Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before). I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc. things like that. Those things have good substitutes from what I’ve read, so not an issue. But my son plays video games like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Roblox, Minecraft, Stellaris, Slime Rancher… and from what I’ve seen it’s kind of difficult to game comfortably (stable) on Linux. As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu. Currently on Windows 10 Home. Looking forward to what you guys have to say. All advice welcome. Thanks.
Dual boot 100% no doubts. Don’t unilaterally impose Linux on your Son, he will likely be cut off from many socialization on current and future popular multiplayer games that may or may not run smoothly on Linux.
Pft, just enable wobbly windows and Linux will be the shit.
For everything else God invented cloud gaming.
But seriously, my kids had the choice between Windows and Linux. They chose Linux because it looks nicer. The older one is even on Discord with friends who live further away. He finds enough current games that have anti cheat for Linux enabled. And in the end they both always get back to Minecraft and Roblox.
I recommend the Xubuntu flavor of Ubuntu.
Dual booting may be the way to go. Sure Steam, Proton, blah blah but there are so many other launchers and AAA games that are not going to be supported at all (or at least not without a bunch of fiddling). For my own kid, I gave up on Linux ages ago and they have a Wintendo now. I have been daily driving Linux since the mid 90s but I’m also practical when I need to be.
That machine is also isolated on its own VLAN to hopefully reduce the blast radius of whatever garbage it eventually detonates. I make regular backups of it and am ready to repave it at a moment’s notice.
Roblox will not work. The developers are actively preventing it from working in Linux.
Those other games should. If you don’t mind to tinker a bit to make sure they’re set up properly, then your son should be able to just launch them from Bottles or Lutris or whatever you set up as a games launcher.
I don’t know about Sims. I have a pirated copy of Sims 3 working just fine though.
It’s about online games and anti cheat. Many companies will not allow anti cheat to work on Linux because they “require” kernel level anti cheat, a big security and privacy concern.
You can read more about anti cheat games and their compatibility with Linux here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I run The Sims 4 using Steam, but I also have The Sims 2 installed via the EA App and running.
When not using Steam, there is another compatibility layer called Wine, which can run games by installing them in a .wine folder (which will contain all windows related apps).
You have to download Lutris (it runs GOG, EA, Ubisoft) and it will set things up for you, but you will need to modify some files and restart the computer to make the EA App install properly (it has compatibility problems with some settings files - you have to make a file executable and modifiable). ChatGPT or Gemini will be able to give you directions on what to modify if you copy paste the error messages.
Wine installs things on your computer as if it were a windows machine. All files (including the C folder) will be in a hidden folder on your home folder called “.wine”. Linux Mint has a button on the File Explorer to show hidden folders.
Having a LLM guide you through the process eases it a lot, but it is a lot to take in for someone that is starting on Linux, but it gets better and Linux is great because it’s hackable. You can change everything. This is one of its strong points.
Good luck running your games. Effort on adapting to Linux will pay off. It’s a OS that is closer to the machine than Windows (also for closed source and proprietary reasons Windows want to keep the user “away” from the machine).
What I mean is, if you’re using Linux, you’ll have a much easier time coding and programming something, if comes the need. Sometimes, this means being able to do things you would usually use web apps for (splitting PDFs, converting files, and so on).
Linux gaming is at a point where the only games that don’t work are the ones being actively blocked by the developers, mostly through anti-cheat systems. Just install a stable distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, and use Steam, Lutris and/or Heroic to manage the games and compatibility layers needed for them.
