Hello all,
At around the mid Nov this year I had enough with Windows especially the latest 23H2 pack that forced a lot of what I call malware back on my system when I had put several blockers from being re-installed.
A bit of a background. I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade.
Back in 2018 I decided to maximise my hosting game server and installed Ubuntu. I didn’t have the greatest of times but I always enjoy the tinkering process of solving something, so I stuck with it.
Fast-forward to Nov this year, by chance I stumble upon a YouTube video show-casing Garuda Dragonized edition and how it performed in gaming. I was very skeptical as I tried gaming on Linux back in my college days and it was unworkable and unplayable.
Having had enough with Windows, I took the plunge. Now something about me, when I take the plunge on something, I’m going in both hands and legs. There isn’t a compromise.
Created the boot drive, backed up my data to my NAS and purged the system from Windows. Within 30 mins of installing the OS and updating (slow internet, the OS installed everything from drivers to tools that I needed for gaming. I was surprised to be honest and I actually spend the rest of the afternoon making sure that everything was working by running benchmarks and low and behold, everything was. The CPU (5800X3D) was boosting at default values, the GPU (6800XT) was stable with the built in OC profile and was actually pushing better maximums than I had in Windows.
After my satisfaction that everything was good, it was time to test out and real gaming. I installed Satisfactory as that was the game that I was playing just before the purged. I didn’t have hopes as it is still really access, but to my surprise, worked first try (to add, I did follow the Proton instructions on how to setup Steam prior).
I tried several other games such as Borderlands 3, Hunt Showdown, Assetto Corsa and Planetside 2 and all worked. The only issue I have is that Forged Alliance Forever is currently bugged on Arch and I’m unable to launch custom games but weirdly enough, I can play the game no probs without FAF.
I know this is a Linux forum but to anyone that is browsing, thinking of taking the plunge. Do it! But make sure that you prep before doing so as without prep, you are not going to be smooth sailing.
I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade
Same here! Grew up using DOS and Win 3.1, and been a Windows sysadmin for a long time. But over the past few years I’ve been growing increasingly dissatisfied at the direction Microsoft’s been going in, particularly the way they’ve been shoving their half-baked cloud services (and telemetry) onto us, and enterprises, being married to MS, have no choice but forced to comply. At least, that’s the case where I live, companies just lap up every new thing Microsoft does and treat it like the next best thing since sliced bread.
I was being turned from an engineer into a middleman, a lackey at the mercy of MS, and I didn’t like it one bit. I hated the thought of having my entire career being dictated by one corporation. So I quit my job and finally managed to land a Linux role this year and I’m so much happier. To be honest, it feels a bit weird throwing away my veteran MS hat and all the knowledge that I gained over the years and going back to being a total noob (at enterprise Linux that is), but I’m also learning a lot of cool stuff, but more importantly, I love being in control of our systems again, and no longer being at the mercy at a monopolistic mega corporation.
That’s an amazing jump and congratulations on doing it.
Thank you!
On a random note, as a fellow relic of a bygone era… remember back when Windows used to be customizable, when you could modify just about any file, change themes without a hack, without things like Trusted Installer/Defender getting in your way, or even completely replace your explorer.exe with a different shell like BlackBox? I miss those days.
Voilà:
This is Linux (Debian) running locally on my Android phone (Galaxy Fold 4), with a Win95 theme. I think it’s pretty awesome that Linux still lets you do stuff like this, whilst still maintain a good security posture. And letting me relive the memories of the good ol’ days. :)
This is amazing. Love it :) such a cozy vibe
I also switched to Arch about a month ago, and I’ve been so surprised at how easy gaming on Linux has become. Even some games that use AntiCheat like Apex Legends run absolutely great.
I had to switch to X11 though, but that’s the fault of NVIDIA because the drivers are still causing problems on Wayland.
Welcome to the dark side XD
Also, don’t forget to take a look at time shift or w/e it’s called. It’s a tool that creates btrfs system snapshots. It creates them when most updates are installed, and you can make em manually too. Really good if you start setting custom kernel stuff or w/e. Allows easy rollbacks from grub menu.
Fedora or, the ProtonGE guys spin Naburo (spelling?) Is also a good choice.
Nobara, but yea it’s a good choice for gaming.
But if you don’t have any complex software requirements besides gaming and the usual desktop apps, then Bazzite is a much, much better option. It gets updates much more earlier than Nobara (which is still stuck on Fedora 38), and is much more stable (immutable OS) and more gaming optimised. You can even boot directly into “gaming mode” for a Steam Deck-like experience, with all the same (+more) optimizations that you’d get from the Deck.
@Ultimatenab@beehaw.org
+1 from my side for universal-blue.org, where Bazzite is part of.
@Ultimatenab@beehaw.org I often see Garuda and other distros like those appealing to newcomers, because they come themed ootb and look fancy af. Don’t forget that you can get every tweak of that by just installing a theme, which is a matter of seconds.
Garuda is based on Arch, which is known to be not as highly noob friendly as some others.
For “normal” users like us especially, who just want to game and do other normie stuff, the immutable Fedora variants are excellent. uBlue fixes some of their minor issues, and they run wonderfully.
They work just how Linux should do it as desktop OS imo, and how other non-Linux-OSs should supposed to be too.
Also, there will soon come a time where you begin Distro-hopping and reinstall your OS every weekend. On immutable Fedora, you can change your DE (the GUI/ desktop environment, which often defines the distro) with one command cleanly and switch from KDE to Gnome for example, which feels like a clean reinstall, but keeps your data and config.
