this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux on my main several times since the 90s (my first dual boot was with Slackware).
Then maybe 8 months ago I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I'm a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn't want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).
Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted and upgraded the root one to something a bit bigger,
So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:
I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven't booted into it for many months now.
Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.
If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn't go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs anymore, so if you install each in their own drive then they don't even see each other (you can still explicitly mount the Windows partitions in Linux from the Files app to access them, but otherwise they have no impact whatsever on booting and running Linux) and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.
For the 20 or 30 bucks of a 256GB SSD it's worth the try and if you're comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))