Several months ago I posted about building a new PC for gaming and got some suggestions for Linux in there. Well I got some specs and ideas, saved up some more money, and pulled the trigger in January to buy. After building, I loaded with Windows 10 thinking I’d start with something I knew and was off to the races. I had a few bumps early on with driver management, but after sorting those out I was gaming on Steam for a while with no issues. Every so often I’d get crashes in game (to be fair, I was playing Fallout NV which is notorious for this), freezes, and automatic restarts. Well, about two weeks ago my computer updated to Windows 11 which was annoying, but since that what my work laptop runs I wasn’t too bothered. The next day when I pulled up a game, my sound wasn’t working. I was troubleshooting with my headphones, game settings, a different pair of Bluetooth earbuds, but nothing changed. I played around and realized sound was just broken across all of Windows, and apparently this is a common issue? Couldn’t watch videos, couldn’t even do a test tone in settings. So, I thought fuck it, this sucks and removes a big part of games for me so I loaded a USB with Linux Mint and partitioned a drive for it. I’m currently looking at Mint installing on my PC and waiting to get back into a mess-free experience.
My condolences for the Windows issues. I hope you have a great time with Mint, that was my first daily-driver Linux distro. These days I seem to have fewer issues running games than my friends running Windows, and I hope it’s the same for you.
I’ll be honest, they’ve shot themselves in the foot. I’m a normal user, so as long as my things that I’ve setup just work there’s no reason for me to change. As soon as they screwed it up I’m ready to jump to the next thing to make sure it just works. I forgot to mention that I did not try reinstalling Windows 10 because the auto rollback feature said it was no longer available for me (I think it expires after a week or so, and I was troubleshooting after work for longer than that time to try to get it functional again.) so multiple chances for Microsoft to keep me in their services but just couldn’t make it easy.
Absolutely, they take their market cap for granted and have been making the user experience worse for years. I’m a pretty technical person so I switched to Linux for fun and software developer clout, but I’m so glad that the Linux desktop experience is getting good enough for everybody. I’ve had mostly an “it just works” experience on the major distros like Mint and Fedora, and honestly even the issues I’ve run into were simple enough to solve with some internet searches.
I also just jumped onto Linux gaming on Mint. Mine is a slightly underpowered laptop, but so far it can run everything in my Steam library (which is a bit dated at this point) with no problem at all.
I built my desktop specifically to be pretty robust and future proof it for a few years: RYZEN 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070TI super, B650 Gaming Motherboard, and 64GB DDR5 RAM. It wasn’t having any issues playing games on windows until windows just started messing with the system unfortunately.
The only thing keeping me from using Linux on my gaming PC at this point is that I’m still using repacks, some of which need an “updater” file to progress to the most up to date copy of the game. I tried with Bazzite, but it was just a bit too difficult. I think once Baldur’s Gate3 is “final,” I’ll make the full switch. I’m already rocking Fedora on my personal laptop which has been seamless.
You can install repacks pretty seamlessly in Bottles.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.usebottles.bottles
Create a gaming prefix, move all installers into the prefix and hit “Run executable” one by one for each installer.
Although if you can afford it, Baldur’s Gate 3 devs deserve the money. Great game and available DRM free on GOG and Steam.
Actually, I had been thinking about this all day. BG3 Totally deserves the money for the amount of hours I’ve already sunk into it. First game I bought at $60. Cheers mate!
Agreed! and Bazzite totally had a great solution for it. My issue came when I already had the repack installed, then you have to run an EXE to update to the newest version of the game. I just had such difficulty making that happen, that I kind of gave up. I hadn’t tried Bottles, but I did see that was also auto installed. I might try on a virtual machine to see if I can figure it out… As for deserving the money, you’re 100% right. I will buy it eventually.