My Experience Switching To Linux And Still Gaming

Been trying to daily drive Linux rather than Windows for a couple of months now and it's been great, but also has some downsides. This video is me rambling and documenting my experience for others!
Follow me: bio.link/henrickthewreck

[@MrSuvvri]

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

[@glossonauta]

There are, however, some Linux distributions without GNU, like Alpine Linux and Chimera Linux, which use other tools, so not "all the so-called 'Linux' distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux".

[@ZOverOnee]

@@glossonauta its a joke

[@glossonauta]

@@ZOverOnee How was I supposed to know that? hahaha

[@chopin4525]

@@glossonauta Did you not smell the church of Saint IGNUcius? 🤣

[@glossonauta]

@@chopin4525 Unfortunately, I'm really bad at detecting irony and sarcasm 🤣

[@nex7053]

Recall is now integrated in explorer service in 24h2.. not possible to remove it and yes it is on all windows 24h2 systems regardless of your cpu architecture

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah I saw the Chris Titus Tech video about that and was like oh man they're pulling a Cortana with windows search move. Only difference is that recall is a lot spookier of a feature. They also apparently called the option to uninstall it through the legacy features menu a "bug" 🥴

[@nex7053]

@@henrickthewreck ye, like my all worklife is all about Microsoft stack from endpoint to azure and because somewhat I see a bit behind curtains I need to at least switch my personal infra to Linux. We had a call with MS about copilots for our services - just that feature is scary AF to use on a personal account. Basically if you are not enterprise everything you enter to copilot or any data it can tap from browser, office etc. will go straight up to training data. Enterprises have exception as data never leave tenant. And recall tops that.

[@cameronholtan3407]

I have been a Linux user since 2018/2019. Originally, the main reason I left Windows was because of the lack of control with the update policy being too intrusive. I also noticed I was reinstalling more than more normal once a year. My system performance was deteriorating pretty heavily. I had been part of the insider program since the beta of Windows 10. The visuals were nice, but between the update policy, and the ads in my start menu, I started my journey with Pop!_OS and ended up making my permanent digital residence being a Fedora based operating system. I wouldn't recommend a normal making the jump on their own though.

[@nex7053]

@@cameronholtan3407 Do not worry mate. I am familiar with linux. I have been using different distros from ubuntu, kali, debian up to fedora. And during those two weeks I successfully migrated my entire workflow to Garuda and I am tinkering with pure Arch on my laptop. Surprisingly for me it was not that hard - I can connect to AVD with freeRDP, MS Teams work ok. I was always using office in browser because of multiuser aspect and collaboration. Also migrating personal email and cloud service to Proton and hit that unsub button on Microsoft account side. So far I had no unsolvable problem. But still I am at the beginning of my journey.

[@DontBother_YT]

Been on Linux Mint since November of last year, Thanksgiving, in fact. And I haven't looked back at windows since. Just updated to LM Cinnamon 22 and the Pipewire audio support is fantastic. Few problems here and there though, it seems that certain games don't like running against OBS and their sounds just... ew. Like it's trying to go through multiple audio outputs. But I'm sure I can find a solution somewhere. Either way, Welcome to the Linux crowd! Please enjoy your stay and the minor headaches that come with it! XD

[@henrickthewreck]

A good way I think of the minor annoyances is a chance for me to either figure something else out or fix it myself lol but fortunately haven't had many big ones just yet outside of Davinci Resolve support! Linux Mint is a great choice overall also - I actually put it on an older laptop for my parents and they've had no issues with using it for their needs!

[@underratedphonker6395]

Welcome to the Cachy community! I'm also new there and it feels awesome so far. I hope you never go back!

[@henrickthewreck]

Thank you! I hope I never go back to Windows full time either! :D

[@CFWhitman]

I ended up using Linux for my gaming long before Proton came about. Back then, you had to just regard it as a different platform, and look through games available on that platform. There were still plenty of games to fill my time, but it was a lot more limited than now. At that time, you had to be someone who was willing not to look at all the big PC releases yearningly, but instead just accept the Linux game library as it happened.

