I don’t have much to add to your search, but I’m in the exact same situation almost down to the card and also looking for an upgrade. The only advice I have so far is to go for team Red, AMD seems to be so, so much better to use on Linux than Nvidia.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
So far, my experience on this depends on your graphics card. If you’re using AMD, you shouldn’t be too significantly impacted. If you’re using Nvidia, god help you. In my experience trying to get games running on Linux with an older Nvidia card, you’ll have a lot more fun bashing your head into a wall until the wall breaks.
Last Epoch, which recently had a major update. I’ve been flatly unable to get it running in two different operating systems now, and haven’t even bothered to try tinkering with it for the last two days. It even mocks me with a Platinum rating on protondb…but all the reviews on Ubuntu are at least 9 months old and that was back when the game had a native Linux version. My biggest worry is that the latest patch has broken something for Ubuntu, but what’s most likely is that my configs are just borked in a unique way that I’m too stupid to fix.
My idea of the average user is a complete idiot who doesn’t know how their computer functions. I know they don’t know how to install an OS. My point that if I was unable to find Bazzite, they have no hope of doing so still stands.
The main game I’m having problems with is an indie online title whose recent update peaked at less that 150k players. I don’t care for AAA either, indie games also break on Linux.
You can definitely say “Oh just don’t support Nvidia,” but I bought my card nearly 10 years ago, and at the time it was the best I could afford. Upgrading to an AMD card would be great, but absolutely not happening any time soon in the current economic climate. If your response to that is “oh well get fucked ig,” pretty hard to argue Linux as a universal gaming solution.
On top of all of this, it seems like everyone in this thread who’s had success with gaming on Linux is saying run Bazzite, an OS I’d never heard of prior to reading responses here. That’s cool if there’s a distro that’s actually solved a lot of gaming issues, but if I haven’t heard of it, the average user is never going to find it. Maybe the title of this article should have been “Bazzite is now the best system for gaming.”
Except Mint has really bad support for Nvidia, to the point that some of the docs I’ve read straight up say “Don’t use Mint if you have an Nvidia card,” so if you’re recommending it to gamers with an Nvidia gpu you’ve actually been trolling them.
Probably one of the biggest issues with Linux that it seems wild people won’t accept is that there is no “one size fits all” answer. Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Mint is great for people who use a computer for light browsing, video streaming, really any casual use. That doesn’t make it universal.
Linux Mint
As someone who just ditched them, apparently here was where you went wrong. Trying to get Nvidia drivers working on Mint for gaming is bad enough that some documentation for programs I’ve wanted to run has straight up said “Don’t even try this on Mint.”
Real shame because I liked a lot about Mint, but I would like to be able to run games like Warframe and Last Epoch more. I wish they were a lot more up front about the issues the distro seems to have with Nvidia.
I’m planning on looking into them now, thanks. Will probably test both Aurora and Bazzite this week based on the recommendations I’m seeing, hopefully I’ll have more success with one of them.
If it was just one extra manual step, it’d be fine. In my experience working with Nvidia drivers on Mint and later Ubuntu, it’s more like 15 extra steps and some things still don’t work. Sure, it’s better than dealing with Windows 11, but from my experience it has not felt like less hassle than getting games running on Windows 10. Maybe that’s just an Nvidia issue, and I certainly would love to upgrade to an AMD system for better Vulkan support, but that’s not happening anytime soon.
It’s so wild, it’s like we’re in different mirror universes. That being said, I’ve never used either of the two distros you mentioned, which might honestly be my biggest issue; saying you have a problem with Linux, or trying to claim Linux as the best gaming system, is such a meaningless sentence because of the variety of distros available. I can absolutely believe that you’ve never had an issue with the distros you listed, but you have to also understand I’ve persistently experienced issues every time I’ve tried Mint and Ubuntu.
I’ve spent more time on random driver issues in Windows than I do on Linux.
I’d honestly be interesting to hear why this is, because it’s the exact opposite for me. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve experienced driver issues on Windows. Now, I typically only use stable updates, so I generally avoid the dreaded “new update breaking driver compatibility” or “new driver incompatible with old version” issues, but compared to working with Nvidia drivers on Linux? literal night and day difference. even trying to stick to the stable 535 drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 has been a huge nightmare, and many of my favorite titles are still unplayable after weeks of tinkering.
III. Little Jimmy doesn’t really need to, because the amount of times that windows update completely bricks your drivers is pretty low. You’re clearly overestimating the driver issues that people experience with Nvidia or otherwise on Windows. Neither myself nor any of the people I know have ever experienced any significant driver-based issues while playing on Windows, and the truth is that the vast majority of Windows users do not even need to know what a graphics driver is to be able to easily play games on Windows.
Yeah it’s great that AMD support seems to be great and I agree that Nvidia sucks as a company, but I’m not the one claiming Linux is the greatest gaming system.
On the one hand, there absolutely are some places where Linux has so dramatically improved it’s insane. Apps like Lutris have really blown me away, it’s incredible how some popular multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft which used to take me hours to get running back in high school can now practically run out of the box.
On the other hand, one of the major gpu manufacturer’s still has terrible driver support. Systems like Proton are imperfect, and seem to be depressing interest in making native Linux clients. Even though some things work out of the box, you can just as easily spend months failing to get a modern title running. To argue it’s the best gaming system is just laughable. In some respects, it hasn’t progressed at all in the last decade. When it gets to a point where users can run literally any game out of the box without any additional hassle, then it will be the best gaming system. Until then, this is a gross exaggeration at best.
Yeah at this point I’m tempted to swap back to Windows until I can ditch my Nvidia graphics card. Driver support is such a pain in the ass, it is absolutely not a single line. Getting games to run often includes installation of i386 drivers as well as vulkanlibs, because all the “easy” installations of Nvidia drivers only grab the 64 bit ones, and that’s before even starting to get into all the tweaks and fixes you’ll need to add for some games.
Also, platinum doesn’t mean shit. I’ve been trying to get a Platinum rated game on Proton working for the last week. the first distro I was using straight up could never run it, and I don’t think anyone using the distro I’m now on has been able to run the latest patch. So that 80% comes with the heavy asterisk of “Your personal machine may still not be able to run this.”
Biggest one is going to remain gaming. If anything, I’m beginning to feel like Steam Proton is starting to harm Linux gaming efforts more than helping them. I’ve known games that have dropped native Linux support because “It works on Proton!” only for the game to not actually work on Proton.
If we could get to a world where every game could actually be run on Linux with minimal hassle, maybe then you can beat the drum that there’s no point using Windows. Until then, it’s going to remain the OS for gaming.
until you wanna play games on it, at which point you start running into driver issues…
I think it has to be fresh, and not old and crusty.
Okay obviously the cyanide ice cream is bad, but I’m intrigued by the thick cum soup. How many men would I need to gather to get a full cup of fresh cum?
Tbh, I actually think this ends up being a win for Skyblivion. I think a lot of first-time Oblivion tryers were hoping for more dramatic changes, as opposed to basically unchanged Oblivion with a weird facelift running on top.