First: nice AI gen image. Dude apparently has a weird relationship with mice.
That said:
Maybe, just maybe, my insights could simplify someone else’s path into the world of Linux.
I don’t think distro hopping would really simplify anyone’s path to using Linux, especially not with family members who just want to use computers to get stuff done.
I think it makes a lot more sense to just pick one popular distro, and walk through any issues you have with that. That way you build up a bunch of tips and tricks, instead of just war stories about what sucked on the surface.
That said, thanks for writing about Linux! Honestly anything helps in getting people interested.
Thanks for your input. Part of the reason I’m focusing on Fedora and Fedora derived distros right now is specifically for that reason. To give new people a path to gaming success. Windows 10 and 11 basically proved Microsoft is going to monetize at any cost. Gaming has been the primary reason people stay on Windows, and that isn’t necessary anymore.
I think Nobara is the distro for gaming. its easy to use, has a brilliant and supportive discord thats friendly to the new/unknowing, and all the gaming headaches (like steamtinkerlaunch that require compiling from scratch on a certain other popular semi-default distro) are all ready and raring to go, either from the get go, or via a simple and easy tool.
I’ve been on linux for a relatively short time. only 6ish+ years? hard to remember off the top of my head. and Nobara is legitimately the best experience I’ve had out of everything I’ve tried.
Not going to base my personality around or become obnoxious about pushing it, but its definite the most click and go distro for gaming that i’ve seen.
Just Linux for me…I haven’t used windows since windows 7. I’m probably going to sell my steam deck though because it mostly just sits in the case on top of my computer (where I usually play since my computer is plugged into my 50 inch bedroom TV. But the stream deck is nice and fun to play with.
I disagree with it, but the premise is that they cant be upgraded so they are stuck at a set spec, they struggle with heating and dust issues, they make a lot of sacrifices due to needing to fit into a laptop size, and they basically need to be plugged in 24/7 which bites at the portability.
All valid points, but also all acceptable trade offs if you need a portable and flexible machine.
Upgrading or cleaning a laptop means opening up the laptop. Anyone who has opened a tower and a laptop will attest, the laptop is a nightmare to deal with and the tower is much simpler.
Depends on the laptop. For some it’s just unscrewing the bottom. Gaming notebooks aren’t the super slim ones. They tend to be easier to open than their ultrabook cousins.
Even on a lot of non-gaming laptops. I can’t say that I’ve loved the dells I’ve had, but I can’t fault them for their repairability. Cleaning out the fans, swapping memory, storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, all just a dozen screws to remove the bottom panel and access all of that.
But you can’t upgrade the two most important components: CPU and GPU. So if your gaming laptop isn’t cutting it, you need to buy a new one, you can’t just upgrade the component that’s causing bottlenecks.
So a gaming laptop is likely to be much more expensive than a non-gaming laptop. My E-series Lenovo ThinkPad cost $400-500, which is about half the cost compared to entry gaming laptops. I haven’t once cleaned the fan, and it’s still doing well a few years later (my kids play Lego games and Minecraft on it).
So for my money, I go with a Steam Deck for games and an inexpensive laptop with integrated graphics for everything else. Total cost is ~$1k.
I have both a steam deck and a slim gaming laptop like the ones that company sells. It’s different, while I mostly game on my deck some games just aren’t good with a controller, and since I’ll be taking a laptop with me anyways why not take one that can also play games?
Mostly because battery life tends to suck. I can still play games like Minecraft and most indie games on my iGPU (esp if you go AMD), so it’s not like there aren’t options, I just won’t be playing larger AAA games on it.
I haven’t shopped too much either, but in the past, gaming laptops were significantly more expensive and often had quality issues vs business-style laptops. I quickly checked prices online, and “inexpensive” gaming laptops seem to start around $1k for a 4060 tier GPU. That’s the price of a decent business laptop (should last 5+ years) and a Steam Deck. You’ll probably want to upgrade the Steam Deck way before the business laptop, so it should help with costs longer term (and by then you’ll probably want a desktop PC anyway).