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah before Proton I only really knew Linux as the OS you'd install on an old laptop or desktop to give it new life lol but Proton has really changed things for gaming and will continue to just get better I'm sure :D

[@CFWhitman]

@@henrickthewreck I suppose that I should have mentioned that for a while back then I ran WoW with wine on Linux, which worked pretty well.

[@henrickthewreck]

Oh true there were still ways to run games through Wine before Proton!

[@heinrichagrippa5681]

Back then the dream was to have a second GPU and use PCI-passthrough to give it to a Win VM. Ironically, by the time it finally became feasible for me to do that, once I accomplished it I realized I didn't actually have any real reason to use it outside of just playing around with what you can do in a VM. Proton made it kind of redundant, as there wasn't really anything I could do in the VM that I couldn't already do in Linux through either Proton or Wine via Bottles. I mean, I guess if one day for some reason I absolutely and specifically _need_ Photoshop, I've got my fancy VFIO VM ready to go.

[@henrickthewreck]

@@heinrichagrippa5681 yeah, a VM could be useful one day but it's become a lot less needed for most people! It's also not the easiest to setup GPU passthrough when you use Nvidia especially so that's a thing lol

[@michaeljaques77]

3 years Pop!_OS. Never going back to Windows.

[@henrickthewreck]

Let's keep it that way!

[@lumeronswift]

I'm adoring Pop!_OS. Has almost everything I need out of the box. My only issue with Linux and gaming is trying to play 1996 - 2003 era games... there are a lot of weird requirements that Wine hasn't yet covered for games like MechWarrior 3 and 4... bugs with DirectPlay and Voodoo and similar. Tried Bottles, Lutris, Steam, VirtualBox, no luck.

[@techzone2009]

❤❤

[@esaedvik]

Just upgraded and rebuilt my gaming rig a moment ago and put Nobara on it as I've been testing it on another (old) rig for quite a while. Seems to work just fine. Zero issues with games so far that would be Linux-specific. Space Marine 2 had issues connecting to servers and crashing, but canceling Epic Online Services installation fixed that. Seems to run cooler on Linux than Windows, which was odd. Everyone's been saying it really hammers the X3D CPUs. Just going through my recent gaming library and testing how stuff runs. Alan Wake 2 was fine, same for Darktide, Baldur's Gate 3, 40k Rogue Trader, EVE Online, Last Epoch, Pacific Drive...

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah I wish that more of the launchers had Linux support to the extent that Steam does but fortunately there are usually workarounds for stuff thanks to the community if anything! Nobara is a great choice too with all the gaming optimizations already setup right away - I was using it for a bit when I had an Asus Zephyrus laptop as my on the go laptop and was always nice :D

[@Tarkov_addict]

My experience has been pretty good, i only use windows every 1-2 weeks to play valorant with friends. but everything works perfectly for me on arch, and i can just get what i want and it works

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah maybe one day we won't have to rely on Windows for even games with anti-cheat! I still have to rely on it for video editing since Davinci Resolve isn't as fully featured on Linux unfortunately! Market share is going up though :D

[@esaedvik]

@@henrickthewreck I would rather ignore companies like Riot that are problematic in other ways too, not just anti-cheat wise.

[@powerdude_dk]

Thank you for your opinion on Linux Gaming. I'm using Manjaro myself, and am very satisfied with the performance! I've been using Linux, full time, for almost 2 years now. I too, feel liberated from Microsoft and their BS. They control your OS completely.

[@ItsLysec]

Welcome to CachyOS

[@VeshSneaks]

One thing I'll say, as a recent convert myself: The Discord Screensharing issue is possibly due to an incompatibility with Wayland. Switching to X11 as the window... thing (I forget the term, still a newbie lol) fixed the issue and screensharing worked like a charm the next time I tried it.

[@johanb.7869]

Windows has become ad filled spyware crap. I left it in 2017 and have never used it again.

