I’m seriously considering switching to Linux. I have been stuck with a failed Windows 10 update for the last week, the damn machine tries to update Windows but fails at 35% and begins a 5 minute-long cycle of restarting the PC over and over again to “roll back” the changes. I have not asked Windows to update, sometimes I can shut down and start my PC without the damn auto-update thing to override whatever I do, other times I restart the PC and the update process begins without my confirmation.
How hard is to get into Linux? I use my PC mostly for g*ming and to study, will my games suffer any issues?
I was saying somewhere else that I was building a PC and the installation was literally inserting a USB stick and it was easier than setting up a game on Steam. You run a chance of your games suffering. I’ve been able to play Cult of the Lamb and Raft just fine. Allegedly Elden Ring is fine. Something like LoL or battle net will require some tricky software management, but I’ve gotten StarCraft II to work and never bothered with LoL because it frustrates me to play and I hate it. I got an N64 emulator to work with the games that I definitely lawfully ripped from my cartridges for the sake of back ups.
Installing Linux over Windows might be difficult and you should ask someone who isn’t me because I have never.
Allegedly Elden Ring is fine
can confirm, my pirated copy runs sweet as a nut on mint, the only tweaking i needed to do was change the language from Russian
Big budget multiplayer games with anti-cheat engines are likely to give you a hassle. Otherwise you’re probably fine.
The best thing to do is to make a live USB of some distro (probably Ubuntu, maybe Mint or Pop!) and try running from the USB for an afternoon. If you like it and everything seems to work, you can go ahead and install the OS. It’s very easy if you want to do a clean install (erase everything). Keeping your files from Windows is also possible, but about as complex as installing a mod loader on a game, and you’ll want to look up some guides for that.
Linux is as easy as making a USB stick and changing an option or two on your BIOS, took me about a half an hour including the installation time (compared to two hours to do a Windows restore).
Once you’re in, installing the most common programs is easy since ubuntu comes with a very mature package manager. just open the terminal (it’s very similar to MS DOS or Powershell if you’ve ever used those) and type something like “sudo apt-get install firefox” and it will automatically download and install Firefox. Some Linux OSs like Pop_OS come with a gui version of this that is similar to installing an app on a phone app store.
Games can be a little bit trickier, but the program Lutris handles the most common workarounds and tricks needed to get everything to work. Generally just use that program’s “add game” feature to run the game’s installer and it will handle the rest, or if you have games on Steam/Epic/GoG you can sync your account to Lutris and have everything on one app. The most I’ve had to do to get a game working is go into the launcher settings and add an argument (like “-forcedx11”) or tell Lutris to use a different version of WINE from the default.
As others are saying, games with an anti-cheat don’t like being run on Linux and often require a workaround if they work at all. The reason for this is Linux’s default security features not giving anti-cheat programs access to the level that they want, so even when they support Linux officially (as Easy Anti Cheat does iirc) developers don’t like to enable it. Lutris is capable of running scripts that can automate this for you, though it might break on an update, just search their website.
