Straight to advanced Linux. Rip the bandaid off now. It’s only going to hurt more later.
Honestly I’ve found most distros pretty solid. It’s just the software that can be buggy. Gnome for me crashes on gpu’s with 4gb of vram, like the rx 5500 and 1650. Steam is better now but I remember the interface being very jank. Left clicking something just made the drop down menu disappear and not actually select it. A lot of programs still not scaling right on Wayland even tho xorg has been dead for years on years. Ect…
But even with all these issues I’ve had recently and not so recently… Still so much better than windows
Let me guess… its a laptop isn’t it?
I would rather use gentoo on my gaming rig than fuck around with DLLs for even a second
Look man. I use my computer primarily for gaming, with a little web browsing. The second Linux can support all games without me having to wrangle and worry about compatibility, plus whatever else config shit I have to go through that I’m sure I’m unaware of, I’ll jump ship headfirst. I’m fucking sick of Microsoft’s bullshit.
Linux supports most games nowadays. It will never support “all” games. Just like windows doesn’t support all games. At this point in time, saying Linux is not good enough with gaming is weird…
Depending on what games you play it’s anywhere from unusable (games with incompatible anticheat) to flat out better than windows even ignoring all the surrounding bullshit. But many of these gsmes with anticheat are among the most popular games in the world, so there’s plenty of reason not to change just bc of those for a lot of people.
At this point games that doesn’t support Linux are games that use anti-cheat
Right, BattleEye is hit or miss depending on the game developer.
Another significant drawback I have is OBS compatibility. It technically works, but just having it open drops my framerate by ~30%, and having it record drops it by ~50%. I haven’t found a fix for it yet, so I’m effectively unable to stream or record gameplay on Linux. The same settings used in Windows hardly impacts my framerate.
I’ll continue using Linux, but I haven’t deleted my Windows partition yet.
The part that most don’t talk about is that installing and getting games up and going in Linux that can run in Linux, often takes allot of configuration and trying, but on the plus side it can run many games from older versions of Windows with some configuration.
It is the configuration that one has to learn how to do which most casual users aren’t skilled enough to do. It is after you learn how to do it that between the Linux Native Games and most other games from Windows.
In my experience, Linux supports a handful, maybe even a large handful, but we’re far away from “most.”
mfs dont know about “O&O ShutUp 10++”
i will try Garuda. i will not go for the easiest, because i want to improve
Garuda is amazing, but it definitely isn’t a beginner distro. Also, a lot of the design choices are questionable, so I still wind up changing a lot of things after installing it.
i tried tumbleweed, so i should be able to handle it, right?
I don’t know about Tumbleweed. Garuda isn’t difficult, unless you have to troubleshoot something. There are a few things to keep in mind, though:
-
It’s an Arch distro. Arch is considered not beginner-friendly to begin with, and Garuda does some things differently. It’s very opinionated, and, like I said, some of the design choices are questionable.
-
If you need to do anything on the command line, you should be aware that Garuda uses the fish shell instead of bash (which is the standard for Linux distros). You might also want to check out
~/.config/fish/config.fish, because there is some interesting, funny, and weird things in there. For example,lsis aliased toeza. -
Do you like macOS? Because that’s the default setup: global menu, dock, etc. You can change all that, but it takes a lot of work.
There are a lot of good things about Garuda, though. There is tons of eye-candy. The
fishshell is much more enjoyable to use thanbash. The chaotic-AUR repository gives you access to even more software than standard Arch repos. And whenever you upgrade, it automatically takes a snapshot of your system, so that if something breaks, you can roll your system back to a previously-working version!i know these, i tried it in live enviroment. But ls ran for me as ls
-
After months of trying, I still can’t get Linux to recognize the 2.5Gbit network cards, or to function with multiple monitors. If the hardware support was better, I would ditch Windows for good instantly.
I’d just rather use Windows and not have to deal with my games not being supported, explaining to people how to print a word document or have to mess with wifi drivers.
A lot of those stereotypical problems have been non-issues for a long time. Last time I had to fuck around with wifi drivers was somewhere around 2012.
There are comments on this post proving that those “non-issues” are still issues.
