Well in my case I get intermittent audio issues in games like the classic Alan Wake. Audio will disappear for like 4 seconds straight then work as usual for 30 seconds only to repeat again. Can be very infuriating if it’s in the middle of an important dialog.
That’s what im going to use daily use anyway and for gaming as well but that because fedora doesn’t detect my wifi drivers at least opensuse slowroll is looking good for a backup os
I’m a Linux virgin and I’m working to install my first distro ever this week. Ngl, it’s daunting. I’m not tech illiterate but damn it’s so hard to know where to even start
EDIT: got lots of replies while I was trying to save my WSL2 files from before I upgraded windows (unsuccessfully) but I’ve been eyeing nobara and will give it a try tomorrow or friday, thx for all the replies
EDIT2: hoping to learn how to dual-boot with separate drives before actually installing
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has worked well on my laptop running lighter games. I’ve not tried anything on my main PC yet because I’m honestly worried about compatibility* but OPs’ post gave me hope.
I fired up Horizon Zero Dawn by clicking play. Which is wild compared to back when I tried to understand wine for Word back on 12.04. Super slick! Ubuntu 23.04 with Steam flatpak.
Someone responded that you should install a gaming centric distro for your first rodeo. We’re all entitled to an opinion, but I couldn’t disagree more.
Linux Mint. It’s a breeze to install, and it’ll help you learn without being too intense until you’re ready to graduate to EndeavourOS or vanilla arch. Mint is the perfect place to get your sea legs.
Keep good backups of anything you care about, so you can let yourself make mistakes and learn in the command line. Wipe and reinstall is a viable option when you break shit, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll get good at configuring your system back to where you had it before you broke it. Takes me like 20 minutes.
I had issues at one point, but it was right after a major version release, and they were fixed not long after. Mint is my number one recommendation to anyone getting started. If I ever get tired of a rolling release, it’s likely what I’ll go back to.
@netchami@XenoStare I feel like devs who make games for windows and apple should use the open source tools to port their games to Linux, I.e steam. There needs to be some formate where we can play games on the deck that are deck compatible without steam. Hell, without heroic, too.
What you described is not a Linux-specific problem, it’s the exact same on Windows. What major games nowadays are available outside of Steam, Origin, Battle.net or Epic Games? Practically none. (Except maybe for Minecraft and Runescape)
I check for every game if I can get it on gog.com instead before I buy on steam, except if multiplayer would lock me into my gog friendlist. There’s some surprising stuff over there, not only ancient games.
Welcome! I made the leap not long ago as well. I’m using Linux Mint, and I’ve had a great experience with it (including gaming).
My recommendation: when you get to installing games, use something like Lutris or PlayOnLinux. These are frontends (like Steam) that will help manage any special configurations you might need. They can even connect to online sources and apply settings that have worked for other people. I’ve been using Lutris and it’s been pretty good (I’ve been playing a lot of BG3 lately, runs like a dream).
I’ve been using Linux for ~14 years and am not a computer person at all. Of all the distros, Linux Mint is by far the easiest, most intuitive, and works without problems. I think that the installation is even easier than Windows. There’s also a large supportive community in case you should into any problems, abd because it’s tailored for newer users, whatever problem you run into has likely already been resolved by someone else.
My personal favorite at the moment is KDE Neon tho.
So far I’ve tried Debian12 on my old laptop and Mint on my self hosting rig. I think I’ll sping so VMs and test new distros before commiting to a full install. I wasn’t too happy with Mint because its boot time is much slower than Debian on a comparatively better machine so I’m not too tempted to go for it again. But maybe I messed up something and caused slow boot times.
Yeah, Mint will tend to be a little slower than Debian since Mint is Debian plus Ubuntu plus Mint. If you’re looking for speed, LMDE or XFCE desktop environments would be the quickest. Of those 2, LMDE might be faster, but it’s almost a bare bones GUI. XFCE might be just a little slower, but the GUI will be more adjustable.
I’ve been crucified for mentioning this before. But Bottles is another alternative that allows easy configuration of Wine prefixes for gaming. It is another alternative worth considering, not better or worse, just different.
Start with something generic. Maybe not Ubuntu because of their recent hijinks. But something like Debian or Linux Mint. Just because it makes troubleshooting so much easier when because you can Google problems more easily.