[@BuriBuriZ]

Ever since Steam Deck released and Valve support on Linux, gaming on Linux never been easier. What holds most people switching to Linux is Gaming and second is Proprietary Software, with Linux Gaming is solved so many people lately switching to Linux.

[@henrickthewreck]

That and the fact that they'd have to install something other than windows - though for someone who built a computer that's not too much more difficult! Market share is going up though! :D

[@BuriBuriZ]

@@henrickthewreck Yes, Linux market is growing. With windows getting more su*ks day by day.

[@GG22n]

​@@BuriBuriZ growing 😭😂😂. Windows 7 and 8 combined have more users than Linux.

[@BuriBuriZ]

@@GG22n oh please look at statistics.

[@GG22n]

@@BuriBuriZ Yeah it's 4.5%.

[@taglime1541]

I have been running Fedora 40 KDE for about a month, but I still need to dual boot Windows for some applications and remote work. Fedora is very familiar to me as we use mostly Rocky Linux servers at work. I bought a SteamDeck earlier this year so I got to experience how easy gaming on Linux is now. Microsoft have been making bad decisions for a long time, Recall was the last straw for me.

[@tubeorip]

Windows 11 is the push gnu/linus has been waiting for. Thank you Microsoft for being an evil corporation and doing exactly what we expect from such evil companies. You are now the lead driver of what you don't want. A free and open software environment with the user having all power :)

[@foznoth]

With Bazzite, and other Fedora based atomic distros, you overlay packages with the rpm-ostree command. CachyOS is my next hop. Back to Arch after about a year of testing out various distros with an eye to recommending them. For my not so technical friends I'm recommending one of the uBlue spins, depending on needs. For the friends that like breaking things it's currently between Nobara & CachyOS once I've had it myself a few months. Arch or Arch based distros are always my own preference.

[@jjdizz1l]

I love that you're on CachyOS!

[@moribundmurdoch]

I'm considering using GPU passthrough instead of a dual-boot setup on my desktop (I play VR games), with Kali Linux as the primary OS since I have to use it for school anyway. However, I do love CachyOS on my 2012 MacBook Pro.

[@xpander69]

Nice to see new people trying Linux for Gaming. You can basically disable steam shader processing from the steam settings. Its not really needed since all the gpu drivers support graphics pipeline library which make the games compile shaders on the menus or on fly without much issues these days, except few older UE4 games i guess. Now some games that use mediafoundation video stuff might still need that feature, but i personally havent run into any of those and for those im pretty sure you can then just use protonGE that has that sorted iirc

[@henrickthewreck]

Fair enough - I'll test out skipping the shader processing but sounds like it'll be fine to disable it for most games! Thanks for the tip :D

[@RichardJActon]

@@henrickthewreck I think there is also a steam setting to cache them so they only run after certain game updates.

[@justinallen4903]

I just switched about a month ago to PopOS. I have had very few issues gaming. Mostly related to audio clicks and pops. I almost entirely play single player games, though.

[@stenboss1816]

I've been on CachyOS for 3 weeks and I so far have a great gaming experience :)

[@henrickthewreck]

Ayy! Glad you're having a great time too with it then! :D

[@informativecontent4778]

Cachyos truly is amazing

[@cuynu]

somehow this video are popular and appearing for users, especially users browsing youtube with linux user-agent string

[@YouHaveTrouble]

If you switch from wayland to X11 you might see 3% - 20% more fps depending on the game :)

[@henrickthewreck]

Oh that's a good tip! Thanks for letting me know :D

[@leonbishop7404]

I was told completely the opposite. depends on the hardware, I guess

[@yesyesyesgrill-ir2ur]

​@@leonbishop7404 like a year ago nvidia was hell on wayland but these days its getting better i hear

[@RichardJActon]

@@henrickthewreck pretty sure there's no HDR support in X11 only on wayland

[@leonbishop7404]

upd: you might get better performance if you run games that are wayland native(those that dont use Xwayland compatibility layer, basically running Xorg in Wayland)

[@Puretea4711]

i switched back to Windows after 3 days... maybe 2020 is the year of the linux desktop....