Anyway, that’s my take. I personally don’t see a point to gaming laptops, for the game money, I’d rather have two dedicated devices.
Actually battery life of gaming laptops is really good, because it’s made to hold a discrete GPU which can usually be turned off, I used to get around 6h of battery for day-to-day stuff in my gaming laptop when I recently bought it, I haven’t used it outside of a plug for a while so I assume the battery would be in a bad state today.
I get the point of having to upgrade the whole system every few years, and that they’re more expensive, but if you need portability a desktop is not viable, e.g. I moved countries a few years ago and I’ll move again in a short while, a desktop is just not practical for me. Plus I’ve had my laptop for 4 years, which is much longer than my deck.
So if I want to play games that I have issues with playing on my deck, like Doom or Cities Skylines I play them on the laptop. Granted, I could plug a keyboard and mouse to my deck, but like I mentioned I already had the laptop for years when the deck came out.
It’s only good if you have a massive battery, which means increased weight and size. I can get that same 6+ hours in a much smaller, cheaper package.
portability
I can see that.
That said, if the concern is only moving, a SFFPC can be very easy to pack. Monitors can be a pain, so if I knew I was going to move, I’d just sell those and buy new wherever I was moving. It’s just not worth the hassle unless they’re really nice.
It used to be more interesting back when LAN parties were a common thing, but AFAIK, most kids have moved to online. When I was younger, LAN parties had already switched to retro games w/o servers like OG Doom and Quake with mods, and those can run on a potato.
But honestly, my go-to is a highly portable laptop and a handheld gaming system, either a Switch or Steam Deck. That combo should be cheaper than a gaming laptop and more ergonomic. If you want to play games those systems can’t handle, a desktop PC + portable laptop should be competitive in price (like $1500-2000 combined), and should be cheaper long term.
That said, use what you have. I’m just saying that a Linux gaming laptop is kind of silly since it’s not going to handle many different games than a Steam Deck, and it’s going to be less comfortable to use than a more portable laptop and a handheld PC.
Obviously get what you want, I just don’t see much of a point these days when we have more options.
Yeah, but they’re sometimes the best option anyway. I wouldn’t use one for any length of time for gaming, but I have the luxury of not having to leave home much, and almost never for extended time. Back when I was still able to work, a laptop for gaming would have made sense on the long overnight shifts (the job has lots of downtime, and limited limitations on how it was filled).
Folks that travel a lot are in a similar boat.
Folks that can only have one PC and need it to be portable are reliant on laptops totally.
Yeah, even the best of them aren’t ideal, but they’re sensible for various use cases.
I’m pretty sure an inexpensive laptop + Steam Deck would be about the same price (or less!) as a gaming laptop.
I got my E-series ThinkPad a few years ago for $400-500 (E495, first AMD ThinkPad E series), and my Steam Deck for $530. So I paid about $1k for the pair. Gaming laptops start around $1k and go up from there.
It works well for me, but then I don’t need a GPU for my non-gaming laptop use, so I can get away with it. YMMV depending on what you need the laptop to do.
Lol, funny you mention that, because that’s pretty much my setup: A steamdeck and an XPS 15 that I got used like 5 years ago. The only problem is that I don’t really like single player games, so between steam-Xbox cross play and anticheat it’s hard to find things to play with my Xbox friends. But yeah the steamdeck is an insane bang for your buck
It absolutely makes sense. For us who want to game but also need a computer to do day to day work and meetings. I’m not buying two computers, so what I buy for work is what I have to game with.
Cuz they’re crazy expensive, not very powerful, power through batteries in a matter of minutes, and they require you to carry GIANT power supplies, which makes them poor for portability anyway.
I’m not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I’m feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it’s so smooth.
When first switching to Linux I tried Pop!_os and it was awful was a headache to get anything to work … switched to Ubuntu and all my problems went away , I don’t recommend using pop .