Yeah, this kinda gives the impression of this old stereotypical Linux image as a gaming platform where we all just play Tux Racer and weird Solitaire clones.
If I was a newbie shopping around for a DE, I would probably be perusing websites like kde.org to get a feel for the visual style and features and such
I agree. It’s bragging about a bunch of things that either aren’t part of KDE or aren’t really gaming. It’s like if MS made a “Gaming on Windows” page to advertise solitaire, minesweeper, pinball, and Steam.
Once my mental health doesn’t suck so bad anymore, i am considering to use SteamOS (or ChimeraOS where SteamOS is not officially available). Alternatively Kubuntu, because Ubuntu has the most help resources. May not be as fancy as a runit based system like Void Linux but it’s fine.
Perhaps, but many people don’t realize that “Add Non-Steam Game” also gives you a Proton prefix on Linux, as if it were a Steam game. Can be used for non-DRM games or even another launcher and keep everything relatively tidy.
Didn’t get my favorite Sims games to run on Void. And my mental health is so bad, i can hardly deal with failures while tinkering, which is necessary on Linux in conjunction with Windows gaming.
Tons of Windows based gaming handhelds already exist from Asus, Lenovo, Aya, GPD, etc. I’d doubt Microsoft releasing one, hypothetical Valve acquisition or not, would set the world on fire.
Knowing good old M$, though, if they tried it they’d make it some kind of Xbox product.
Yeah, but SteamOS is definitely a better OS. A lighter OS specifically. The Steam Deck, while being powerful, isn’t exactly too powerful and having Windows on it isn’t optimal.
Luckily GPD (i think) offers SteamOS for their devices and i do want to buy a Win Mini.
Maybe you just haven’t found the right distro that made you feel at home. If you’re still willing to try, experiment with a bunch of different distros, then use the one you like the most for an extended period of time (weeks instead of days) to build familiarity. Resist the urge to boot windows during that period and try to do everything on Linux.
I did try Void initially. Void Linux doesn’t have much resources but they did have an IRC chat willing to help… albeit with a little dont ask to ask schtick. I actually installed Void on a few of my devices for a while to try and get my favorite games to run.
Aaaanyway i encountered some weirdness like being able to install a game one time and then not anymore after installing Void on the internal SSD. I didn’t get my favorite Sims games to work and tried various Proton configurations… It was sad. My ex gf told me to buy a graphics card for my GPD Win 2, which has an Intel HD 600. I could but first i’d have to somehow make this thing compatible to Thunderbolt. Intel HD graphics aren’t exactly good but “buy a graphics card” sucks as an answer too, even if in jest.
I do still want to switch to Linux later once my mental health is better. And perhaps once i got the new Win Mini with integrated AMD graphics. I think GPD actually offers SteamOS for their devices so that’s a distro i may want to give a shot. I do love the SteamOS interface and the KDE desktop.
There were a lot of problems getting proton to work on NTFS, but that’s only because the COMPATDATA directory must not be located on NTFS. Worked fine the moment you symlinked COMPATDATA to your ext4 drive.
There was a time, where this problem got discussed almost weekly on reddit.
That mainlined ntfs driver is fast but occasionally drilles holes in ntfs so I have to chkdsk on Windows. Also NTFS is not mount & play, you need to configure it with right permissions etc.
Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.
I’ll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I’ve never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
You can run windows in a vm in linux yes, with the caveat specifically for gamers that games with overzealous anti cheat can detect that they are running in a VM.
No need for windows to game anymore, steam/proton, lutrus and wine handle what I need just fine these days. This is more about using Microsoft excel as I have some union business that operates out of an excel file and Google sheets and libreoffice do not play nice with all the macros going on in it. Literally just to run excel.
I joke it runs faster than on bare metal but because you don't use it for everything and can in fact have a fresh install for each program it probably does.
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That’s a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn’t work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.
Btw, the web versions of MS Office are completely free when opening files on a personal, unpaid OneDrive via the web interface at onedrive.live.com
The web versions are literally the thing that Teams launches when you share and open documents there. Teams and the US’s obsession with Chromebooks at school are probably the driving factors behind improving Office Web. Benefit for non-ChromeOS Linux users is surely just coincidental (kinda like Adobe Express).
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