Yes. I think Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 were my last "anchors" to Windows (7, at the time). I barely ever booted into it… I wanted to be NOT IN WINDOWS more than I wanted to play big fat luxury games.

But I did keep it around until there just wasn’t anything left that I wanted to run but couldn’t. The first Humble Indie Bundles with games like FEZ and Limbo had been out by that point as well as a few bigger titles like The Witcher 2. Wine was much more painful than it is now.

I’ve generally made sure not to buy too “crazy” hardware (like Bluetooth controllers… yes, I’m old and a neophobe and I don’t know what else).

I stopped dual booting long ago. If a game doesn't work on Linux, I find it much easier and more fun to simply do something else. At this point, the threat of losing my browser tabs would be enough inconvenience to dissuade me, and I generally have quite a bit more active state than that on my computer that would be lost with a reboot.

Before I gave up on Windows gaming I did use a dedicated machine with a KVM switch for a while. But even that simply stopped seeing enough use to justify it.

Regarding your bluetooth issues on your 8bitdo, I had an issue with my 8bitdo pro 2 where on linux there was a higher input delay vs Windows. I then updated the controller firmware and that fixed it. Works great on linux now.

Maybe try updating the controller's firmware, if you haven't yet anyway.

Regarding dual booting, I do dual boot, sometimes I like using windows, others i like using linux. It's nice to have the flexibility. Ideally i would like to switch to linux one day, but there are still a few small issues, at least on KDE wayland.

If You do not feel comfortable to leave Windows for gaming then of course keep it and dual boot PC with Your distro. Also, You can go to protondb to check how Your games run on linux

I think it's the best of both world

I usually play almost everything on my Linux distro , but I keep my small windows partition for games that sometimes I play and cannot on Linux (aggressive kernel anti cheat etc)

I think you're talking mostly to a community of Linux users, so it's not going to be a great sample. Personally I dual-booted for quite a while, and eventually realized I had unintentionally not used Windows in months, so I backed up my files and removed it.

If you're having issues with Linux, I would definitely dual-boot spend some time trying to figure the issues out instead of just going to Linux 100% and putting up with them.

Realistically, if you game a lot, you'll probably end up using Windows most of the time if you dual boot.

I have a dual boot setup and the reality is that time in a day is already quite limited, and rebooting every time you want to game is bothersome. It's up to you. If you partition things right, there won't be a single problem. I would still advise using a completely different drive than the one which has Windows to avoid problems.

I don't game on windows just linux, but I have a windows VM on hand for the occasional bit of windows software I need. But these days that's becoming a rare occurance. I still love my old Nikon photo editing software which lives on the VM, I just dont edit so many photos these days.

I used to dual boot, but I found that the less games I had installed to windows, the less often if want to switch to ti - the problem with dual booting is the time it takes to reboot.

Sure it gives you the best compatibility and such, but it takes just enough time to frustrate waiting, but not enough time for you to go make a coffee or cup of tea while waiting - it's right in that annoying zone, which is not what you want when you just want to pick up a game and have it work, and if you miss the boot prompt, it will boot back into Linux, and you'll have to do it all over again.

If I were to go back to dual booting (I won't, Linux is just so much more satisfying to use) I'd have one side for gaming and the other for work stuff. I wouldn't install games on one side, and I wouldnt install work apps on the other.

As a result, I found that I'd rather just play something else instead of waiting for the pc reboot. So i uninstalled windows and never looked back.

If I were you, I'd still try dual booting, especially if you need certain software that just doesn't have a good Linux equivalent - But I'd try to use Linux for everything possible - sort of as a method to wean yourself of the windows side, make windows less and less necessary to boot into.

Also, just some advice: when setting it up make sure windows is installed first, then install Linux, windows hates bootloaders other than its own, and therefore tends to break the Linux bootloader - for the same reason, keep a Linux live image around so you can fix it if windows update decides to update the bootloader and in turn, nuke the Linux bootloader.

I completely abandoned Windows on my gaming PC. These days if a game doesn't work on Linux I just don't play it. There's plenty of other stuff to choose from.

As long as anti cheat keeps only supporting windows you will need it to experience all games. You can go through the labor filled process of trying to VM windows with GPU passthru, but at that point are you really much better off? I swear one day we will get to a market-share that is worth supporting, but it just isn't there yet. Even fresh titles like Battlebit support anticheat that is incompatible with linux.

