My plan is to buy an NVMe today, install linux as a dual boot, but use linux as a daily driver, to see if it meets my needs before committing to it.
My main needs are gaming, local AI (stable diffusion and oobabooga), and browser stuff.
I have experience with Mint (recently) and Ubuntu (long ago). Any problems with my plan? Will my OS choice meet my needs?
Thanks!
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Thank you to everyone’s support. I did not expect as much support as you all provided. I’m happy to announce a huge success! Ubuntu is installed, I’ve overcome several hurdles, and have a few more to go. I’ll try to post in next week to summarize my progress and challenges.
If you use Steam for gaming, then probably most games will work either directly or through a specific Proton version (you can set this in Steam). Games that won’t run are most 3rd-party launcher games and games that intentionally use ring 0 spyware.
Something to note for the future, never install windows after Linux, even they are on different drives. Windows boot manager is very invasive, it likely will overwrite your Linux boot manager.
Good to know, thanks!
The biggest problem you’ll encounter with mint in particular is that multiple monitor support can be… hit or miss, other than that, gaming on Linux has been very good for a while now and it’s only getting better. Unless you are really into valorant or destiny 2, pretty much all of your games on steam, epic games and all other stores should just work. My personal recommendation is to try fedora, as I’ve had a much smoother experience with it…
In my opinion in modern computing I’d rather be on a “faster” releasing distro such as Fedora, Arch Linux. Modern hardware depends constant patches to the kernel to keep up with new sleep management changes and improvements to the GPU stack etc.
Currently running Fedora 38 on my Thinkpad and it’s wicked fast. Definitely my favorite distro at the moment.
Same here :) Fedora sericea to be exact
Nice. I hadn’t used linux in a few years and I’m really amazed at how damn good it’s gotten.
I use debian for gaming and light LLM workloads and it’s been serving me quite well. Really like KDE.
Are you using Bookworm? I had trouble getting sddm on it to use system resolution. Normally I would ignore that but I only installed it on a VM so I could record an intro for my stream of Debian booting into the gaming.
I haven’t updated my machine yet because I have no experience with wayland or pipewire and Nvidia with gaming. I was also interested if it’s pretty decent with games and nvidia yet.
I am. SDDM should work properly out of the box, maybe it’s a wierd issue with virtualization?
Wayland is pretty much plug and play if you install xwayland (with the exception of OBS studio which used to be wierd about Wayland surfaces, I think that’s fixed now). Pipe wire has been working fine for me.
I use AMD though, so ymmv with Nvidia.
Yes, I thought it might be a weird sddm bug so I installed gdm and configured that too with the same result. Next option is to try a different distribution.
Gaming on Linux is absolutely possible, but you have to have the right mindset for it. Put it in its own category. There are games that work on XBOX, there are games that work on PS4, there are Games that work on Windows, there are games that work on Linux. There is significant overlap between all of these, with many games working on all the platforms. Some games work better on some platforms than they do on others.
If you go at this with the mindset that you are going to play all your favorite Windows games on Linux, you will be as disappointied as if you got a PS5 to play Zelda and Animal Crossing. But if you instead go into it with the mindset “this is a gaming platform with thousands of games I can play on it, I’ll play the games that work on this platform” you will find that gaming on Linux is a perfectly adequate gaming platform.
Gaming depends on your game choice. It gets better every year, but gaming is always the category that Windows slightly wins on. Everything else is dramatically easier in linux.
Ubuntu (or variants) is always a solid option. Apt is just the best (imo) packaging system, and since Ubuntu is #1 in popularity, you’re more likely to get support for issues there than any other linux variant.
I read this earlier and you convinced me to try Ubuntu. Initially not a fan of the way it looked, but customization seems limitless. It’s been less than 10 hours, but it’s already starting to look like ‘mine’. I’m sure that will evolve plenty in time.
Keep in mind that OP never mentioned what kind of geaphics card they have. From what I’m aware, updating Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu is still an awful experience
Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I haven’t had any bad experiences updating nvidia drivers.
I haven’t had Nvidia issues in Ubuntu since the aughts. Optimus OTOH, is even worse on Linux than Windows.
