I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
Check out https://www.protondb.com, to see which games work well on Linux. Games that are platinum should work out of the box, ones that are Gold might need some tinkering. Most games work great, but a lot of multiplayer games aren’t supported.
In general gaming on Linux has been a pretty smooth experience lately. Games on Steam usually just work, but IMO running games outside of Steam is pretty hit or miss. They sometimes need following a guide or trying to fix an obscure issue that only like 2 other people have.
The thing about Linux is that you might have some issues outside of gaming. Things you might not expect like Discord not being able to screenshare audio or that one program you need not working on your distro properly. Also you should know games on an NTFS drive don’t work well on Linux, so you can’t expect your drive full of Windows games to just work if you have them on a 2nd drive. In general I still think you need some patience if you’re going to settle on a Linux desktop, it’s not entirely a bug free experience yet.
I’m not the OP, but drat, I didn’t know that bit about the NTFS drive not working nice… that was gonna be my plan for my games so I wouldn’t have to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of games (Battlefield 1, Borderlands, TF2, Genshin, etc…)
Yeah it’s a real pain point. I copied my games to an external drive, reformatted the drive, then put them back and everything worked smoothly then. On the bright side if you can’t do this, Steam makes moving games to your Linux drive pretty easy.
I’m gonna have to try this when I switch then, thanks!
What distro?
I’m on Nobara currently, but the NTFS thing is an issue with Linux in general.
I just copied my library to a properly formatted drive. No duplicate downloads were needed.
Oh ok, cool!
NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.
Oh ok, that’s interesting that there would be a performance impact! But that’s cool that it does work. I’m honestly more worried now about getting Nvidia to work since that’s what my pc has since I’m using sway, but I guess I’ll worry about that when the time comes. Thanks!
Does your EXT4 games drive play nice when trying to run the games in Windows?
I’d like to dual boot but the NTFS / EXT compatibility issue remains a concern for me since I would rather not have to redownload everything only to have it not work on one of the OSes.
I don’t boot into Windows often enough so I just reformatted the drive to ext4. When I did use both though NTFS was perfectly usable for both.
My wife switched to Linux recently and we kept her large data hdd as it was (i.e. ntfs) but within a week she discovered several new files had been corrupted, and could neither be opened or deleted. Seemed to be happening when she was using drag and drop in Thunar, while moving files using copy paste worked better. Didn’t want to take more risks so we backed everything up and reformatted to ext4.
I run this setup right now and it works very well. The key is to disable fast boot in Windows (preferrably before even installing Linux), otherwise it won’t shut down all the way and leave the drive in a dirty state. The ntfs-3g driver will still read and write to it, but games won’t work.
Does disabling fast boot make it so when you tell the computer to shutdown it actually shuts down? I found out that shutdown doesn’t really shutdown after checking Task Manager and seeing the uptime
Yes, that’s what it does.
Oh nice, that’s always irritated me so much. I’m gonna work on disabling that then, thanks!
Outside of steam, there are community scripts with Lutris and other alternatives.
But sometimes they don’t work well.
There are also ways to play epic games and gog games easily through the Heroic games Launcher and Wine-GE.
(wine and winetricks and 2 other wine components need to be installed).
A bit of a tangent to the discussion but that issue with screensharing audio could perhaps be worked around, by piping the system output to the browser mic input, given that the mic still works when screensharing. Easy with pipewire and an audio I/O graph tool like helvum.
I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called “discord-screen-audio” which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!