I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.
Not sure how Bottles and not buying games directly relate (other than Bottles also being able to play pirated games obviously), but anyway.
I switched to Linux on my main computer as a “New Year’s Resolution” and so far I’m not missing much. I did cross-grade from an RTX 3080 to a Radeon 7800 XT because 95 % of the problems I experienced were related to Nvidia and their crappy drivers, but after that I had little issues in general.
I also use Fedora + KDE. KDE on Wayland seems to be the most reliable way to get VRR (FreeSync) working with multiple monitors. I installed it onto a new SSD I bought for this purpose, but I’ll transition more and more SSDs over to the Linux install as time progresses. The only reason I booted into Windows again so far was to check out some application’s configuration so I could replicate it on Fedora’s side. I didn’t even bother to install the Radeon GPU driver under Windows.
I could complain about smaller issues, but these are mostly related to third party software where the Linux version has some weird quirks (or where there’s straight up no Linux version, mainly games).
Overall very solid and I assume it only gets better with time.
The main reason I used fedora was because of hassle free nvidia (as muchjh as they can do until nvidia open sources everything and not just the kernel modules).
All these posts about Linux have me curious, especially because I just updated my hardware and have enough parts leftover to make a new PC. My main PC still has to run Windows because I use Ableton for music, but you guys are making me want to make the 2nd PC Linux just for shits and giggles. Especially if it plays well with Nvidia, my old card is a 2070.
Your old PC is better than my current one, lol.
Nvidia doesn’t like Linux desktop users. The situation is getting better, but it’s still not great. If you stick to the mainstream distros (Ubuntu, Fedora) and officially supported game stores (Steam), you should be totally fine. Other distros and game launchers can be a pain, how much depends on how experienced you are with computers (required skills ranging from “editing text files” to “knowing the difference between DirectX and Vulkan”).
If you have a leftover PC, you could consider taking a look at one of the SteamOS forks and turn your PC into a living room console/media center, especially if you have a decent collection of Steam games already. After installation, you can control the entire system with just a controller, and with a little messing about you could add streaming services such as Netflix to it as well.
“Working well” is relative. You can make Nvidia work, but there are some caveats. Currently, there’s driver 535 and 545, and both have different quirks. Neither works particularly well with Wayland, certain applications can flicker when they need longer to draw than the display’s refresh rate.
So, when I tried with the 3080, I eventually gave up and used X11. X11 has a technical limitation though, and it prevents VRR to work with multiple displays. That’s because X11 combines all displays to a single virtual “screen”, so a full screen application on one display can’t set the refresh rate of that display independently. This isn’t a problem with single monitor setups though.
As I tested Baldur’s Gate 3, I found that choosing Vulkan in the launcher resulted in about half the performance compared to Windows, and DirectX 11 (which ironically gets translated to Vulkan by DXVK) had graphical glitches like black boxes instead of houses etc.
Knowing all that and if you’re willing to experiment with driver versions, it’s not that horrible, it’s just not as straightforward as AMD Radeon on Linux (or Nvidia on Windows for that matter).
For me it has been that I have bought the games at some point and the versions offered on GoG or steam haven’t been the full versions pf the game so I’ve used wine bottles. Proton is a godsend
For a good gaming experience on Linux, you need either Steam or unofficial wrappers. If you pirate games because you don’t have money and don’t want to wait until you do, Bottles is a whole lot easier than setting up custom Wine environments with all the necessary patches.
Yeah I agree, my point was just that Bottles isn’t especially made for piracy, it can play “legit” copies of games just as well.
I’m not condemning them for pirating games, sail the high seas all you want!