Anecdotal evidence blahblahblah. For example: I just had to reverse engineer some epson drivers to get my fucking printer to play with my USB hub. Shit sucks sometimes, and I’m not going to pretend windows doesn’t also have it’s moments, but they sure as hell are less frequent (for me recently) than they are on windows.
Linux by its nature is very fractious (See: the Gentoo vs Debian debate that had been going on since the dawn of time…), and that means we don’t get one general distro. Linux’s big strength is in it’s customizability, and while for you and me it’s clearly a great option that we love and cherish, for my grandma it’s just not there in terms of plug-n’-play usability. Also, it was probably made by the wrong sort of Baptist or something, my grandma is awful.
…
Anyways, while I love Linux, it’s nice that there’s an option for the people who just don’t care. I’d love for them to start caring, because they should, but until I’m made omnipotent dictator for life it’s just not going to happen. And that sucks, but at least I don’t get calls at 4am asking why they cant get a flatpak working on debian. (I know it’s supported but…)Earlier this month I bought a cheap Asus laptop for my gf and put zorin on it only to find that no one makes Linux drivers for the included WiFi card. Bought a new WiFi card and ended up returning the laptop because the touchpad wouldn’t work correctly either.
I have a PC with a version of Ameliorated Windows 10 on it. At a glance the project seemed promising, but then after install it did this thing where the lockscreen background is supposedly a blurred picture of the guy who made it. No matter how much I dug through the settings apparently I, as the owner of my PC, do not have high enough admin privileges to get rid of that despite my account being the administrator…? Pretty sus.
On top of that the update process takes more effort, so I haven’t updated the system in literally years. The whole situation overall leaves me unable to trust my own computer, but even that feels more trustworthy than the default Windows-is-malware experience.
Next time I turn that PC on will be to install Debian.
i’ve seen someone installed Ubuntu LTS on his gaming pc. he said he has been spending hours to use it, in the end he decided to reinstall windows 11.
My experience is the opposite.
Took an hour just to get a mouse to work on Mint
That’s wild. Mice are a generic driver just like on Windows. It should be plug and play on either OS.
Why did it take an hour? Any idea what was happening?
Still have an absolute mess on Linux Mint with my projector, wrong aspect ratios everywhere, sometimes only one screen is selected. Maybe it has something to do with how and when I connected/booted/powered each device…
Took hours to get wifi working on Mint after wasting a day trying to get my GPU working on Bazzite (all AMD setup before someone asks)
Meanwhile I install windows with English UK as my language and don’t get any of the bullshit people complain about AND everything works.
I’ll play Fallen Order on Linux (shader issue on Windows causes stutter while they’re loading while the game is running) and will probably uninstall it and just continue using Windows.
This won’t be popular but I haven’t had a stability problem on my home Windows 11 pro (server) machine. I disabled online login during first boot setup so maybe that’s why … my network handles telemetry shenanigans so I’m not worried about that. Never bothered to put a Linux on it, which was the plan, since it’s not failed once, it’s been a few years since it was spooled up. 🤷🏼♂️
This is where I am too. Just built a new gaming pc and was planning to do dual boot.
Installed windows 11 LTSC and honestly, it’s everything I want in a gaming pc so I guess no need to install Linux.
Having said that, I bought a pc that came with windows; can’t wait to kill it with fire!
I found it impossible to set up 11 pro without a Microsoft account. Did you put one in for install and disable it after?
On 10 if you cut network access during install it’d let you set up offline accounts. On 11 it refuses to finish the installation until you connect to the internet somehow. I had to put my linux laptop in AP mode and connect a patch cable to the windows PC because i hadnt loaded the wifi drivers on the USB i had.
Some command line shenanigans if I remember. Not sure that still works on newer patches.
Shift +f10 to open a command prompt in the installer
OOBE\bypassnro
It reboots and restarts the out of box experience, but this time ‘I don’t have internet’ will be available as an option
Bonus tip, don’t choose a password either, as it will force stupid recovery questions. You can add that after first boot with net user on the command line.
Thanks! I appreciate learning the magic incantation
How is your network handling telemetry shenanigans?
