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.
Sounds like he doesn’t want to spend his time tinkering, but playing.
Can’t blame him.
If he wants Windows, why are you questioning what he wants to do with his computer? He’s had enough of playing fuck-fuck with Linux. (Mind, I work with Linux all day, every day, it’s the cat’s meow for dedicated services like Proxmox, TrueNAS, containers, etc).
Go get Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more.
And you can permanently license it using Microsoft’s own scripts.
Sounds like he doesn’t want to spend his time tinkering, but playing.
Ehhh, I feel like this person is a tinkerer, it’s just the things they wanna tinker with don’t play nice with Linux.
Installing a modded version of Minecraft indicates a desire to tinker. Roblox is a game based around the concept of tinkering. EA games (especially ones from 7 years ago) require some level of tinkering even in Windows.
Please stop reminding me that 2017 was 7 years ago.
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.
Well you get an a for effort. But if your friend wants to play windows games it’s better for them to just have windows on the machine. I give it to you and your friend for going all out on a new laptop and putting Linux on it right away.
A more convenient way for a new user to experience Linux is to do a live usb for them. That way they can boot into Linux easily but boot into windows just by removing the usb drive.
I’m really sad to see this “If he wants to play Windows games, let him use Windows” being repeated a hundred times in these comments. Mostly because it’s an echo chamber, but also because Windows games have been better and better under Proton so 80-90% of Windows games on Steam run without a problem on Linux.
I understand your frustration but if you were in this guys shoes and this was your friend calling you all day to do troubleshooting, what would you do? Spend hours of your time helping him become a Linux addict or tell them just to put his computer back to windows and be done with it?
I’m a huge Linux fan but even my main pc and laptop are windows. I use WSL (amazing btw) on the laptop with a kali install. And I’ll use powershell (also really good) on the pc for any ssh needs for my Linux servers.
First of all you should have asked what he wanted to do with the laptop, the moment he replied playing games that are not on Steam you should have let him use Windows. Secondly, a laptop with 256GB of disk is likely going to have very low amounts of RAM and an onboard GPU, performance is going to be shit on Windows as well, you should have let him use that before, I think it’s highly likely that Windows itself would run like shit on it, so after a year or two putting Linux on that laptop would have blown his socks off. But the problem is that he didn’t get to experience any of that before you touched the computer, now he will claim it’s your fault that games don’t run or Windows is slow. I’ve been there, a friend had issues with the laptop, I said I didn’t understand Windows and would only help if I could put Linux, at first everything worked great, but then the friend needed special software that wasn’t available so I had to reinstall Windows for them (and btw, you OBVIOUSLY should reinstall Windows for your friend), and then everything on that laptop was my fault, even the problems the person was having before were somewhat my fault because I had put Linux there.
It has an NVMe drive and after my friend upgraded it, 16 GB of RAM. Yes, it has an integrated Intel GPU, but I think it is pretty decent.
FIFA 17, Roblox and Minecraft? Yeah I reckon a modern integrated GPU is just fine.
But unfortunately it seems like your friend’s preferred games aren’t all that Linux friendly. Maybe get him addicted to a Steam library on Windows first and then you can win him over using Proton lol
Nvidia user?
FIFA? Get a PlayStation. Use your computer for serious things.
What? Why?
Oh shut up. Honestly what a loser take.
“How dare you play games on your PC!!! I’m the arbiter of what people do on their PCs and I say games are banned!!”
Jesus Christ, get a life.
They aren’t banned, you’re just a stupid loser for using them like that
Ah yeah, losers are people who use their computers to run recreational software, as opposed to the people who come onto social media and cry about people using their hardware recreationally, who definitely aren’t losers in the slightest.
That was sarcasm, by the way. I’m calling you a loser.
With only 256GB it might be even hard for him to use windows, to be honest.
Slap the bottoms of his bare feet with reeds until he complies. /s
If you want to persuade your friend down the road to give it another shot, try asking what things he’d like to do and see if you can configure everything in advance. It’s impossible to predict all future desires, but knocking out some of the bigger ones could help. Honestly, I’d be surprised if he tries again any time soon. Can’t blame him. We all have different levels of tolerance for drudgery vs wanting things to just work.
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.
Laptops often have open slots for hard drives. With his permission open the back and see if he has one. Bonus points for replacing his win10 hd with a 1tb. He’d probably appreciate it enough to give Linux another go
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What should I do?
Let them do what they want.
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 think the best course would be to tell him something along the lines of “I’m sorry these games didn’t work out well for you and the experience didn’t turn out to be good for you, there’s still the option to dual-boot or try a different distro if you want but I understand if you don’t. Just know that these issues aren’t specifically because of Linux but rather poor support from the game’s devs, or more likely their publishers, games (about 90% of them) work fine through steam or Lutris unless the devs implement anti-cheats without linux compatibility so hopefully in the future if you happen to play more steam games you’d consider giving Linux another chance.” nonetheless I’d still say he should go on windows, find out that his games will likely still run like shit on there on his own and if he complains about it maybe bring up Linux again, gently and appropriately of course.
Just tell him, “Give Linux another shot when you are bored.”.
t. Used to be a Windows tryhard w/ baby duck syndrome, told myself exactly this. Took me a while, but I became a penguin a couple years after.
I was ok with windows but frustrated with it’s ads and updates. Even back then I liked OSS which I later found out was mostly FOSS and I tried out Linux dual boot on my new computer, I’ve probably spent 60h on that windows installation and at this point I only have it to change the settings on a usb device that doesn’t seem to have Linux support, which I’m considering writing something small for if I figure out how those things work.
Most of those 60h were in the first year and then a couple of hours between Ubuntu and endeavouros, making sure I had my backups even if I couldn’t boot into Linux.
