Help me change my windows gaming pc to Linux
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Does pop then use SNAPm because then I don't really want to touch it. Imo. SNAP is so slow and bloated I don't want it on my system if I can avoid it.
Usually deb or flatpak if you use the popshop
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
Linux mint cinnamon. I tested sims4 a few months ago. Ran fine. And surprisingly I didnt need to repurchase from steam, somehow I linked my ea account.
Sometimes games crash but not often for me.
That's when I tweak the Proton version. -
Check out Bazzite!
I second this, have been using this as a daily driver on my laptop and PC, and I'm really enjoying it. Seems very very stable.
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
I have installed all of those Sims games at one point. It works fine. Mods work without any problems as well.
Lutris will help you for the most part.
I think for Sims 3, I specifically had to use Lutris 7.2 as the runner (IIRC, I have to check again). It didn't work with other versions. I will verify this when I'm home.
I did the most setup for Sims 3 (there is a whole guide for performance). I don't remember details too well, but it's still set up I think, so you can go ahaed and ask questions
Minecraft runs native, for Steam games you can see protondb.com
I'd be worried a bit about the Nvidia GPU. But since I have no experience with them, someone else should give you advice on this.
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
I've been using Bazzite for a good while. It just turns your PC into a fancy console. Boots right into Steam. Everything can be done with a controller. If you can use a console, you can use Bazzite.
Of course Chimera and Nobara are very similar in that way. Bazzite is just the new hotness.
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I suggest revisiting dual boot, despite your history. You want to have grub/Linux on it's own hard drive, in a Linux style filesystem and default to it in bios. Then get the windows boot registered in grub.
Windows won't know about grub that way, no way to mess with it.
Windows 10 EOL doesn't mean it will stop working. If sims has trouble just use win.
Mint or a gaming focused distro. Not arch/endeavor/manjaro unless you're comfortable with Linux CLI already
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Windows 10 EOL doesn't mean it will stop working. If sims has trouble just use win.
"This, just continue win 10 (or win11 even though they said not run blah blah). I have my whole house with about 4 PC/server all running Debian but I still keep one gaming PC run windows.
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I have installed all of those Sims games at one point. It works fine. Mods work without any problems as well.
Lutris will help you for the most part.
I think for Sims 3, I specifically had to use Lutris 7.2 as the runner (IIRC, I have to check again). It didn't work with other versions. I will verify this when I'm home.
I did the most setup for Sims 3 (there is a whole guide for performance). I don't remember details too well, but it's still set up I think, so you can go ahaed and ask questions
Minecraft runs native, for Steam games you can see protondb.com
I'd be worried a bit about the Nvidia GPU. But since I have no experience with them, someone else should give you advice on this.
Happy to hear a succes story and Sims 3 is the least interesting of the bunch. Sims 2 and 4 are most important for her.
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Check out Bazzite!
I hate how good bazzite is at just being a game console. But then there’s lots of little Fedora ublue things in there that are useful. Like the fact that it has podman by default makes running silly things like ollama so easy.
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I I wrote to someone else here I don't really understand Lutris when I tried it about a year ago. I found it a bit confusing on how to use it and gave up rather quickly because steam ended up worked for my needs back then. But now I want remote play and Sims to work and I feel like I'm starting from scratch even though I very good with Linux. Gaming on Linux is a whole different ordeal with drivers and compatibility layers and I don't want my girlfriend (or myself for that matter) to be bothered by this when we just want to game.
As someone that aggressively takes advantage of the prime gaming giveaways, heroic launcher has been nearly perfect for all the random games that I’ve received on epic/amazon/gog.
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
Protondb will be your best friend here. If I were you I'd look up the games you want to play on there and check peoples comments on how they got them running. Almost everything out of box using steams proton tools but often it needs tweaking. Depending on how much you want to play a game it might not be worth the trouble to setup. For instance I stay away from every live service game now. You should also check out the os people are using on protondb to make sure it works for you I use arch (btw) so I won't take instructions from a Debian setup if I can find one with a similar os.
