As a guy that doesn’t use Linux I must say, all the memes about it are making my brain hurt. Y’all are so much more knowledgeable on tech that I feel left out lol.
This one is pretty simple, if you want an explanation for it. Just pointing out all the wonderful under the hood improvements that valve, AMD and others have made to the state of Linux gaming, in meme form.
Maybe just give it a try? It’s pretty fun to test on an older machine and it is pretty easy to learn the basics of Linux. And if you are interested, it is a great rabbit-hole to get drawn into ;)
Like the others said, dual-booting means you’ll keep windows and your files… But you should still always be backing up at least your important files regardless tbh
The point of the dual boot is that you still have everything from before. When you turn on the computer, it’ll ask if you want your old Windows or your new Linux.
Its shader compilation that made elden ring at launch a better experience on linux than windows, because the windows build had a broken shader compiler causing microstutters.
I made the switch to Linux a year ago, and I haven’t looked back since. Of course, I still keep a dual boot for those pesky games that use Ring0 anticheat or are simply incompatible with Linux, like Fortnite or PUBG. But honestly, I don’t find myself playing them as often anymore. My current actual go-to games include Dota 2, CS:GO, Elden Ring, Sea of Thieves, Diablo 4, Street Fighter 6, Dead Cells, and Isaac.
Hmm I find that the performance gain on games like D4 and Elden Ring are significant enough for me to boot over to my windows disk (much to my chagrin). Do you have any specific tweaks for those games. The performance isn’t always terrible for those games on my Linux system but it’s enough to affect gameplay occasionally.
I don’t rely on special settings; instead, I ensure that I have the latest Mesa driver installed for my 7900XTX. Additionally, I optimize my gaming experience by using a set of launch settings that work well for most of my games, with minor adjustments made to the RADV_PERFTEST environment variable. These are the launch settings I use :
Linus gaming got simple when steam dropped steamOS as a stand alone operating system. I went from windows 7 to steamOS. First was the steam piston, now I have a steam machine (Alienware / dell) and a steam deck. It’s as easy as console gaming but with all the flexibility of PC gaming.
And before I get shit for prebuilts, sometimes you just want to play, and shit just works. Also am poor.
I mean if you want to be pandantic owning a computer for gaming excludes you from being poor. Otherwise, if we’re doing cost relative to performance, you can pick up an alienware alpha for cost of the graphics card.
Depends on what you mean by “computer for gaming”. You pretty much need a computer at home for school work, printing and sending documents, maybe even some work from home. A lot of this can be done with a phone or tablet nowadays, but that wasn’t the case 5 years ago, which is why lots of people have an old-ish computer. And yes, this computer can be used to play games, not all the newer ones, but still plenty of games.
If you have a dedicated, modern and expensive computer only for games (and note that this includes consoles), yeah that definitely does exclude you from being poor.
Honestly, by now Gaming on Linux and macOS works without problems. Most games are published natively, and if not, it generally works fine with Wine or Proton.
It’s not so much Linux catching up as it is making games compatible (and in most cases run just as well as native Linux games) that weren’t made for Linux in the first place. And that’s pretty insane. Thank you Valve 🙏😔
Right? All of these comments are like “it’s just as easy as gaming on Windows. I just have to make sure I run these specific commands in my terminal or my PC bricks, nothing runs as well as on Windows unless you have 20 years of experience with Linux, and you still need to keep a dual boot of Windows for those pesky games that aren’t Linux-friendly (re: 99.9% of games). I’m so much happier on Linux and will never look back!please shoot me in the face now and end my pain I’m so happy!”
Like whatever lies you guys need to tell yourselves lol. I’ll stick with Windows until it’s as easy as hitting play. Also would be nice if the UI didn’t look straight out of 1995.
Mint was the most recent distro I tried and it looked like a potato, but sadly didn’t taste as good.
With Nobara, can I install any and all applications and games I’m currently running on my PC, with zero additional steps, and does this OS get driver updates for my 4080 on the same frequency as Windows? Can I install Steam and play any game in my library with zero additional steps? If that’s the case, I’ll make the switch right here, right now.
You could just change the theming and stuff if you didn’t like the default look. Linux is basically infinitely customizable after all. Distros and desktop environments just make it much easier.
