnome-tweaks).
Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:
Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu’s approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don’t care about or are already religiously opposed to), but… for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then… that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.
Which kind of gets to the general “religion of linux” as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows… 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.
Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now…). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD’s CPUs… you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).
But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally “just work” outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.
But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.
But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr…), and… updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can’t be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.
Thank you for the recommendations! I don’t mind having some proprietary blobs here and there - as you pointed out, with Steam and the games I was going to run on it, it’s basically necessary anyway, especially with a NVIDIA GPU. However…
I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play.
All in all, that, the drivers being a bit behind on NVIDIA and the few annoyances that happen with external devices (like you pointed out, with a 3rd party controller) are unfortunately exactly the reasons I might not to switch just yet: while it seems to be more convenient to go full Linux for a few things here and there, but if I am going to need Windows, should I really bother keeping both installations? I’d have to buy a new, larger NVMe because my system doesn’t support that for now, reinstall everything anyway… And so far, I’ve been able to do everything I need without needing two parallel systems.
If that was sufficient to make you not want to use linux as a primary desktop: Cool. You would probably have been miserable the first time you had to use a terminal to fix a problem (which very well might be installing steam). It isn’t for everyone
But also: If you don’t think you have a need for windows (no gamepass, no VR, etc) then don’t bother keeping a drive. In my case? I know there is work to get WMR headsets working in steamvr on linux but I use mine maybe once a year at this point so it isn’t a priority to debug. And 8bitdo firmware updates are similarly rare (and I could probably get it working in wine if I cared enough). That basically just leaves gamepass PC for me and time will tell if I even bother to use the PC version of starfield or if I check it out on my xbox and then buy it on sale on steam if I like it.
At the end of the day: you know your needs and use cases. I personally like knowing that I can switch OSes at the speed of a quick reboot, mashing delete, sitting through 5 minutes of updates running, and then switch back in about 60 seconds when I am done. Good 2 TB nvmes have been going for about 100 bucks these days so storage is cheap. I could also have futzed around with partitions to share a drive but… why bother?
I’m a software dev, so I’m already quite used to using the terminal routinely. My current plan is to reconsider if I see an interesting enough NVMe sale - and there are constantly a few these days, so I just might, in the next few weeks.
After all the advice I’ve been getting thanks to this thread, it appears that I would almost be among the best candidates to switch: I mostly play single player games, nothing with anti-cheat and no VR, I’m having heavy doubts that I still need anything Windows-centric. The main downside I still see is the performance hog with an Nvidia GPU.
I have an Nvidia GPU and have had no problem playing BG3 or Diablo IV, for instance. Nvidia drivers are a lot better than they used to be, at least by my estimation.
I had the same problem on steam deck, I solved it by launching the game in desktop mode, force stop it on steam launcher after a few seconds, move back to game mode, change the layout from community to official layout and it work absolutely fine 👌
Amen. Folks seem to forgot the many other aspects that makes a game good in exchange of focusing on the least important aspect – how well s/he will play the game.
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