I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play FIFA 17 on his computer. After 5 whole hours of troubleshooting we were able to get FIFA running smoothly with some issues. Next, he wanted to play Roblox. I guided him through the process of installing Waydroid and libhoudini, only to discover that Roblox would run at 10 FPS. With Minecraft, it wasn’t any better. It took us 1 hour to get it working (not skill issue, he wanted to play cracked through Prism Launcher). Now, he wants to go back to Windows 10. I have already told him about dual boot, but he has only 256GB of storage and he wants to play a lot of games. What should I do? Install Windows to his laptop, install some other Linux distro, or try to convince him more about dual boot? Thanks in advance and sorry for the essay.
UPDATE: Of course I will help him install Windows on his computer if he wants so, I don’t want to force him to use Linux after all. I just wanted him to give it a try, and maybe daily drive it, if he can.
EDIT: Because for some reason it was misunderstood, let me clarify it here. Roblox ran with poor performance on Waydroid, not Minecraft. I just said that the installation of Prism Launcher cracked was difficult. After that, Minecraft ran smoothly without any problems.
Roblox in particular has been super hostile to the Linux community, they’ve two or three times now intentionally changed their application to make it so it won’t run under wine. If Roblox is something that is a hard requirement for him, I would highly recommend against any of the non-windows derivatives. The lead development team on Roblox seems to have the ideology that anything that isn’t Windows is a hacker platform and therefore they attempt to remove access from those platforms wherever possible. I don’t personally agree with it but, it is what it is.
I also wish people would stop blindly recommending Unix platforms as a drop-in replacement for gaming on Windows. I have yet to see anyone who has been able to just install any of the flavors and have it “just work”. I fully agree that we are ages better in terms of compatibility than it was even 5 years ago, but at 100% should be going into it as a “you will have issues prepare to have to troubleshoot” and if this was his first time using anything not windows, I would have hard recommended against nuking the windows install, at the very least shrink the C partition on Windows which can be done via GParted, which thankfully is already pre-installed on the Linux Mint installation media.
It’s disappointing that he is looking to go back, but I can fully understand his frustration, as someone who’s recently retaking the plunge after 6 or 7 years of being on windows again, I find myself getting aggravated at times trying to make hack scripts to make things work as well.
That being said, if he is wanting to go back you shouldn’t force using it, that’s only going to remove the possibility of him switching back in the future(like when MS makes w10 a subscription model either end of this year or the year after which will force w11)
Honestly with the exception of trying out Nvidia drivers until they worked nicely (took 3 tries the first time back when I was on Ubuntu because it had nouveau as default and I miss read the first time) everything worked fine with wine or proton (or was just Linux compatible in the first place) and often I had better performance too.
Now on endeavouros I do more tinkering but I still don’t have any problems except on my Wayland machine which experiences stutter in a few games but I’m guessing that will be fixed later this year with the new drivers and Wayland protocol changes.
At least he tried it. Maybe he’ll pick up a second drive and dualboot. Regardless I have mad respect for someone who doesn’t just assume things but puts the effort into finding out for themselves.
I remember when I was testing the water. I accidentally nuked my drive and something about that felt so final. At least after I found the USB drive I kept my backed up files, that was a real nightmare. I thought I lost my receipts for tax sure but all those photos and videos.
Minecraft runs natively on Linux. What was the issue?
They were trying to run it cracked through an alternative launcher.
Oh, yeah your cracked launcher designed for Windows probably won’t work well without tinkering.
The launcher wasn’t cracked. It’s a cross-platform open source launcher that works quite well under linux. The game itself was cracked, meaning they were trying to play without having purchased it.
Bro can’t spend €10 on a game but can spend €200 on a new Windows disc lol
Prism runs better than the official launcher on both windows and linux, I don’t what the issue is. Java maybe?
Bro go with something solid Opensuse, Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian. Mint is old boomer shit.
Or just Windows
This poor person doesn’t want Linux shoveled down there throat
Adding on to this that if they do decide not to go Windows do not use Debian.
Don’t get me wrong it’s hella stable if you’re using stuff from like five six years ago, but if you’re trying to do anything remotely new or gaming related I would probably pass and try for one of the ones that are less stable. This is coming from someone who just made this mistake, steam will install but proton will not because the dependencies that proton relies on don’t exist in any of debian’s default sources, of course the launcher won’t actually tell you this unless you try to launch it from command line. On top of this if you’re planning on using games that originated on a windows partition, proton isn’t able to use those partitions unless you force yourself the owner by using uid and gid in fstab for the partitions, but it won’t tell you that either it will just fail to launch.
I’m at the point where I think I’m just going to Nuke my Debian install and just go with another system because man has it fought me every step of the way in this process
Your suggestion is not wrong despite people not liking it. OpenSuse Leap or TW and Fedora even SilverBlue can be good for Linux newbies.
