Random Thoughts

[Ravenshire]

You know the Steam Deck runs a Linux distro, right? I game a lot on steam and every one of my "windoze only" games run, with a little help from the Wine and Proton compatibility layers.

Or, you can always dual boot...

I didn't know that, no. I've never really looked into the Steam Deck, because I'm not a great fan of handheld consoles, but it might be a sacrifice worth making to get away from Windows, and even better if it can somehow be used with a TV and/or external controller like the Switch?

That is really good to hear... what distro do you use or would you recommend if you don't mind me asking? I suppose the key question it comes down to is how well it works with the various game engines - Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot - because they are essentially the common denominators of many games, but what you're saying definitely sounds very hopeful

I have dual booted in the past, but a long time ago, and not for gaming. I'll definitely look into doing it again now, with what you've said, and if it feels really viable then hopefully I can make the full break from Windows at some point. Thanks for your advice.

Most any Debian fork (ubuntu, kubuntu, mint, etc...) works well for gaming. I've also heard good things about gaming under Arch Linux, but Manjaro is the only good stand alone Arch installer that doesn't taka a ton of backend work, and they are notorious for breaking their OS with rolling updates. Last I heard, Steam OS (a debian fork based on, I believe, ubuntu) was supposed to be made available (again) as a stand alone distro. At a guess, I would think that would be the best pure gaming solution if/when it's available.

There are way more choices than I can list, but Mint seems to be the current top choice for Steam (outside a steam os re-release), though that may have changed since I did my latest gaming PC build. The best source for Linux Steam gaming I've been able to find is ProtonDB. You can find advice there on subjects ranging from "what's the best distro for Steam?" to "how do I get 'X' game to stop doing 'Y' when 'Z' happens?"

Honestly, It's more work to game in Linux than Windoze but, I think it's more than worth it. And, when you buy/build a new gaming rig, you clone the system drive from your old PC, drop it in the new system as the system drive, and Linux just runs, so you only have to do that work once. Something that will likely never happen in Windoze!

If you go the dual boot route, you can set up Steam on both with common libraries. Then you can game from either OS without maintaining two installs of each game, eating twice as much drive space. This will also let you really compare the differences and the pros and cons, on the same hardware, very easily.