[@NabiYote]

Risk of gambling 2 is the biggest threat to linux adoption, if it works there people might switch to mac and crawl back whatever productivity they have left

[@GatoCoder]

An interesting video. I would maybe lower the background music a little so its less noticeable :P

[@goku4393]

It depends on the headset and your equalizeer setting on your device. I'm using oneplus buds pro and vocals are audible.

[@henrickthewreck]

Thanks for the tip! I'll keep it in mind for the future :D

[@linuxnext]

nice video :)

[@henrickthewreck]

Thanks :D

[@jakobw135]

Have you tried Garuda Linux, an Arch variation and compared it to Cachy, or other similar distros?

[@henrickthewreck]

I haven't tried Garuda, but I've heard decent stuff about it! The only other arch distros I have any experience with aside from arch itself is Manjaro and Endeavour but out of those I'd recommend Endeavour more so since it seemed to give you more options out of the box and I actually use that one on my laptop - a MacBook Air 2014

[@Kai_Rengoku]

Started my journey on Garuda Currently just arch but I always add Garuda repos and cachy repos to every build I do, toss in a splash of blackarch repo for blue themed builds 🥰

[@azemaviator]

Is the mixer software you are using unable to run and install inside a distrobox? For Bazzite if it is simply a kernal mod that needed layering only that should be fine then the rest in a container. There is a good likelihood someone would be willing to help get what is needed to enable your mixer into Bazzite. Not try to convince you to move back just interested. Using a linux distro outside of the ones that are not targeting expert users (like arch) "Skill issue" should never be a valid reason for a user's inability to make use of of a distro. If it can be done easy on other distros it is a problem not with the user.

[@henrickthewreck]

I did actually try to install it through Distrobox since I saw that it was an out of the box option in bazzite but even when it was installed in there, it wouldn't recognize that the mixer was plugged in and therefore I couldn't actually configure it. Looking back, probably needed to figure something out with something along the lines of passing through the device to the Distrobox container or something but even now that's mostly out of the scope of my ability to be honest 🥴

[@DanielOliveiraViolao]

Interesting. I'm using Zorin OS.

[@jakobw135]

Don't gamers want their games to run NATIVELY on the Linux hardware - without going through various emulators like - Proton?

[@MaartenT]

Proton is not an emulator, it is based on WINE (which is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) as it translates Windows calls to Linux calls but the CPU is the same architecture so there is no need to emulate. So it should be faster than a virtual machine and it is in fact sometimes faster than Windows with Windows games (not sure how that works, but I have seen tests where that is the case). I personally don't care how it works as long as it works, I don't really need games to be native and in some cases I have noticed worse performance for native games because it's less tested. But I am sure there are plenty of people who would prefer native games. That said, the chance of devs putting in a large amount of work to get something to run or compile of Linux for the couple of % marketshare is just not a realistic thing for most devs. Some will do so when the game runs on Unity for example because it seems relatively easy to just compile it for Linux as well, but for huge games from big companies it's very unlikely.

[@jakobw135]

@@MaartenT But doesn't the TRANSLATION process from Windows calls to Linux ones - SLOW the game, in one sense, compared to running NATIVELY?

[@MaartenT]

@@jakobw135 You would expect so, but again in some cases it runs better according to some tests I have seen the last year. Absolutely not in every case, but generally it's relatively close either way with obviously some outliers where the difference is pretty big. I personally found that the Windows version of Europe Truck Simulator 2 worked better in Linux than the Linux version although I have seen people say the oposite. There are so many different systems that it's hard to test this kind of thing. Also, there are obvious compatibilty issues, most notably with anti-cheat (especially the ones that run in the kernel). It works for some games, but most companies refuse to support it. Recently GTA Online stopped working on Linux because of anti-cheat they implemented as did EA WRC (and apparently other EA games). An other issue I have seen is with older games that use videos that run on unsupported video formats (mainly WMV stuff) and things like that. Those videos typically either don't run or it crashes the game. There are sometimes ways to fix it, but somestimes it's difficult. But honestly, most people won't get that issue. That mainly happened to old Visual Novels. That said, I tested out a very old poker game that was on Steam that people complanined about that it didn't work in Win 10 or 11 any more and that worked perfectly fine. Basically nobody is going to play that any more, but it worked without any tinkering to my surprise.

