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.)

  • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    10·
    5 months ago

    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.devEnglish
      16·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
        3·
        5 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.

      • mb_@lemm.ee
        1·
        5 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.

      • RelativeArea0@lemmy.world
        22·
        5 months ago

        As much as I want to agree to this, a part of me screams “STOP FANBOYING CORPORATIONS”

        Lemme tell you a short story about bait and switch

        We all know that android is a collaboration of companies to have an open handset ecosystem (which is weird, because these are companies driven for profit)

        one of these companies is quallcomm, they were so nice that they released an open source “bridge” for devs to thier hardware called codeauroraforums

        Thier marketshare grew and the performance of thier hardware were miles ahead the competition

        Then it came when these “subpar” and cheaper semicons caught up on thier performance and also…covid happened

        it shrank quallcomms earnings, made them to make some “decisions” and one of them is killing codeauroraforums, switched thier “opensource” stuff to codelinaro in which, all of the hardware supported are devkits of thier struggling snapdragon x

        In addition to these decisions to increase earnings, they also made a deal with microsoft to make laptop chipsets (just like what apple did. Unfortunately, barebone windows on arm is different from windows on snapdragon unlike apple with thier walled garden wherein they’ve designed thier chips inhouse)

        now they’re finger pointing who’ll support that thing, lmao

        So…uhm…yea, stop fanboying corporations and thank you for listening to my ted talk

        btw AMD is cool with linux…for now

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          If you think recommending someone a GPU brand with drivers that are easier to install when they said they wanted something that just works is “fanboying” then I don’t know how to respond.

        • Mesophar@lemm.ee
          1·
          5 months ago

          I agree with not overly fanboying, but “they might stop support” can literally happen with any platform. If AMD stops open source support, they’re in the same boat as NVIDIA but with a leg up from having all the history an experience from the time with support.

          Your favorite distro could go out of support and have the project closed tomorrow, just like Windows 10 reaching EoL. Except someone else can fork that distro and pick up the mantle to continue the project.

          That game that you really want to play on Linux might suddenly choose to implement an anti-cheat or DRM that isn’t compatible with Linux, or a different game might choose to remove that block and it suddenly opens up for the Linux community.

    • PoorPocketsMcNewHold@lemmy.ml
      3·
      5 months ago

      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
        5·
        5 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
        0·
        5 months ago

        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

    • lorty@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      5 months ago

      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).

    • finestnothing@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 months ago

      I recommend endeavouros - it’s on arch (personally my favorite, btw), has a bunch of desktop environments you can pick from that come configured nicely out of the box, nice presets and well commented configs, etc. Install and setup are super easy, they also include installing your driver’s and such.

      For getting games to work, most games work out of the box on steam (just make sure to enable proton for all titles and you’re set). Some games will require some changes to the launch command which you can super easily find with just searching {game title} Linux. There are some that straight up don’t work, and most likely no tinkering will fix that - but it’s primarily fps and competitive games with kernal level anticheat. It’s getting better with fewer and fewer games using it though. Since you already have a steak deck you already know the process most likely so you should be able to hit the ground running

    • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
      2·
      5 months ago

      You’ve basically described my situation exactly. I built a PC 6 months ago for Linux. I distro-hopped for a good while and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now I’ve put OpenSUSE on my laptop too. I would highly recommend it.

      I went for an AMD GPU and have never had any problems with it. Linux is not as painless as Lemmy would have you believe though. Be prepared to learn some hard lessons and keep your data physically disconnected from the PC while you do it.

      You’ve asked about WiFi drivers further down…on my PC, the only distros that had the correct WiFi drivers out of the box were EndeavourOS and ZorinOS. The rest all needed wired LAN to get them going.

    • kusivittula@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      5 months ago

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

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      5 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.

    • _spiffy@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      I’ve been gaming on endeavour OS for 3 years now and I love it. 10/10 would recommend.

    • WeebLife@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      I have Linux mint on my gaming desktop and it’s been great. I’d say that is a good entry point. But i tried a couple distros via live USB before choosing.