I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I think it’s time to try something that may cater to my specific needs more.
I use my machine for work and gaming (mostly Steam). I am a fullstack software developer and use a second MacBook as well for my daily work needs.
I’ve had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn’t game much and doesn’t need various software development tools.
Are Manjaro or OpenSUSE good choices? I know there’s a tonne of distros out there, and I’m trying to narrow things down a bit. Hopefully this community has some helpful advice.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: First of all, thank-you everyone for your help and positivity. It’s been less than a day and the amount of advice and ideas is fantastic. Not too mention the noticeable lack of negative comments (a huge reason I left reddit more than a year ago), thank-you all for reaffirming my reasons.
I’ve got to admit, I’m a little overwhelmed by all of the advice, but in a good way. I will be scrutinizing all of this advice and laying it out into a roadmap for both my distro testing, as well as PC building. You are all making this community a helpful and spectacular place. I hope one day to be able to pay it forward! Please keep it up!
Anything you pick, make sure to first do a web search on how well your games work on Linux.
Good call! I already did this… wasn’t sure if there was a better way other than installing steam on the vm and logging into my steam account to see which ones were installable. I suppose this doesn’t tell me how well they’ll play though does it… 🤔
protondb.com will tell you how well an individual game will play, as well as any tinkering steps you might have to use (in the comments)
Proton can run any Windows-only game on steam, you just have to enable it in the settings. The ones for which you didn’t have to enable this either have a native linux version, or are officially supported in Proton, and should run very well. The other games may have more issues, but even those might work excellently out of the box.
Something like “proton your_game_here”.
Beware that on the Linux land you’re on your own. People say “things just work except [something]”. I don’t say that because it feels like moving the goal post every time something gets fixed just to face the next problem for a niche person like me.
The reality is, you never know. My favorite title apparently worked in 10fps. Nobody could figure out why. Then some update on something suddenly fixed it and that’s when people finally confirmed it was a software bug all along.
Even people saying Linux can play any game admits “if you can’t spend good efforts, you’re not for Linux.”
ProtonDB is a pretty helpful site to gauge the compatibility of any given game. Users report their own hardware, distro, and Proton version(s) tried, along with a summary of how well it all worked.
Happy gaming!