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah at this point the biggest couple of things preventing people from switching over is ease of access being that you have to pick a distro and install it as it doesn't come on most devices out of the box, and anti-cheat not always working. But Proton is really good for what it's worth and keeps getting better!

[@azemaviator]

@jakobw135 Proton/Wine don't do much other than make what calls would be happening and tell the Windows kernel to do something instead of telling the Linux kernel to do something; that call to do something still has to, well, do something. There are some cases where the backend sides on Linux are more efficient than the Windows kernel version, and sometimes, it is worse, too. Still, there is very little overhead from basically just a redirector. Wine/proton is like a router on your network. If you want to reach some site, the router is an extra hop, yes, but you can't talk to the internet directly; you have to have a router. In this case, Windows is a router/modem combo for ISP A, whereas Wine/Proton is a router talking to the modem it is connected to (Linux) for ISP B. In most cases, the hops to the internet locally don't matter much, as the server still has to accept your request and send back the response, which tends to be the slowest part of the whole connection. I hope this analogy explains why Wine/Proton is effectively the same as running natively on Windows. For the most part, other than anti-cheat, when a game is broken under Proton, the translation does not yet cover some Windows API. Another note is that for graphics, the CPU time for most calls is very close, and the GPU is the limiting factor in the speed, as most of the performance is the code that runs on the GPU, which does not change. I am glossing over some details, but this should address your main question. The API calls that the game makes to Windows are not free to start with; they inherently have a cost. Wine/Proton also has a cost, yes, but it tends to be in line with the cost Windows has for the same call. At the end of the day, both Wine and Windows are simply tools to tell your hardware what logic the game wants to run. Wine is not perfect; some games simply run bad currently, but as people report issues, those issues can be solved over time. (quite the wall of text...)

[@metalfiregametime652]

I've noticed that Arch based distros work really well for gaming. I use Endeavour OS and one I really like too is Xero Linux.

[@oredaze]

Recall needing an NPU has been proven to be false...

[@henrickthewreck]

Just saw this news! Microsoft really trying to sneak that in lol feels like it should be bigger news!

[@peterjansen4826]

Eldenring works much better on Linux than on Windows thanks to shader-caching (compiling it before you use them, storing that in a directory). Most games just work on Linux. In some cases (Borderlands3) Steam will offer you a better experience than Epic Games. On average on Windows you get a close to 10% higher average FPS on Linux but that is not really a problem, it is less than half of 1 tier difference within the same generation of graphics cards. For some games on Linux you get a much higher average FPS (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Borderlands3), for some games the performance is much worse, mostly when those games are new and contain buggy code, usually people (both developers and community) will find a solution for that. Any game which uses Java runs much better on Linux because Java runs much better on Linux, Minecraft is the best example. I personally don't care about non-supported shooters, there are shooters which are supported and I just play those, currently mostly Apex. I also played Deadlock, Overwatch, Shatterline and Battlebit on Linux. DaVinci Resolve is fine on Linux as long as you use a NVidia-card (which I dislike) and don't mind not using AAC (which is inferior to Opus but from some cameras you will get a file with AAC and there is no other option). Setting up DaVinci Resolve can be tedious though. Note that we do have a good AAC-implementation (opensource) on Linux but the company (BlackMagic) refuses to use that and they don't want to support the proprietary version (from Apple) because of license nonsense, apparently MS pay them to be allowed to use it, on Linux that of course is not directly possible so BlackMagic would have to pay them or just open the opensource version which is absolutely fine.

