6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?
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I moved back to Linux and it works wonderfully. Except for HDR. That require a bit of tinkering. And there is no good way of getting it to work in any Linux browser, except for some very clunky workarounds. Hopefully that will be fixed.
FF 138 has HDR support
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1jp6njd/hdr_in_firefox_now_works/ -
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I switched a year ago and I love it. All my old games run better on linux than windows at this point. Proton is fucking amazing.
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Tip: Add your non-steam games to steam to launch launch them with Proton. thats probably the easiest way.
Otherwise there's Bottles and Lutris (and maybe HeroicLauncher)
Thanks for the tips!
Lutris I've used with some success, and I'm somewhat ok with wine when it works out if the box (or troubleshooting using the wine wiki).
Do you recommend any other sites/guides for troubleshooting?
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Does Debian have the same update woes I ran into with Fedora? Or if there was a way to tweak that in Fedora, I couldn't find the option, and it was several years ago besides.
No. Debian updates tend to be interruption free. Apt/dpkg is a lot more consistent than RPM and deals very nicely with dependencies in both directions.
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Thank you! The wall in my brain keeping me from doing it is a bit smaller now
note that you should absolutely make a backup of all your important files before you muck about with installing different operating systems, it will wipe your drive, so, yeah.
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Unless you're using NVIDIA. Didn't work out of the box for me and required a couple hours of fiddling. Mint worked seamlessly.
That's weird. It worked for me just fine. I have GTX 1060 3GB.
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Debian is not a good choice for beginners. It's extremely bare bones compared to Ubuntu or Mint.
Drivers on Debian stable are also heavily outdated
Drivers being outdated is not a big deal, unless you use recent hardware, then it might make sense to make a jump to current testing release (trixie), or just stay on testing indefinitely.
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...all the IT savvy are switching people over...
Totally feels strange because my dad's laptop doesn't have the TPM requirement and he was telling me about how he was talking to the IT guy at his work about possibly switching to Linux just so he can keep his laptop. Absolutely insane because I might not be the only person in my house using it anymore (android not included because I view it as a completely separate entity).
I was telling him that day that I could flash Mint (have the most recent addition on my laptop) to a thumb drive if he was actually wanting to switch over. He's definitely an average computer user, so nothing too special, but it still feels real weird.
Though this will also suck for a while because the tech savvy people helping them switch over will also be running IT for these people who have never used Linux before and most likely have never even used windows CMD either. Cannot wait for stories of people being fed up because their parent/aunt/uncle/friend/whoever looked up how to fix their device and entered the cursed rf command without thinking once about it.
So, in the case of my aunt, there were a few teething troubles. That said, a lot of it was just requests to add web page shortcuts to her desktop.
The really big thing is that she's stopped complaining about how slow her laptop is, and openly says she finds it easier to use.
Most of the troubleshooting is going to be around office software and games. It's also going to be about replacing windows tools (I am really going to miss my ".bat cave"), and learning new troubleshooting skills (wine is a bit rough to troubleshoot unless you're willing to get your mining gear out and dig deep into logs).
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Unfortunately not. Even as an IT person I can say I just wanna come home and boot up my games without hassle. Sure alot of things have been done with proton etc but still a massive amount of games don't work without Soo much dang tweaking. I don't have time for that especially with a job/being a single parent. I am highly interested in steamos though.
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.
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How do I even get started? Do I just install Mint and figure it out from there? Linux seems so complicated but it's been a decade since I last tried. Nowadays, I feel old and this seems like it needs too much research
Whatever you do. Don't dualboot. It gives a wrong impression of what Linux is, and complexity is not inherently a part of it. Try Mint as a live USB OS first. That means the OS runs from a USB thumb drive. This will allow you to dip your toes before you dive in. Just like dipping toes, it's a no-compromise way of testing, but if you choose to install you already have 90% of what you need.
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Where are you getting these distros from? Most popular distros do more than "just view websites or write code."
They are ranked number 3 and 13 on distro watch, so they are hardly unknown. And lots on Linux YouTubers were talking about how great they were.
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maybe try bazzite? i've found it to be a better experience than nobara and steam games run fine for me, aside from the obvious big titles that have anticheat issues.
they have a guide for davinci resolve, too: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/davinci-resolve-setup-guide/1197
I don't really feel like going down the rabbit hole of trying a hundred different distros to maybe find one that works. My experiences with those two were that things were completely broken, randomly. Like just trying to boot the USB installer would lock up half the time, the installer itself would fail partway through most of the time, when things got fully installed, trying to update or install new things would just fail randomly. The kde desktop would crash just from me changing settings in the kde menus.
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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.
Is Windows actually stable though? I used to have to use it for work, it's a disgusting OS. Now I use Ubuntu for work, also disgusting, but it's much better than Windows
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Yeah, its maybe some kind of circular logic that their brain doesn't make that link
It's probably some kind of circular logic, I dunno.
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Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).
But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.
I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card
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Been on Linux for like 15 years now
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I have no idea. I rely on music software that doesn't have a Linux port. This sucks, because that software cost money, and if I can't get it running reliably on Linux I might have to... either that, or get a Mac
What music software?
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October 2025, right?
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Right?
10 bucks says they delay it.
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I would recommend to try linux first by dualbooting. Try Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux MINT and KDE Neon (i really like it because it has a Windowsy feel). You can see how those distros look here: https://distrosea.com/
I personally dont like the stock ubuntu, was really suprised by fedora.
Can second, Ubuntu sucks (but they did a lot of formative work in getting desktop Linux going), Fedora is great
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Unfortunately not. Even as an IT person I can say I just wanna come home and boot up my games without hassle. Sure alot of things have been done with proton etc but still a massive amount of games don't work without Soo much dang tweaking. I don't have time for that especially with a job/being a single parent. I am highly interested in steamos though.
I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux one my main several times since the 90s (yeah, at one point I used Slackware).
Then 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).
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 so if each gets their own drive then they don't even see each other 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 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 ;))