I have axed Windows since they started to get really aggressive with their bullshit on Win11 and so far I don't regret it at all. Admittedly I'm not that much of a multiplayer guy anymore, single play is working fine however. I'm on Garuda Linux and it's super handy, because it comes with a lot of stuff already set up for you while still offering the benefits of Arch. Luckily, because this isn't Windows, you can just remove what you don't need. Depending on your choice of image, there isn't too much to worry about tho.

I really want to try some older Windows games at some point. From what I've heard (and seen on Windows) they run better on emulators or Wine than Windows these days.

I dual boot Windows and Arch but most of my time spent is on Arch. It's probably been a month since I last touched Windows.

After five years of dual booting, I ditched windows for good in 2022 and it's proven to have been an excellent decision. Managing two systems is way more of a hassle than the occasional (and increasingly rare) hiccup in running a game on Linux.

I dual boot Garuda and Windows. I still have Windows for VR (ALVR works, but not as well as my windows setup), The Crew 2, and Fortnite.

I have a GPU passthrough setup just for VR and HDR. But I don't really use Windows otherwise.

I have a relatively big SSD so I don't mind keeping my Windows partition around for the rare occasions I need it.

Whether one can live without a Windows partition really seems to depend on what games you play. In about four years, I've only needed to switch to Windows to play three games, but I don't play any competitive multiplayer games so I don't tend to encounter any Linux-incompatible anticheat software.

I axed Windows a while ago, I play exclusively on Linux with either my keyboard or a wired Xbox 1 controller. It fits my needs pretty well as I don't play online or super recent games. Steam with wine/proton does a great job at running my games on my shitty x230.

I'm dual booting, but sincerely only for the very rare occasions my friends want to play Call of Duty. Other than that, every other game I play works hunky dory on my Fedora Rawhide/KDE Plasma install.

I'm not sure how to help with Halo freezing up, but I use an 8bitdo Pro2 controller with Bluetooth and have no issues even playing for another room. What distro are you using? Perhaps you're missing Bluetooth device drivers or firmware that might make it work better.

I use Linux primarily almost all the time, but because of some games like Ark, Eco and even Cyberpunk I haven't been able to fully abandon Windows even though I want to. Most of the time my Windows install just sits there taking up a lot of space just so I can boot into it when I run into some game which just refuses to be run on Linux.

I still dual boot. A lot of games in my steam library and other stores just don't work on Linux, especially some visual novels. CJK characters can cause some trouble and sometimes localized game version just needs to be activated through certain software but not working in wine(English version works but reading that could be painful due to lack of vocabulary). I hardly use Windows(since Windows 11 is so laggy on my laptop and it takes more than 20 percent of my limited storage and is still eating more of it) but when trying to play some visual novels... I just dual boot.

I am usually using either (mostly) Windows or (mostly) Linux on a machine. On new machines I buy or set up I usually try to install Linux first, but I will not switch from Windows to Linux on older machines I have already set up and I will also not remove Windows from machines I don't use that often.

At least for now, I don't plan on installing Windows 11, so if Windows 10 support runs out I might switch a few more machines to Linux.

100% Linux nowadays. The only game missed in my household is Fortnite (for the kids). In that case it seems that Epic intentionally sabotages Linux. You can get into a game alright but after 15 seconds or so it boots you.

I still dual boot, although at this point its more rare for me to boot into windows at all. I had some trouble with diablo 4 on linux for example, so I've been mostly playing that in windows.

I setup my laptop to dual boot Pop!OS and I basically never boot into the Windows partition. I don't do much gaming on the laptop but everything in Steam has worked perfectly when I have. I don't regret setting up dual boot because it's nice to have the option but if I start running out of disk space it's getting blown away.

I built a PC for GPU passthrough. I can hand the whole GPU to windows in a virtual machine and it runs near flawlessly. I almost never do it because there are all of three games I can't run either natively or with a layer like proton or wine. But I almost exclusively play single-player games, so your mileage may vary.

If you're just getting started I think it's totally fine to test the waters with a dual boot. A lot of games work great on Linux now even unsupported games like League of Legends and Blizzard games via Lutris or Bottles.

Another option I didn't see anyone recommend is doing a QEMU KVM GPU passthrough. So you would boot up the VM for gaming in windows and pass your gpu through. It's a bit of work to get running stable / performant but then you don't have to restart your machine every time you want to game or run Windows only software. The downside is games like Valorant and Genshin Impact won't work in a VM.

I'm currently dual booting to game on Windows. I'm trying to game on Linux but keep running into a few issues. Such as for the life of me I can't get Zwift working with Lutris. Once I work those few issues out I'll completely get rid of Windows.