Gaming

I use mint for gaming and it works just fine. Granted my computer isn't particularly new, and I have an AMD GPU (nvidia is more finicky and some distros support it better than others out of the box)

You’d probably be fine using mint.

Like, if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card you’d want to use mint’s built in driver manger GUI (don’t need to even use the command line) to make sure you have the best driver. If you have AMD graphics (ether iGPU or dedicated GPU) you don’t even have to do that. The main thing that Bazzite does is have the right Nvidia graphics drivers out of the box.

The main difference between the two is the package manager, the thing that downloads programs and makes sure they have all the dependencies they need to run. Bazzite is fedora derived so it uses DNF instead of the Debian derived APT for package management. Frankly the differences between the two are not really material.

Ether way, Lutris will get windows versions of games running as well as steam does, and any game can be added to Lutris regardless of how you got it, if not from one of the major store fronts you just have point Lutris to the files.

I use Mint as well. Haven't had any major problems using it for gaming.

Steam and Lutris pretty much has me covered.

I believe the final frontier for Linux gaming - apart from some niche cases - is multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat. They are literally impossible to play on Linux, so if you're into one of those then don't bother.

The other edge case is modding. A lot of mods work just fine on Linux, but some just don't and some - like those relying on Mod Managers and the like - might require more fiddling and specific tinkering. If you do a lot of modding it's probably easier to stick to Windows as you know everything just works.

Otherwise you should be good to try.

I can't make any recommendations yet, I'm still very early in my own evaluation. I can say with Bazzite, most functionality seems available by UI. They also include tooling to manage manually installed games, as well as other platforms such as GOG, etc.

They use a kernel level anticheat don't they? If so, no cigar I am afraid.

or they are in Europe and they get to wait an extra year.

This is being offered in the USA, too, you know. You have to submit to logging in with a Microsoft account and allowing them to back up your system preferences to the cloud.

Secondly, the onerous TPM 2.0 requirement is actually what is going to stop a lot of those low-end computers from upgrading. I recently was helping a friend with what seemed like a relatively recent machine and I was shocked to find it still has a BIOS and not a UEFI and I had to redo my installation disk to support MBR partitioning instead of GPT partitioning. People like that will be SOL and simply won't be able to upgrade, even if they want to.

This is the most convenient way I had access to to share the available options for info. I'd love a similar list of official methods.

They've also mentioned elsewhere that they'll continue support as long as there's enough of a subscriber base to justify it. If enough people are using it, that 5 years could be much longer. They offer security patches for Windows 7 too.

I'm not really sure what their process is. I'm just glad to be able to keep my current work flow without having to worry about fully losing security updates.