Operating Systems

If you do dual boot though, it's important to keep Windows on it's own hardware if you use grub. Windows tends to cannibalize the boot manager partition during updates.

Proton/Valve has made a lot of headway here. Mostly I'm seeing mmos/Destiny 2 being the only big holdouts anymore, but the niches I am in have tended to have good Linux support for quite some time.

If you don't mind doing it one at a time, and you've got a different drive besides the NTFS one (i.e. you're not just looking to just reformat the NTFS volume), this currently works:

• Format the new drive with whatever, likely Ext4 or Btrfs
• Install Steam and make a fresh library on the new drive
• Copy the contents of the NTFS steamapps/common into the new steamapps/common (or copy the individual folders of whatever games you don't want to redownload).
• Go into Steam, and act like you want to do a fresh install of whatever games you just copied over. Steam will act like it's going to start from scratch, but you'll get "discovering local files" before any downloads start.
• Steam will either show the game as installed as-is or will update the delta to the current version.

I use this method also for restoring backups of games to an SSD that live on a mechanical drive.

If you choose Arch/Arch based, or choose to install one of its supported kernels, NTFS support is integrated into the mainline kernel since version 5.15

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS

So you'd be able to use your already existing disk/partitions that have NTFS. Of course you'd still need to install the OS in another partition.

I tried to keep NTFS around when I switched, but ext4 is much better for spinning disks and support for whole disk encryption (LUKS) is also another pro that made me switch everything after a while

NTFS is fine in Linux. I have a dual-boot setup for when I need to run or test something in Windows, and I use my Windows install drive as a Steam library in both. When I swap back and forth Steam occasionally does a file integrity check, but I don't typically have to redownload anything as far as I can remember. The only caveat is that if a game has both a Windows version and a Linux version I have to set my Linux library to use Proton for the game instead of the native Linux version, otherwise, yeah it'll see the files are wrong when I switch and redownload.

NTFS is fine with Linux, but any new OS tends to need you to install things again. There used to be a way to zip all of your Steam downloads for a new install, but I can't seem to find any instructions that still work.

Its probably a mixed bag and dependant on what games you play (and your GPU).

I just dual boot. I use Ubuntu (currently 22.04) for most things like work etc. Using it now. And when I want to play games I use Windows.

That said, i Do have a mac as well, for recording music. I have considered moving to something like Renoise on Linux. Definitely wont be on windows.

All told, im not a evangleist for an OS. I just stick to what works for the task at hand.

Proton CAN play a lot of games. I believe its how the steam deck works too. So its probably more feasible than ever to run a gaming rig on linux. But ive been down that road before, and its been a fools errand for me.

After owning a steam deck I put mint on my pc and windows still in there I open once in a blue moon.

I haven’t had any issues gaming wise on Mint. Everything works. The OS is snappy and not in your face. I have a Mac for work which I use most of the day. I wouldn’t be able to run Linux as my daily driver. But it’s a great gaming pc option.

Gaming works well for most Steam games, but if you go out of Steam it can be less nice. I've been linux-only for around two years now, and there's been only a handful of games that I wanted to play that wouldn't run on linux (but there's only a handful of online games I play so ymmv)

I've been maining Linux on my gaming rig for about a decade. It's way better now with modern Proton/Steam. Most games run great. Some have weird issues that will take some extra work or need a special version of Proton. A few are completely incompatible, like Destiny 2 (requires some gnarly security software that Bungie isn't willing to support on Linux).

You can check the ProtonDB site for the games you want to play to get an idea of what to expect. I notice about a 5% performance drop in Linux compared to Windows for most games, but that may have to do with the extra stuff I have running in the background on Linux for work/dev.

I love Linux and advocate its use, but if Windows is meeting your needs don't feel like you have to change. If you do try it, it's a good idea to start with a dual boot and jump back to Windows if a game you want to play doesn't work in Linux. Or if you hit an issue you just don't want to deal with right then. Computers can sense when it's been a long day and you only have 20 minutes to play.

I haven't tried it in a long while so I'd also like to know how ALVR is these days, I haven't tried it in a while and have heard it's gotten some big updates lately

Last time I tried it though (close to a year ago) it had quite a ways to go

I have an Index and it was seamless for me. Everything runs fine in Proton, and I didn't have any performance issues with my 2070 super. Tried the same games in Windows and it was the same experience, plus a couple of FPS (I assume because it wasn't going through DXVK). Can't speak to your other questions, though--those are outside of my experience.

I've been hopping between distros (and windows) for what feels like the past 6 months. Honestly it doesn't make too much of a difference but my preference for games is fedora or arch base and wayland. The biggest difference is the default kernel version really (AMD drivers in my case) but you can also add a newer kernel to any distro. I'd recommend just choosing a distro based on the package manager you like to use and stick with that.

I honestly don't think the distro matters too much if you just use steam. I use Arch and haven't had any issues with steam or proton that I can recall. SteamOS is itself Arch-based as well

My biggest gripe with nvidia is the total number of gpu options. You have mesa, nouveau, and even the dedicated proprietary gpu, but then also specific kernel builds with said gpu drivers.

Personally I use the nvidia kernel module drivers. They are good, even for my wonky egpu+dgpu+onboard graphics setup. I have to reboot to connect/disconnect the egpu, and had to copy my x11 config over to the gdm login manager but otherwise it works great (with x11).

Wayland and other dwm…will have different results.

Also dual-booting is honestly the way to go when starting up, just in case.

I generally agree, but I always found when I did that, that I would never take the time to resolve issues I encounter and just jumped back into Windows. It wasn't until I went full immersion that the switch stuck. It's been a few years now, and I'm glad I did.

A long, long time ago I ran Linux full-time on my desktop. Then I got into graphic design very seriously (early '00s) and went full Mac. I was full Mac for years and years, until a handful of years ago when I started to get more into photography and I wanted a fast Photoshop computer that didn't cost $5,000, so I went PC.

The photography world is similar to music and video production; there just aren't Linux alternatives that are mature enough. Lightroom is still the best catalog system. CaptureOne might be a better RAW processor, but that's OK, neither have Linux ports anyway!

I am on my Steam Deck all the time, and it's amazing to me how well games run on its Linux-based OS, but on the desktop I need one of the two commercial operating systems, there's just no getting around it.

SteamDeck has been great for Linux gaming. I've ordered a ROG Ally, and I really hope that Steam will officially open up their latest SteamOS version for other device makers. Considering that's how SteamOS was originally released (a desktop gaming OS for pc based consoles), I'm surprised they're not still operating like that

I've heard cutscenes can be problematic on some games. Something about the SteamDeck not supporting h264 I think 🤔. Warhammer 40,000 Boltgun is an example.