It’s time once again to bang my head against the wall of Linux gaming to see if I can make the switch from Windows. What’s the flavor of the month for gaming distros for a Windows native that’s not a moron but also wants something that just works once its set up?

Bonus points if you can point me at resources for how to put Linux on my Windows box as a dual boot without breaking my Windows installation.

EDIT - Tried Mint and Nobara and neither could figure out how to dual boot with Windows on a machine with two physical drives. I’m sure if I had a CS degree I could figure it out in short order but a little googling and messing around trying different things didn’t work so I think I’m done. Maybe next time, Linux.

  • dabeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Yeah this pretty much sums up where I landed after like 8 months of Linux desktop usage. The only reasons I ever boot back to windows is Valorant (which also requires me to turn Secureboot back on… I should just stop playing that game) and whenever I need to compile programs for Windows. But I’m gonna fix that second problem by turning an old laptop into a Windows build machine that I can access remotely.

    Honestly, I’d say overall my experience with Linux desktop has actually surpassed Windows. KDE just runs snappier in every way and the app ecosystem you can access via flathub is so vast and polished. Everything feels like it has a lot of care going into it. Windows-only programs with no good Linux alternatives still exist, but for my use case I no longer have that problem.

    • Stillhart@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Random update: I had to swap to Pop!_OS because some games were having issues with the hybrid graphics on my laptop. I couldn’t figure out how to get it working in Nobara but Pop supports hybrid Nvidia graphics (because the company that makes Pop sells laptops with hybrid graphics). It took a little longer to get Pop working as well for me as Nobara was, but so far so good.

      I really don’t like the desktop environment as much but I’ve got it working well enough and I’m getting used to it. I don’t want to mess with it more, trying to install Wayland and whatever, so I’ll stick with what just works.

      • dabeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yup, at the end of the day, do whatever works. I’ve never had to mess with hybrid graphics but I’d imagine some distros handle it better, as you found. PopOS is great and their next update should he real sweet (they’re developing their own Desktop Environment in-house).