With Nobara, can I install any and all applications and games I’m currently running on my PC, with zero additional steps
It’s not zero additional steps on windows either though; on windows you’d still need to download and install directx, opengl, vulkan, etc and find and install the correct .net framework versions for many tasks. I remember windows having its own fair share of hassle while I was on it until a few months ago, even aside from how slow and bloated it is.
Nobara basically takes care of similar setup on Linux for you, making some additional improvements like proton GE (modified version of Valve’s proton to further increase compatibility and performance) and I’m pretty sure the drivers are just a modified version of the latest official ones. You could ask in the discord server for more info.
And you don’t need to ‘switch’! You could set up dual-booting instead; some invasive anti-cheats are only made for windows right now so some of those games don’t work yet.
Yup. Was dual-booting up until a few months ago. I much prefer the default aesthetics of mint/cinnamon and gnome over it, though I did change mine around to fit my tastes better (which I tried and failed to do on windows)
All the useful menus in windows 11 are buried inside the new ones and they still use the old windows xp style menus; they didn’t even bother integrating them with the new design. Even the default file explorer doesn’t use the accent colors you set lmao
All the useful menus in windows 11 are buried inside the new ones
That’s UX; not UI
And the not using accent colours is either intentional or a bug; if it is a bug then you can’t blame windows for it, because this side also has it’s fair share of bugs. And windows’ design philosophy isn’t customisablility, but rather ease-of-use, right? (even though it fails a lot at that)
But yeah, Linux can definitely look cooler than windows with a little effort.
Mint just looks like a fake OS that someone designed for a movie set or something. I can’t quit put my finger on it, but it looks cheap and basic as hell. Windows 11 is very aesthetically pleasing and IMO looks nicer than OSX these days.
With Windows, I can install Steam. Once that’s installed, I just install the games right from Steam. As far as my GPU goes, I just download GeForce Experience and then it pushes updated drivers to me on a regular basis that I can choose to install or not.
DirectX gets pushed out to every Windows computer with no need to manually install it, as does the .NET framework. If you need a different version of .NET, any software you install will typically warn you during installation, and even give the option to install right then and there.
I built my most recent PC about a year ago. I installed Windows and ran updates. Then I installed GeForce Experience and updated my GPU drivers. Then I installed Steam, and then installed my games of choice. No more, no less, and I was playing games in 4k 120+ FPS with zero issues or messiness.
If I were to install Nobara right now, can I just go through that exact simple process? If not, I’m not interested lol, and I’m a “techie.” Good luck trying to convert your average user.
You guys always claim how great Linux is and how you’re never going back to Windows, yet still dual boot with Windows. You know what I don’t do with my Windows install? Dual boot to any other OS lmao.
I daily drive Debian 12 on my desktop. In my massive library of steam games, I’ve yet to come across more than 3 that I haven’t been able to get to work, and the rest run remarkably better than on windows. Controller support has been more seamless than it was on windows, and I’ve gotten older games to work that never worked on windows 10. I’m not sure what experience you’re basing this on, maybe Optimus has some issues for laptops, but every desktop I’ve built in the last ~4 years has worked fine (and with nvidia GPUs, too)
about wine/proton, I want to share some advice: if anyone is struggling with installing 3rd party mods and such in Proton, try starting your installation process from ConEmu (ConEmu64.exe) (It’s a simple, open-source, portable terminal emulator for Windows) instead of pointing the Non-steam Games wizard at each installation and gaming exe individually.
I originally tried to do this with the explorer.exe built into Wine, but getting that thing to launch is a pain.
for example a lot of Windows programs will have you download an .exe that installs the program, then you need to run a different .exe to actually run the program. Steam’s non-steam game wizard in combination with Proton gets confused by this and runs the two .exe’s in separate environments, screwing with any attempts to install a mod or install the app itself.
You haven’t used Linux until you’ve accidentally destroyed your install. Reversible damage like uninstalling your shell or breaking your display server counts as partial credit.
It’s not bad, and it used to be one of the only noob-friendly distro’s, but things have improved since then. Upstream Debian has gotten easier to install and Fedora has become the best starter distro imo.
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