Maybe a dumb question, the biggest reason I can’t fully move is i do enjoy VR and sim racing, both of which I’ve seen have limited linux support still, and though I enjoy figuring things out and fixing stuff, I don’t want to always be tinkering instead of just racing/gaming.
Would it be possible or safe to keep gaming on win 10 until it’s totally not supported, but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
I did just order a 2 tb drive to put linux mint on, to give gaming on linux another try. I haven’t had a linux install for a few years now and kind of miss it. But i do wonder if I’ll need to reinstall all my games again or can just access them off the existing hard drives (I know, NTFS formatted wont be optimum for linux).
If I’m in the wrong spot to ask, please inform.
Tip, if you go with dual booting, use the windows boot manager and not a linux bootloader. If you use a linux bootloader be prepared to have to fix it with a rescue disk every now and again since Windows will fuck it up with updates sometimes.
Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I’m triple booting Windows 10, Windows 11, and Linux for a few years now with GRUB, and Windows never broke it.
Yes. Dual boot, or even simpler, try running your games in Windows VM in Linux. Performance hit should be minimal.
What VM solution are you using? When I tried to do this on Unraid, I kept running into opengl issues. Being honest i was trying to run a slicer that only had a windows profile.
At the moment, just VirtualBox for simplicity, but have run flat KVM for similar things in the past. It is FAR from ideal, but better than fucking with dual booting for myself. Also breaks a lot with Nvidia hardware.
Take a look at qemu + virt-manager (gui) and maybe if 2 gpu’s plugged into same monitor check github for looking-glass
I would be surprised if they’d run well in a VM but I’ll have to try! I have an AMD fx 8 core and a rtx 580 so I think compatibility wise I’ll be good.
Other games I play a lot are cs2 and board game sim, some pubg and gtav (which i know I’d need to use windows for)
Having had similar hardware and reading about your preferences let me throw some cents in the hat:
Sim stuff runs mostly ootb. I don’t have a fancy rig, but both my G29 and x52 pro work perfectly fine. At most, some games will map the axis wrong, but that’s easily fixable (eg. AMS2 swaps clutch and brakes and inverts all axis). The insullary apps such as TrackIR and controller stuff is already available, although not official. There’s Oversteer for wheels and GX52 for hotas.
I don’t have a TrackIR device but I’ve used FacetrackNoIR with the neuralnet face tracker and besides needing a bit of background lighting, it woked fine.
It’s not all perfect and depending on the games, it might need some tinkering. For example Mechwarrior 5 refuses to work properly with my hotas, and when I had a weaker CPU, Beam.ng was unusable with traffic/opponents. Some older titles are a pain to set up, like the older WRC games that had some obscure config files for the mappings. The upside is that you can back up your “fake windows C:” (aka as compatdata folder) once you got everything the way you like it.
I mostly do office type stuff and vector graphics along with CNC, and the proprietary software I need runs 90% fine on wine/bottles, so I haven’t had much of any blocker issues with work stuff.
I’ve been running Linux way before proton was a thing, and I’m really happy about how things are moving nowadays. I got used to the gnome workflow and now any other OS feels cumbersome and clunky, but YMMV.
TL; DR:
- PRO: most sim stuff just works
- CON: some games perform a bit worse
- PRO: most hardware runs OOTB and popular gear have apps for setup and options
- CON: those are unofficial and might not support all bells and whistles
- CON: some games are finnicky to set up, especially with external software addons (eg crewchief, ED companion, TrackIR)
- PRO: you can save your games prefix so all that work is portable/reproducible
- most office stuff is more than adequate for everyday work.
Yeah gtav might struggle in Linux. ProtonDB shows its a tough config. Dual boot is probably your only option if that’s a deal breaker. Sharing my experience, I had a game i was playing that required windows and I was dual booting for a while, as well as a 3d slicer that the only profile for a printer I own is still windows. Everytime windows updated it seemed to have a good chance of wrecking the bootloader. After about the third time that happened I just stopped doing that, wiped windows and ran fedora.
As of today, I have spent time trying to make that slicer profile work in Linux, got it most of the way there and got frustrated, so instead I repurposed an old laptop that gets powered on only for that one specific printer.
Every game I play now runs on Linux.
Performance hit should be minimal
Only if you have a second GPU that you can pass through to the VM. Otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time.
Dual boot is the simpler method. A VM is far from simple when it comes to gaming.
You can use one GPU and hot swap it to pass through when booting your windows VM
but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
Shopping is done through the browser so it won’t matter what OS you’re using. If you’re concerned about security, Linux probably isn’t doing you any favors.
Having weak security on your operating system certainly isnt helping when there is some sort of exploit in a browser running on that system. The perfect operating system may not prevent issues inside your browser, but it may limit the damage these do. I feel like you suggest using Linux reduces security - why do you say that?
You CAN but it’s a matter of time before you’ll have to upgrade to 11 or go 100% Linux because drivers and game clients eventually stop supporting EoL operating systems.
simple windows 10 is not the best idea in some cases. its gonna cry and whine everyday about update, and sooner some of the launchers are going to ask for a newer version. if you are serious about 10 tho, i would recommend 10 ltsc, which is gonna give you plenty more years of security updates, and has a lot less bloat.
