Just a pet peeve of myself and probably plenty of other Linux users/fans. This phrasing makes it sound like there's way more incompatible games than there are.

https://www.protondb.com/

Out of the top 1000 games on Steam only 21 don't work on Linux. I personally wouldn't call that "plenty". And for most of those games, the devs actively chose to make the game incompatible with Linux and Proton.

I get that the games you want to play aren't compatible, and that makes you not willing to use Linux. That's good and valid, and I have nothing against that. It's just annoying when people (usually accidentally) exaggerate game compatibility issues on Linux.

There's something to be said about the fact that I'm not super comfortable with doing everything with commands and am used to GUIs

I'd like to add that this is somewhat outdated information. While there are some distros where you still need the CLI a lot (mainly server distros), many of the mainstream distros have enough GUI support that 99% of users don't need to touch the CLI. I switched to Nobara a few weeks ago and I haven't needed to use the CLI yet.

It's not the world's smoothest transition.

Another thing to note is that the transition doesn't have to be a hard break. Many people dip their toes into Linux by dual booting. That being said, there's some pitfalls, namely not keeping Windows and Linux on the same drive, since Windows has a habit of deleting the bootloaders of other OS's during updates.

But, as I said earlier, it's fine if you want to stay on Windows. I just want to clarify some misunderstandings you seem to have about Linux

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

It's mostly any game that has anti-cheat in it though isn't it. It's all well and good to say that only 21 games don't work, but if they are the top most played games then it's a bit of a problem.

I know it's not Linux as fault that the games don't work, but it's daft to suggest that you can just brush it aside as not a concern. I have a steam deck so if a game is Linux supported I'll just play it on that but until kennel level anti cheat is sorted (preferably by just getting rid of it) at least personally I'll have to stick to windows on my desktop.

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 13 hours ago

Spot on, though I will admit, the gaming working as well as it does is a pretty recent development to be fair, and everyone (especially not people who don't use linux) may not be up to date on that info.

Also to the CLI, sure you may not need it as much as you used to, it isn't "doing everything with commands" anymore, but I'll be honest claims of "never needing it" are often exaggerated on the other end. In reality, most linux users will still need to use it sometimes, varying by usecase and distro. To that end, I will say, before I switched myself this was the largest thing holding me back, but I'd heard it had gotten better, and windows was changing shit on me so often that I figured "if I'm gonna relearn X on windows every month I might as well just bite the bullet and learn linux instead." I watched a few videos on youtube after searching "bash basics" and "linux terminal basics" and followed along like it was a basic computer class teaching use of Powerpoint, and within a couple hours (maybe three) I was not just "no longer scared" but almost comfortable in the terminal. Doing this has greatly improved my experience over the years of running linux and I recommend it to all newcomers even if you then still avoid it after, if just for a passing familiarity. Basically: "Only use sudo carefully, and always keep a backup of any important files, so if you do break your shit you only lose the time it takes to reinstall. Also you can use timeshift or snapper." These days I'll even open up a terminal inside of my GUI file browser sometimes, I love the CLI now.

As to dual booting, I like to recommend either if your laptop has two drives dedicate one to each OS, or if not, linux will run on a potato, if you or anyone you know is going to upgrade PCs because "it runs too slow," no it doesn't, that's just windows' bloat. Take the old HW for free or cheap and slap an appropriately weighted distro on it, then use it to learn while you still have your main, then when you realize how much better it is just switch your main over too, it's free!