I had to update my drivers a few months ago, and it was awful for me. Granted, I started having issues after a power outage, but just updating the drivers shouldn’t have been as hard as it was
This is the way.
Unfortunately, if you don’t already know the answers it’s more a question of experience before you’ll understand them.
When I started with Ubuntu I couldn’t do dualboot, so it was hard. It got better with each update, but my beloved Gnome2 desktop was threatened and Ubuntu went on to Unity - KDE sucked, so I jumped over to Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop.
Whilst it was great, I had terrible issues getting software - PPA’s are often suited to Ubuntu and not Mint… so in the end I tried installing Arch, failed twice, then got a Manjaro (Cinnamon) ISO and tried that for a few days, got some snapshots (rsync to my HDD) and then figured it’s not a big deal to install KDE, as it’s easy enough to go back.
KDE was so much better by then (about 5 years back) that I’m stuck with Manjaro KDE - having access to the AUR to install stuff is awesome, and flatpaks work at the flick of a settings switch too.
Dual-booting gives you the luxury of (if you wanna play Genshin Impact) having the option to boot into your game OS but also the ability to install games on your Linux OS and decide which one runs best on your hardware.
Everyone has such varied ‘needs’ that your question is impossible to answer - you must just suck it and see.
I recommend to Install windows on its own drive. I had Windows one time do something to the EFI partition and I wasn’t able to boot linux after. I have heard of people having a separate EFI partitions for linux and windows to avoid this problem.
Sorry what i meant was the NVMe will be used only for Linux. My existing HD with Windows will be untouched. No partitions needed.
When you install a dual boot system, Linux installs a grub loader. This asks you what you want to boot - windows or Linux.
Microsoft doesn’t place nicely with grub and I’ve found many occasions when a windows update mysteriously disabled it, and you can only then boot into windows.
If you only want to test the interface and see if you get in with it, you could create a Linux live usb. It’ll be the same but the os speed will take a hit booting from usb, so just be aware.
Been a while since I had the problem, but then been a while since I even wanted to boot windows anyway…
Back when Grub was a thing it was easier to use the Windows boot loader and add Linux there.
how do you do that?
Windows comes with the
bcdeditcommand line tool to manage it’s boot loader’s entries.
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If you like Linux use Linux and make it your home. But expecting gaming to be as easy as Windows just isn’t going to happen.
For the last two, it will more than enough. Gaming tho, it depends. If you wants emulator, Linux is THE emulator OS. For Windows game tho, if you are planning to play older game, Linux is better than Windows. Period. For newer games, like ‘just-release-game’, it is not ideal. Free to play multiplayer games, especially outside of Steam/Valve, forget it.
To piggy-back off this, take stock of your current favorite games and do some searching to find out how those have worked out for others. ProtonDB is a great resource for games on Steam. Outside Steam it can often be done, but can be a headache.
I will typically try a game on Linux first, but keep Windows around and will just boot into that if I cant get up and running pretty quick. Don’t have time to deal with the tinkering all day haha
Nothing wrong with it. Here’s a website to help you choose the distro: https://distrochooser.de/
Personally, for gaming, I’d recomment Mint or Ubuntu. Probably your hardware will be supported. There’s also Pop!OS, which seems to be completely gaming related as well as SteamOS, but I’ve never used them.
You can run a hardware probe from the live USB to see how well the distro handles your hardware too
https://linux-hardware.org/It just recommended elementary OS to me and that’s the next one I was going to try, lol.
I’ve got Nobara installed and it has shit the bed for whatever reason. Was way too unstable for me as well. Also, support is lacking there. A lot of hostile attitudes in response to any questions I had.
Gaming is the only area where things might get tricky at all, every other area will pretty much just be a matter of getting used to different UIs.
Whether or not you find it sufficient for your gaming needs depends mostly on what types of games you play. If you’re always playing just the newest AAA titles, you might have some trouble, but there are a whole shitload of great titles that work perfectly on linux, and more are being added/ported every day.
As far as distro goes, I think Mint is a good choice for what you describe, you could also try one of the gaming specific distros, but my understanding is that those are generally overkill unless you’re making a gaming box
