It’s time once again to bang my head against the wall of Linux gaming to see if I can make the switch from Windows. What’s the flavor of the month for gaming distros for a Windows native that’s not a moron but also wants something that just works once its set up?
Bonus points if you can point me at resources for how to put Linux on my Windows box as a dual boot without breaking my Windows installation.
EDIT - Tried Mint and Nobara and neither could figure out how to dual boot with Windows on a machine with two physical drives. I’m sure if I had a CS degree I could figure it out in short order but a little googling and messing around trying different things didn’t work so I think I’m done. Maybe next time, Linux.
https://nobaraproject.org/ Nobara is EXCELLENT. It took me weeks to tweak my last distro to get to the point that Nobara is out of the box, and GloriousEggroll sets it all up and keeps it updated for everyone.
As for dual booting, you should be able to follow any online guide (and the Nobara installer might even have an option for it). The only caveat is Nobara does NOT support secure boot, so you may have to disable that in your bios (you can google the benefits of secure boot, I find that for a stationary desktop in the hands of any reasonable user, it’s not necessary. Only reason I ever turn it on is to play Valorant on Windows 11 🙃)
So after a lot of dinking around on two different machines and trying about 6 or 7 different distros, I’ve settled on Nobara and I’m really into it. It does everything I need right out of the box, it looks good, and it just works. I haven’t gamed a ton on it yet, but so far the light-weight games I’ve tried have worked perfectly.
For day to day stuff… linux is there. There’s no reason to use Windows for day to day computing stuff and, if gaming works out, I don’t see why I’d ever need to go back to the Windows boot. I’m impressed.
Anyways, thanks for the recommendation. I have a RL buddy who also recommended this distro. He said it’s a good balance between the slow updates from Ubuntu-based distros and the rapid updates from Arch-based distro. Too slow and your drivers get out of date. Too fast and you get a buggy mess. Makes sense to me.
Yeah this pretty much sums up where I landed after like 8 months of Linux desktop usage. The only reasons I ever boot back to windows is Valorant (which also requires me to turn Secureboot back on… I should just stop playing that game) and whenever I need to compile programs for Windows. But I’m gonna fix that second problem by turning an old laptop into a Windows build machine that I can access remotely.
Honestly, I’d say overall my experience with Linux desktop has actually surpassed Windows. KDE just runs snappier in every way and the app ecosystem you can access via flathub is so vast and polished. Everything feels like it has a lot of care going into it. Windows-only programs with no good Linux alternatives still exist, but for my use case I no longer have that problem.
Random update: I had to swap to Pop!_OS because some games were having issues with the hybrid graphics on my laptop. I couldn’t figure out how to get it working in Nobara but Pop supports hybrid Nvidia graphics (because the company that makes Pop sells laptops with hybrid graphics). It took a little longer to get Pop working as well for me as Nobara was, but so far so good.
I really don’t like the desktop environment as much but I’ve got it working well enough and I’m getting used to it. I don’t want to mess with it more, trying to install Wayland and whatever, so I’ll stick with what just works.
Yup, at the end of the day, do whatever works. I’ve never had to mess with hybrid graphics but I’d imagine some distros handle it better, as you found. PopOS is great and their next update should he real sweet (they’re developing their own Desktop Environment in-house).