Eero Secure does a pretty decent job by itself but addresses can be blacklisted as well (hi Roku). If I had more money, time, and could figure out my double NAT, I’d probably switch from Secure to a Firewalla device, probably a Purple. Overall the eero’s have been a great, I don’t have to think about it, mesh system. Of course you have to be okay with Amazon owning them.
My standard response to “just go Linux” :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
As some background - I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.
I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even POST.
Windows would never do this, no, Windows can never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it’ll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero.
There no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-furst century, something Windows has had since I don’t recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it’s been what, almost thirty years now).
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying “you should manage data in a proper database app”. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, no, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
Haha at the Logitech mice, here’s me swapping side plates on my Razer naga trinity all the functions work great, even the RGB (couldn’t care less really) has a configurator available in the distro repos - but it works out the box.
Some pretty wild claims in there. It’s okay to just not like it without making stuff up like ‘Linux doesn’t support Logitech mice’ or ‘windows can never run a laptop battery to zero’.
Unless you have an Nvidia card.
I’ve been on linux for years, I work the Nvidia libraries all the time, I alternate booting wayland and X… I even use my AMD IGP as output these days, instead of the Nvidia card.
And I STILL hold my breath wondering if I’m going to get a blackscreen, and have to go into tty mode or boot from a usb stick to investigate and fix it.
IF you are a distro hopper try openSUSE, nVidia maintains a repo on their own servers for the SUSE/OpenSUSE drivers. I have not had any GPU issues for 7 years.
I’ve been lucky then, only problems I’m having (Wayland + NVidia) are:
- Steam menu corruption, mostly on friends window (can be solved by maximising window)
- Maximising browser on my second screen results in not all the screen being used, but buttons react as if they were using the whole screen (so you’re not clicking where you think you are). Solution is to resize window to maximum manually. Minor annoyance.
Oh and I disabled stand-by entirely. It’s was 50/50 if it would return from it. I think most problems are because I have mismatched resolutions (1080 and 1440).
That 2nd monitor window thing sounds like a DPI scaling issue, especially if your main screen has different scaling than the one causing issues. I get this a lot at work because of my setup and the software I use (on windows btw) and I got so used to manually moving the window and smashing it against the top of the screen to maximize it that I don’t really mind. But maybe the term can help you troubleshoot it further
I thought that too, and things got better when I set 1x scaling on both (it was 1/1.5) but it’s not stopped the problem entirely.
Yeah some softwares are also just bad at handling this stuff on startup I guess. Visual studio fucks up the code window’s scaling all the time for me. UE4 used to literally never open a window with the correct scaling on my second (smaller) monitor window too but it got a lot better with UE5
And nothing sops you from starting a X session for a specific game, anyway
I fear top commenter lost patience just a tiny bit too early
Just out of curiosity, how would one do this (in general terms)?
I hope I never have to because I’m sure I would not figure it out lol
In the screen, where you type your password to log into your computer, there is an option to choose which of the installed desktop environments / window manager you want to use.
On gnome standard login screen, it is down in the right corner, but there are many of this “lock screens” available and each can place the dropdown(or dropup, lol) anywhere they want. Just search your screen where you have to type your password to login for options.
I’ve yet to have an actual game dislike wayland. But you’re right, there is always the option to swap.
I had issues with minecraft, last time, I tried, maybe it just workes by now 🤔 I think it was an issue with java and xwayland
I… have had an NVIDIA 2080ti since they are sold (so… about 6 years?) and use it daily, gaming, using it for selfhosting AI a bit with CUDA and… just works, from gaming to tinkering. I don’t get those comments. Sorry you had such a bad experience, it’s not mine.
Same thing here. There was a big update earlier this year that made it so I can use Wayland, where before that, it was impossible. At this point, I can’t tell you the last time I’ve had any GPU related issues. Further, I believe that Nvidia is now working with Linux for driver support, so it should get even better going forward.
Works pretty well on pop!_os (with X) barring some oddities that I’m not even sure are specific to Nvidia cards (like the compositor losing its shit when I try to pop out a video from my browser and put it over a game’s window)
