Games

Bazzite makes nvidia pretty easy, although it can still be troublesome, they are working on it. There's a different iso to install that is designed for nvidia, couldn't be more straightforward.

drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux

I dunno man, Debian makes it pretty easy.

1. Prerequisites

x64 Kernel headers:

sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64

2. Debian 12 Installation

Disable secure boot & add ‘Contrib’ repository to sources list:

sudo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Install Nvidia driver

sudo apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree

Restart system.

Bonus points for optimal performance follow CUDA doc & OptiX doc for Ray-Tracing & utilization of Nvidia cuda cores.

Might be worth testing Linux with a separate drive. I know people still have trouble with Nvidia, but there are a lot of people (myself included) that just had to install the drivers and have had zero issues thereafter. Mine is a slightly older gaming laptop.

I have a desktop with an AMD card that I tried to put Linux on and couldn't get the drivers to work. I'm going to try again in the summer and hope they've caught up.

I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

Privacy, UI/UX, admin controls, ads, pop ups or notifications, nagging about online services, AI, forced account creation, not working with older hardware.

I had the same outlook before switching to Arch Linux, but honestly gaming on Linux is actually the lesser of my hassle. I can genuinely just grab msi files or exe files for games and feed them to Steam to get them playing via Proton. There's only one (1!) game that I can't play, and I'm 99% certain it's a problem with my hardware, not my OS (Monster Hunter Wilds seems to hate my GPU and crash all the time). But even that was fixed with a mod (up until the latest update).

With that said, I've had a lot of hassle handling other things that are upstream of gaming so it's not like you're unreasonable in wanting an OS that is mostly stable. Then again, I made the decision to use Arch Linux, there's distros that are simpler afaik.

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:

• Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I'm using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
• In general even though I've done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I'm just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn't have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
• As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn't get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don't do multiplayer games anymore, I haven't had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
• Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don't in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no "phone home" for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).

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 ;))

that's also my excuse, but then again, i don't even game that much. and i'm on rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games and new GPUs are just too expensive.

And god i hate w11. i mean it's not that different than w10 but things just don't work!

my logitech mouse stutters for no fucking reason, 10 year old games lag for no fucking reason. the whole windows lags after being waken up from sleep after a few days, i could go on and on. none of these problems existed on w10.

You walked so our games would run 🫡