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Today, I left windows behind for good (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 months ago by lorty@lemmy.ml to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml
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I did it. For a few years now I've wanted to make the jump but lazyness and a bit of worry that my main game wouldn't work very well kept me from it.

Then some effing windows update caused ridiculous stuttering on games (or maybe it was a auto-update of some other hidden thing, I couldn't figure it out) so I decided that if I needed a system wipe, might as well as try gaming on linux.

Honestly? Much easier than I expected. Install Steam, turn two options on and 90% of your library is ready to go. I had to tinker with getting freesync to work (ended up just switching to wayland, which just worked) but other than the plugins I use for my main game requiring a bit of more work, smooth as butter really.

So yeah, if you are a lazy gamer like I am, next time you do a system wipe or get a new computer, try installing linux first. Don't even bother Dual booting it, if you don't like it just reinstall (setup your usb drive with ventoy and the images you want to try out.)

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[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 2 months ago (20 children)

I’m a pretty tech savvy guy but not a “coder” by any stretch. Pretty comfortable using terminal commands so long as the instructions are clear.

I’m considering building a gaming PC within the next 6 to 12 months, and I pretty much want it to be strictly a Linux machine for gaming. I want my hardware to work out of the box as much as possible and maximum compatibility with my games with minimal tinkering. Again I can handle getting some things to work, installing drivers, tinkering with game settings. But a lot of what has kept me from going whole hog into PC gaming is I am a dad with a full-time job and sometimes I just want to fire up and start playing. Steam deck has been nice but obviously very underpowered compared to a dedicated tower I’d build.

Which Linux OS would folks recommend? OP asking you as well haha.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 54 points 2 months ago (6 children)

GET AMD INSTEAD OF NVIDIA. While everyone talks about how Nvidia is better than it used to be and stuff, AMD basically has zero problems on Linux.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 2 months ago

Yeah I think AMD is the route I want to go for several reasons tbh.

[–] mb_@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago

That has not been my experience... amdgpindriver was crashing quite often, gfx ring 0 timeout. Tons of people with that problem forums. I managed to adjust some parameters and fix it eventually.

VRR doesn't work properly, I can get it to work, burnout is a shore every time.

I have both and nvidia and an amd GPU, and with xwayland fixed, the nvidia one can run just as well.

That said, paying 2k for a GPU to have raytracing and 24gb of RAM isn't that attractive.

[–] apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago

I have a 7800XT on Linux and I want to point out that I still run into their "drm_fec_ready" and "no edid read" bugs every day.

amdgpu is miles ahead of what NVIDIA is offering, but it is still a GPU driver on a second class platform. Do not expect a flawless experience on bleeding edge hardware.

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[–] PoorPocketsMcNewHold@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You'll get plenty of answers with different suggestions, so I'll suggest checking in that community for plenty of previous answers. I would say to stick with "main" known distribution and to ditch specialized ones. https://linux-myths.pages.dev/Single-Maintainer https://linux-myths.pages.dev/Distros

I'm on Nobara but despite the fantastic work of GloriousEggRoll, it did had it's lot of breakage which made me want to switch to the suggested uBlue Fedora atomic builds, per those criterias.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago

I've said this before around here, but y'all REALLY need to stop recommending immutable distros to people who are new and just trying to figure stuff out. It's confusing as hell for them, and counterproductive overall. Why don't you just say "Use Fedora" if you have a suggestion.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! I messed with Mint once and it was easy enough to get up but wifi didn’t work out the box which was irritating. Is that common in your experience?

Full disclosure it was an intel MBpro lol

[–] PoorPocketsMcNewHold@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Mint is a good choice ! They have a decent help forum where you could ask for such help. Like this one for example. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=228884 Feel free to give more details here too, maybe i, or someone else here could help you with your specific Mac problem.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately when I mentioned I had a Mac everyone got really nasty and told me to buy a PC/“you should’ve done your homework.” 😅

I have a 2017 MBPro that can still handle 4K video rendering. It’s already in my possession! Why would I go buy something else? But everyone was too angry at the idea of my using a Mac to care sadly.

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[–] lorty@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well I had downloaded a few to try out, but the first one I installed (Pop OS) just worked right away so I stuck with it.

Although if you are considering a new PC, do go for an AMD GPU. Will save you a lot of hassle (like it did me).

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 months ago

Bazzite and Pop are top of my list currently

[–] solarvector@lemmy.zip 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's always the top 10 once enough people chime in, because any can work and it's easy enough to install or select what you need on most of them. (I'd probably recommend mint).