Worth pursuing and you sound experienced enough to get it set up. Idk about modding though that can be painful to get setup BC of how wine/proton work.
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
You should just test run it from a bootable usb.
Install steam.
Mount your NTFS drive which contains your windows games.
If you have sims on steam use steam.
If not take a look at lutris before doing any of the above.Your experiment ends when you've tested all games you want to play.
Now: You cannot use NTFS (windows) drive for games, although you did it in the experiment long extended usage is discouraged.
So you will need to find a way to transfer your games to a different formatted drive. (ext4, btrfs for example)
If you don't need that advice you will eventually run into frustrating issues.
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I briefly tried to install lutris on my laptop about a year ago, but i found it really confusing to use. If I remember correctly it required a disk or iso to install and i have everything through either steam or EA or som older games just installs natively so I didn't really understand why or how I should use it.
Mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think but not in a direct reply so making sure you see it, Lutris has the game specific scripts but also ones to set up environments for Origin/EA App. I've used those before with Sims 4 with both several expansion packs and some custom content.
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Mentioned elsewhere in the thread I think but not in a direct reply so making sure you see it, Lutris has the game specific scripts but also ones to set up environments for Origin/EA App. I've used those before with Sims 4 with both several expansion packs and some custom content.
Awesome. I'll give it a go with lutris
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I've been using Bazzite for a good while. It just turns your PC into a fancy console. Boots right into Steam. Everything can be done with a controller. If you can use a console, you can use Bazzite.
Of course Chimera and Nobara are very similar in that way. Bazzite is just the new hotness.
+1 for Bazzite. Atomic distro + NVDI drivers included
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
Not helpful, but oops, I had accidentally disliked this post
I removed the dislike:)
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I've been using Bazzite for a good while. It just turns your PC into a fancy console. Boots right into Steam. Everything can be done with a controller. If you can use a console, you can use Bazzite.
Of course Chimera and Nobara are very similar in that way. Bazzite is just the new hotness.
I agree. If you're a noob, and want the smoothest path, then Bazzite is the way.
I however, started on Ubuntu originally and you will have to learn the apt repos and install all this on your own. I'm now on Arch which makes you learn more the inner workings of Linux.
So if you want to progress, be sure to consider all the other distros out there too.
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You should just test run it from a bootable usb.
Install steam.
Mount your NTFS drive which contains your windows games.
If you have sims on steam use steam.
If not take a look at lutris before doing any of the above.Your experiment ends when you've tested all games you want to play.
Now: You cannot use NTFS (windows) drive for games, although you did it in the experiment long extended usage is discouraged.
So you will need to find a way to transfer your games to a different formatted drive. (ext4, btrfs for example)
If you don't need that advice you will eventually run into frustrating issues.
I actually don't like this advice for this particular use case. The live session is gonna be sluggish because of the USB bottleneck which will make it look like the games run a lot worse than they would with a proper install.
Especially since this person also is already Linux proficient, I would say just jump into a dual boot setup or wipe the windows partition momentarily. Sure, it's gonna take a little longer and it's a bit tedious to have to reinstall windows if you change your mind but I'd prefer a bit tedium over a poor benchmark
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Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
if you are comfortable enough with cli and Linux you should try arch for the desktop, it'll be probably easier in the long run because games are fussy and you can refer to the wiki and use the AUR
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I actually don't like this advice for this particular use case. The live session is gonna be sluggish because of the USB bottleneck which will make it look like the games run a lot worse than they would with a proper install.
Especially since this person also is already Linux proficient, I would say just jump into a dual boot setup or wipe the windows partition momentarily. Sure, it's gonna take a little longer and it's a bit tedious to have to reinstall windows if you change your mind but I'd prefer a bit tedium over a poor benchmark
I specifically said this advice because dual booting windows with Linux is a terrible idea.
Although you are right, if you USB read/write is slow it will be a sluggish experience.
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I specifically said this advice because dual booting windows with Linux is a terrible idea.
Although you are right, if you USB read/write is slow it will be a sluggish experience.
Long term, I agree. To test for 3 hours, and then decide which partition to nuke and which to keep? For this particular use case I'd prefer it