[@henrickthewreck]

Yeah the biggest problem is installing Davinci resolve and having it work 100% depending on your distro, of course! I wish that black magic had a better implementation of installing it on Linux but I understand that it's a smaller market share than Windows or MacOS so they don't care as much. Would be awesome if one day they made it easier though even as like a flatpak or something!

[@peterjansen4826]

@@henrickthewreck To install it you need to have certain dependencies which are not clearly pointed out. Out of my head Opencl and the proprietary drivers in the case of AMD (which you can use next to your mesa-drivers). BlackMagic Design should support the same features on Linux as on Windows. Flatpak is a solution but the better solution is to use AppImage. Basically you put a lot of files in 1 AppImage-file (all the dependencies are in it)), the user simply downloads it and then runs that file. I do expect that DaVinci Resolve will get better on Linux in the next 10 years but it will be a gradual process and BlackMagic will keep supporting NVidia better than AMD in the next years.

[@Joshua-XP]

First MUSIC?

[@peterjansen4826]

ChromeOS also is Linux! Just boring, walled-gardened. But any game working on Linux can easily be run on ChromeOS, especially if you just install a regular Linux-distro on it, which you can do in a sandbox without touching your ChromeOS system, but you probably also can just install it instead of the ChromeOS system when you jump through a few hoops. Anyway, the point is that Linux now has a 6% marketshare with the browsers. In regard to unknown: probably that comes from more privacy respecting browsers which hide such information to make it more difficult to fingerprint the users. Other is mostly *BSD.

[@henrickthewreck]

That's true - it's the big example of Linux in the mainstream like being sold at stores and all - though definitely a different experience than using your typical Linux distro. I have seen a video suggesting that old Chromebooks are the new thinkpads for putting a Linux distro onto!

[@Snufflegrunt]

For the love of everything good, please turn off your Discord notification sound when recording a video.

[@UVCMD]

One of the most important things for me is HDR support. Nice to see it finally becoming a Linux thing. Unfortunately, nVidia's support isn't where I'd like it to be. I'd like to see RTX Video HDR available for Linux or at least something similar to Windows AutoHDR. This is because many games don't support HDR and the games that do support HDR often get the mastering wrong. Maybe you know a convenient solution for this? If not, them I'm stuck with Windows atm.

[@henrickthewreck]

While there isn't an auto HDR solution for gaming on Linux yet, I think games still look great on Linux even if without HDR. I actually should do a side by side comparison or something to see if it's just forcing HDR though because I almost feel like it is? Could just be the OLED effect though. Hopefully the Nvidia drivers get better on Linux and eventually support this though :D

[@jdanks]

arch LFG

[@user-den1251]

Your idea to switch to linux was great but video lacks good music and not noisy microphone.

[@FierroSev]

Love linux but for gaming, it causes more headaches than it is worth. Not all software works, and if it does, it can be riddled with bugs. I play path of exile and there is an addon called awakened. while i does run, it will constantly bug out and have to alt tab to get it show the prices of items. Not an issue on windows. Overwatch 2 won't let the mouse click on anything, and when you do, it minimizes to the desktop. So you are forced to play in window borderless. Another thing is that linux sucks if you have new hardware. It can take months for the kernel to be updated before it work. Ever bought a laptop, only to realize linux doesnt work with killer wifi cards commonly found in gaming laptops. Or peripherals like your fingerprint reader doesn't work. Also i wouldn't look at global linux numbers and use that as a reflection as far as gamers. Steam has their own gaming numbers, and linux less than 3%. If you want to just game, linux isnt it. From having to deal with flatpaks and permission issues, new hardware not working, pirating being harder, a lot of the most popular games dont work, etc. Nothing beats windows, as the compromises are far too great to use any other os.

[@deleted_handle]

im the second comment and my " " says it

[@Spectrulight]

My iternet lag :(

[@mfourier]

try fedora 41 beta with gnome 47 owo😈

[@Fact_Fusion_The_1st]

im the first comment and my name says it