But... hardware is probably more important. Cutting edge GPU might not have good drivers yet. AMD is probably going to be much better supported. Networking you're probably good now, but getting more popular stuff means it's more likely to already have had the kinks worked through years ago. If you play popular multiplayer shooters with shitass anti cheat malware it probably won't work.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 months ago

Luckily MP competitive games aren’t really my thing,n the few MP games I play are generally social/collaborative. Valheim and such.

Thanks!

[–] polarbearulove@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It's absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I'd likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they're pretty easy to get rid of).

As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you're used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)

[–] Jayb151@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just tried Bazzite on a laptop and doing it to be quite good. I prefer kde plasma anyway, so it's been pretty awesome. I was even able to install ghost of tsushima via repack, so I'm considering imagining my actual gaming PC...I just want to finish BG3 first cause I'm too deep and would flip the duck out of I couldn't finish

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

Oh I don’t blame you. BG3 is a loooong game. And it’s so good 😊

[–] Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Which Linux OS would folks recommend? OP asking you as well haha.

I'll throw Tumbleweed into the pile of recommendations.

It comes with a rollback utility called Snapper configured OOTB. This was a big one for me and it's what stopped me distrohopping. The only reason I didn't stick with TW the first time I tried it (years ago) was because of issues getting my Nvidia card to work.

You can install Snapper yourself on other distros of course, but I've read that it's sometimes not a trivial undertaking.

Note: Ventoy adds something to the boot params that causes issues for some, so heads up if you decide to try TW off of Ventoy.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I've gone through several installs (mint, neon, vanilla, tumbleweed, manjaro). The distro I've ended up sticking with has been EndeavourOS.

For three simple reasons:

  • when I want to install something, someone has usually already put in the work and made it easily available on the AUR
  • if something breaks, there is an easy way to recover as long as you set it up in advance (snapshots)
  • bleeding edge, you get updates quickly, latest KDE, latest kernel, latest everything

Basically, the low ease of use of arch is addressed by EndeavourOS, and its "instability" is addressed by timeshift. All you're left with is how easy it is to get your system to run whatever you might want it to run.

What I did is install EndeavourOS with btrfs, then first thing run sudo yay -S pamac to install a GUI for managing software discovery, installation and updates.

Next, timeshift, timeshift-systemd-timer and timeshift-autosnap. The systemd package enables timeshift to maintain scheduled snapshots, and the autosnap package automatically creates snapshots whenever you install or update something, so you can always go back to right before changing your system.

Run timeshift to set it up, and you're good to go.

[–] kusivittula@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 months ago

mint. my distrohopping always ends back in mint. heard good stuff about zorin too, i intend to try that next.

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ve been bouncing around Linux distros since 2007.

I’ve been a big Ubuntu fan but Bazzite has absolutely blown me away, especially for gaming. Everything just works out of the box. No tweaking, no driver installations, no troubleshooting.

My multi monitor display and dock with peripherals (including webcam and wireless headset) just works with a single USB connection on the dock.

Call me a shill for bazzite but if you are just using the pc like a windows user would to play games, you won’t go wrong with it. I could basically say the same for any Ubuntu or Fedora distro but from my experience, those require some tweaking for everything to work nice.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ve seen a few bazzite advocates here so it’s definitely top of the list for checking out right now. I’m a big fan of SteamOS and wish I could just install that lol but this seems like a great alternative so far

[–] appel@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I just watched this YouTube video last night of someone setting up Bazzite on a mini pc to create a sort of Steam Machine, might be nice to check out. https://youtu.be/f45hDPOrzFI

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago

Wow thank you!

[–] UprisingVoltage@feddit.it 2 points 2 months ago

As far as user friendlyness for new users I usually recommend Mint (Cinnamon desktop) / ZorinOS Core (customized Gnome desktop)/ TuxedoOS (KDE Desktop).

Choose accordingly to your preferred desktop environment and enjoy.

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[–] Apalacrypto@lemmy.world 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Same thing happened to me recently, like literally 2 days ago. I’ve been wanting to switch for good for years, but always ended up having some problem pop up that I would try to deal with, and eventually go back to windows.

Well, 2 nights ago, I’m playing a game on steam. Middle of a boss fight, my computer just shuts down to start installing windows updates. When it finally finished, not only did I lose my progress, but because the game was not shut down correctly, it corrupted several files and needed a reinstall.

I literally used Chris Titus Techs Win10 tool to disable windows updates until I choose to run them, as well as ShutUp10 to disable ALL M$’s bullshit.

Update happened anyway, and sure enough, all their spyware had been re-enabled. At that point, I started asking around online for recommendations on what would work best for my use cases, with a few specific tools I needed. In the past, I had used several distros that really didn’t do what I needed, or would get me 90% of the way there. Problem was, that other 10% was a pretty important 10%. Someone told me to try just regular old vanilla Fedora. I did, actually learned how to setup, configure, and use Gnome extensions to get it to look and feel the way I want it to. Been having the best experience ever; EVERYTHING just works out of the box. At this point, I have successfully and fully converted!

