I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
Check out https://www.protondb.com, to see which games work well on Linux. Games that are platinum should work out of the box, ones that are Gold might need some tinkering. Most games work great, but a lot of multiplayer games aren’t supported.
In general gaming on Linux has been a pretty smooth experience lately. Games on Steam usually just work, but IMO running games outside of Steam is pretty hit or miss. They sometimes need following a guide or trying to fix an obscure issue that only like 2 other people have.
The thing about Linux is that you might have some issues outside of gaming. Things you might not expect like Discord not being able to screenshare audio or that one program you need not working on your distro properly. Also you should know games on an NTFS drive don’t work well on Linux, so you can’t expect your drive full of Windows games to just work if you have them on a 2nd drive. In general I still think you need some patience if you’re going to settle on a Linux desktop, it’s not entirely a bug free experience yet.
A bit of a tangent to the discussion but that issue with screensharing audio could perhaps be worked around, by piping the system output to the browser mic input, given that the mic still works when screensharing. Easy with pipewire and an audio I/O graph tool like helvum.
I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called “discord-screen-audio” which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!
I’m not the OP, but drat, I didn’t know that bit about the NTFS drive not working nice… that was gonna be my plan for my games so I wouldn’t have to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of games (Battlefield 1, Borderlands, TF2, Genshin, etc…)
NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.
My wife switched to Linux recently and we kept her large data hdd as it was (i.e. ntfs) but within a week she discovered several new files had been corrupted, and could neither be opened or deleted. Seemed to be happening when she was using drag and drop in Thunar, while moving files using copy paste worked better. Didn’t want to take more risks so we backed everything up and reformatted to ext4.
I stopped checking protondb or winehq before buying games. Games just work these days.
You still have to be careful with multiplayer games in my experience though
probably true. I rarely play multiplayer, so I would not know.
Outside the few games like valorant and destiny 2, literally everything else I’ve tried runs just fine on Linux. Wine/Proton has gotten really good these past 2 years. Even on Wayland, which has historically been bad for gaming things just work nowadays.
protondb.com will tell you how well each game works. There’s also an icon on Steam, if it says it’s certified for the Steam Deck that’s also good.
I’ve installed Manjaro in 2020 during covid specifically for gaming and never looked back since.
We’re living in the golden age of Linux gaming right now, get yourself a piece of it.
The whole reason I kept Windows around was for Genshin Impact. At compete random, the game silently added proton compatibility with their anti cheat, so now I never have to boot into Windows anymore. I was never expecting it to actually happen lol.
If your pc doesn’t support vulkan you’re fucked, unless you use steam
Vulkan isnt that new though so a 1660 should be fine, right?
I use a 1650ti and it’s not supported
1650ti most certainly does support Vulkan. However there may be problems if you have switchable graphics.
Indeed, i have to use optimus manager in X11 in order to let my graphic card process games and other things
The only thing that still makes me keep a Windows partition on my computer is Valorant, I want to start playing CounterStrike so I can drop this damn malware game.
I’ve always wondered but for all the hate Valorant gets, do you feel like their anti-cheat has reduced the amount of cheaters you experience as compared to other games?
FWIW I haven’t played much Valorant
Absolutely not, even at my low rank, every now and then I end up falling into a game with hackers. And there’s always someone going live on TikTok admittedly using hacks.
It depends. Do you play stuff with kernel level anticheat? If no, then the current state of Linux gaming is, by and large as good as, and occasionally better than, Windows - even on games that don’t run natively.
Proton is astounding, and the state of Wine is amazing compared to 10 years ago (and it wasn’t bad then). Get Bottles or Play on Linux going, plus Steam, and there’s very little you can’t do…
Except kernel level anticheat.
(To be 100% transparent, there are other issues. I have a couple games I can’t get to run reliability, but they’re all obscure edge cases. But like 90% of stuff without anticheat just works at this point.)
Edit: proofreading