I haven’t tried fedora myself and at this point I don’t want to mess with what is working great for me . I did have some issues with it freezing when idle but that was fixed with a kernel update.
For me it was the reverse. Pop was the clear winner for several reasons. Plus I like System76 overall. I vigorously recommend Pop as a beginner/gaming choice.
But honestly, Ubuntu vs PopOS should not have been that different for you - they are extremely similar. Pop is cleaner with less bloat, and not beholden to Canonical.
To each their own of course, and having options is what makes switching great.
My wife’s laptop crapped out so I threw pop os (previously had arch on it) and made profiles for both of us. Lets her play the few games that she likes, and Firefox is the same. It’s made for an easy transition from windows to Linux for her. Ubuntu would probably be just as easy overall, but she likes the tiling too since it’s very helpful on a small screen (arch + bspwm is my main driver so I wasn’t going to give up tiling)
This may be a YMMV situation. I’m not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I’ve tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)… Anyone know if that’s a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?
(Also, sorry you’re getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)
I had a bunch of issues and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got to the point that steam wouldn’t even work anymore and couldn’t get any games to launch. I’m not worried about upvotes so it’s all good lol .
You can even tunnel your hardware directly to the VM, e.g. graphics card and have like a 2% loss on the virtualization side. Not much of a deal, if you know what you’re doing. Bonus: You can restrict the VMs network, do external backups etc.
Isn’t that just a dual boot with extra steps? Or are you saying you could have a SW rendered Linux GUI while Windows is using the GPU, then switch Linux to use the GPU later? I thought there were lots of issues with swapping GPUs between host and VM without a reboot?
It’s just like a dual boot but slightly faster. You also don’t need to worry about having two drives, messing around with partitions or having Windows overwrite your boot loader.
As you pass your GPU to the VM, Linux can’t use it anymore so all you see on your screen is the VM. When you start and shutdown the VM, a script runs to prepare the VM to boot or to hand over the GPU back to the host.
So can you launch it straight from a graphical desktop and just suspend the graphical bits somehow? Or do you need to drop to a vtty first? Does it work properly when loading from a snapshot, or do you have to boot each time?
I don’t need to use Windows very often, but it would be nice to run a script to get into it, then he back where I was after closing out.
You can launch it from virt-manager or from the command line providing you run the script first manually.
The script will kill the display manager and unload the drivers ready to give the GPU to the VM so any GUI programs you have open will be instantly closed.
Regarding snapshots I’m not sure about this as I don’t use them but I have a feeling that libvirt doesn’t support snapshots with passed through devices.
It also probably also packages spring, an RTS engine – originally TA Spring, based on Total Annihilation, and it looks like it’s also on Steam. Can play a couple of RTSes that use it, like Zero-K, which is similar to Total Annihilation.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad game, but that game is absolutely ancient, and he has “Relatively modern with decent graphics (something that looks nice)”.
Check out the definitive Edition then which was released in 2019, the latest DLC with new civilizations was added a week ago. It’s a fantastic game with a large active community around it.
I don’t know how it runs on Linux, but as a casual AoE fan it’s in my opinion the best AoE game. It stays true to its roots, but basically does almost everything just better. Units can stand on walls, civs all play different, graphics are fine, and it maintains the AoE feeling that made all the older games good.
Starcraft 2 is the solid bet, the campaign teaches you a lot.
But Supreme commander forged alliance for just a crazy amount of fun, almost 20 year old game and still has the game play to keep you landed, and they have YouTube games online.
As a casual RTS player I never really liked SC2 too much, at least in multiplayer. It’s one of those games where you get instantly punished when you don’t play optimally. In AoE or Supreme Commander or something I can at least build a base in peace for a while before I get absolutely destroyed.
Edit: I agree with forged alliance though. It runs on Linux and is an awesome game. Great sense of scale, and also nice for casual play
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