Edit: grammar and typos

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 8 points 2 months ago

Are you me? It pissed me off that the system was obviously designed to disregard my wishes one too many times. Luckily, gaming support has been very good.

[–] craigers@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

This was me a few months ago when I started seeing ads in start menu. I love Linux and use it for work but was worried about things like VRR, scaling, HDR support, periperhal support etc. While a lot of those things are still a WIP I have had no major issues (except occasional anticheat borked but even then rarely).

I ended up going bazzite and I'm really liking it. What distro you go with OP?

[–] lorty@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago

I went Pop OS but I had Bazzite, Nobara and Endeavour on the usb drive ready to go if I didn't like it.

[–] lapo@f.lapo.it 8 points 2 months ago

@lorty Did the same (and discovered Ventoy) just recently myself too. So far, on a "secondary PC" but it's going so well that I will probably do it on the primary one as soon as something bad happens to it.

[–] s12@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 months ago

Congratulations!

[–] Baaron87@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

Nice! I left Windows behind a few months ago as well. Had been dual booting Ubuntu and Windows since Windows 7.

Tried to primarily game on Ubuntu about a decade ago but it just didn’t work out well at the time so I had to keep Windows around. Fast forward to this past year with Windows 10 quickly approaching EoL and (me personally) not being a fan of the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu I started looking at other options.

Ended up learning about Bazzite and haven’t looked back. Was able to play almost my entire game’s library without much effort. I had planned on dual booting two Linux operating systems so I could separate work from play, but decided to stick with one.

[–] Muffi@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

Congratulations!

[–] imnapr@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 months ago

As someone who dual booted, I agree, don't bother. If you've got any important files, back em up to a cloud or something, and wipe. Dual booting gave me so many issues, and eventually I broke my windows install somehow anyway. Just go with a full wipe, it'll save you a Lotta trouble.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

I always knew there was still good in you.

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Some tips for lazy Linux gaming setup:

Install flatpak and flatpak steam

Install the ProtonPlus flatpak if you need custom proton versions for some games, I usually just add the latest proton-ge and don't have to bother with anything else

Fedora, Arch, EndeavourOS, Nobara and Bazzite are all pretty good bases for a gaming setup. They all have their pain points so I'd boot a couple and see how you like them before making a decision.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't describe rolling release distros where you need to fix breakages for lazy gamers.

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

99% of breakages on a rolling release distro are solved by downgrading the broken package until a fix lands so it's not much worse than windows. You want to be chasing recent releases of pretty much everything if you want the best performance for gaming. You could run Debian but you'll be waiting 18mo for any new performance improvements to land.

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[–] rickdg@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I’ve used linux on the side for years. In my experience, people talking about it usually forget to mention issues that might be fatal flaws for someone. Like audio sources not being saved between reboots or monitor resolution seeming a bit off. You have to go in expecting problems and being comfortable with that. If you’re the kind of person that’s going to blame linux when the first thing goes wrong, it will and you’ll want to go back to windows. And then windows will also have problems but more people will be able to help you.

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

Exciting! Sort of interestingly, I never dual booted or anything, I just jumped straight to Linux.

Honestly, it's really not that bad. Linux has come a long way since I started out, and while I usually make it harder for myself than it needs to be, I've seen young middle schoolers installing and using Linux, I've seen retired professional musicians with no technical background install and use Linux. Especially with all these new fancy atomic desktops, like Silverblue, Bazzite, and Kinoite. Admittedly, I have managed to break a Kinoite installation (doing stuff I probably shouldn't have been doing), but fixing it felt magical. Just roll back to when it wasn't borked, then update it.

I did a lot of not so nice things to that installation (it was a bit of a test, to see how fragile it was), and it's still running now!

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago

Depending on the distro, look that Vulkan is set up.

[–] ulkesh@beehaw.org 4 points 2 months ago

Welcome to the club! We have punch and pie.

[–] SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Nice! I wish my issues were limited to those fixable ones.

I have issues with sound card SPDIF not working and Bluetooth on the intel WiFi card not wanting to switch on. Both known bugs with no fixes in the pipeline.

Will need to wait for my next PC upgrade in 5 years time.

I got about 15% better minimum frame rates under Linux and only one of my recent games had issues with anti-cheat.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Have you been able to try a more recent kernel version? It may have improvements in the driver situation.

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[–] RandomlyRight@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

Same for me! Happily used Nobara for the Season start of my main game Path of Exile and will never look back. Btw is it your main game too by any chance? I was also worried to switch because for that game you need some community tools to work properly. Had a few bugs but it all works perfectly now.

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