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.)

  • 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.

      •  mb_   ( @mb_@lemm.ee ) 
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        23 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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

    •  lorty   ( @lorty@lemmy.ml ) OP
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      53 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).

    • It’s always the top 10 once enough people chime in, because any can work and it’s easy enough to install or select what you need on most of them. (I’d probably recommend mint).

      But… hardware is probably more important. Cutting edge GPU might not have good drivers yet. AMD is probably going to be much better supported. Networking you’re probably good now, but getting more popular stuff means it’s more likely to already have had the kinks worked through years ago. If you play popular multiplayer shooters with shitass anti cheat malware it probably won’t work.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • I’m not amd guy… I’ve used Intel and Nvidia for ages and ages… when my last upgrade failed hardware wise… I bought a Intel minipc from Beelink with an Intel ultra 5 125h.

      It came with windows 11.

      I’m a dad of a 1 yr old. who is playing stardew with his wife right now.

      Ive formatted a handful of times to different Linux distros to see which felt better for me on this PC.

      Manjaro, kubuntu, Debian, kde neon.

      Currently I’m running kde neon. Out of the box it likes to reboot on updates… so I found a non-sudo needed cli command to fix that. (It’s a setting apparently in settings)

      Anyway…l say all this to say… the way steam is now… and how graphics cards are… you can pretty well run what you want.

      Granted it’s antidotal from me… But as long as you’re not buying the absolute latest stuff from a hardware vendor… You’d be fine.

      If I was buying now I’d probably not buy the Intel chips that are having troubles but the gen before that… and probably some 3xxx Nvidia card.

      And not hesitate to run any distro I wanted.

      Ps I like apt… because that’s what I’m comfy with. So I tend to use distros that use apt. Tho manjaro is nice because of the aur… But they have issues company wise

  • I don’t think you’re lazy if one tiny inconvenience was enough for you to overhaul your system to get a different OS.

    You know, I can think of more reasons to jump to a different OS than just a brief bit of stuttering. But you do you.

    •  lorty   ( @lorty@lemmy.ml ) OP
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      23 months ago

      Maybe it sounds overdramatic but if the point of a computer is to play games (and I did spend a lot of money for it) and it stutters consistently to the point that the “80” FPS I’m getting looks worse than a consistent 30, then yeah, I’m going to do something about it. And since the simplest way was wiping the system and reinstalling, then going for linux at least at first makes sense.

    •  lorty   ( @lorty@lemmy.ml ) OP
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      13 months ago

      Maybe I wasn’t clear in the OP but it was not a bit of stuttering: I could go to certain areas in game and get consistent stuttering and frametime problems, which is worse than just lowered but consistent FPS.

  • @lorty Did the same (and discovered Ventoy) just recently myself too. So far, on a “secondary PC” but it’s going so well that I will probably do it on the primary one as soon as something bad happens to it.

  • As someone who dual booted, I agree, don’t bother. If you’ve got any important files, back em up to a cloud or something, and wipe. Dual booting gave me so many issues, and eventually I broke my windows install somehow anyway. Just go with a full wipe, it’ll save you a Lotta trouble.