I have got both OpenSuse Leap and Fedora 37 on old-people systems and they are happy to browse using Chrome and edit using Libreoffice. etc.
Windows or Linux is as much suitable for the people who can use it and need it. No need to force anyone to use anything.
First you say they are right and then you provide evidence to contradict them?
He says Mint is for Boomers so use OpenSuse or Fedora. You agree with him by saying that “old people” are happy with OpenSuse and Fedora.
Did you think he was saying Mint was for Boomers and the other distros were for people older than that? I mean, you might be right. So what do the young people run? Garuda? Nobara? Bazzite?
Young whipper snappers can run for the hills since all the elders are going to become Linux experts :-D
Go install Windows you ankle-biters! Get off my lawn! :-D
Except OP’s friend doesn’t want to run Linux
Hence let the friend run Windows. End of story.
As someone who daily drives Opensuse TW and have used arch, gentoo etc. I would highly recommend mint for a new user most of the time. It is one of the distros that works out of the box without any tinkering. Want to add a printer on opensue using yast? good luck. in mint it is a few clicks. just to name a example
Ok Boomer.
Mint is literally the youngest distro on your list. OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and certainly Debian were all around for years when the very first release of Mint came out. With so many new distros to choose from, how did you manage to list only the old ones. Forgot the /s?
Mint is actually based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.
Debian was a teen-ager when Mint was born. If Debian was a person, kids would be calling it a Boomer.
Funny stuff.
Haven’t personally used it but I heard there is a native Roblox client for Linux called Grapejuice. Might be worth looking into to solve one problem. I have no idea if it’s good or not but here’s a link: https://brinkervii.gitlab.io/grapejuice/
This worked well before Roblox blocked the use of Wine. Sadly, we tried it and it didn’t work.
Wow they blocked wine? That sucks wow. I bet that means Steam Deck compatibility is a no go now too huh. That really is too bad.
Aren’t Roblox and old Minecraft rather efficient? FIFA 17 sounds like it’s from 2017. To me it sounds like mostly old games so without the specs of the laptop which don’t sound good with 256gb of storage I can’t really judge whether 10fps in newer Minecraft versions isn’t perhaps to be expected. Minecraft has always run the best on my machine (compared to most steam games which are more finicky when it comes to drivers. Btw for me fixing drivers it’s usually just switching between the ones on flatpak and arch whenever it doesn’t work and worst case I do a downgrade until it’s fixed.)
Would it be worth testing the vanilla Minecraft launcher to see if that’s the problem, perhaps compare the launch options if it’s not possible? (I completely get not liking what Microsoft is doing with the launcher and I’m looking for an alternative at this point as well.)
It’s possible that the laptop has an old/niche graphics card with bad driver support, which will probably be worse to try to fix on windows, unless they already know how to use the manufacturers likely gui based weird custom installer already (I think that’s how Nvidia does it and of course it has ads).
Personally my experience on windows has been a nightmare with it breaking itself more often than Linux (while being used a fraction of the time or probably slightly more if I count the time spent on my old laptop which had slightly fewer issues). Luckily I don’t have to use it but I do have a windows install in dual boot which takes 3x longer to start, shows me ads, requires me to plug the mouse in after booting for it to work.
Roblox not runnimg is more like a feature. /s
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You can’t really complain that your pirated stuff doesn’t work right, lol.
Gave me a good chuckle when I read that. There’s no guarantee that it’d perform well on Windows (pirated software in general), why should it on Linux.
FIFA and Roblox, those gotta be one of the worst games to run on linux…
With Minecraft, it wasn’t any better.
Minecraft runs natively on Linux, though. It’s not FOSS so it’s not available through
apt, but you can install it from a .deb from their websiteDownload page
The installation fileI’ve had better performance with Minecraft on Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 (albeit with kernel 6.1) than on Windows 10 personally.
Sadly, I can’t easily fix FIFA or Roblox for you
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if hes willing try zorinos. If that does not work I know of nothing easier. It comes with play on linux pretty well configured.
I’ve been using Mint for about two years and it games okay and also feels outdated. I built a gaming computer for a friend recently and put Bazzite on it and it runs games great and just works great as a whole
There’s a drm-free version of prism launcher called PollyMC (note the two l’s)
Can we please just stick to one modded MC launcher instead of having a controversy every year
Why should I care?
And I don’t think you really understand free software by what you are saying, because you’re suggesting we should monopolize the software we use for no reason, which really goes against the whole point.
I’d be happy with the non-DRM launcher to be the most popular
I swear it’s always the same mistake each time someone has an issue trying linux. It should be a rule at this point : never switch to another OS without knowing what will work and what will not.
Going at it blindly is a quick way to get overwhelmed and discouraged.
(Not pointing fingers here, had a friend who wanted to try it out too, didn’t listen to my warnings, didn’t wanna check if everything would work out and then spent three month of pure hell, with me picking up the pieces and fixing their pc all the god damn time…)
