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.
In the last few years, Valve (company behind the popular Steam PC games store) has made huuuge efforts in making most games work well on Linux, because the Steam Deck console that they sell runs on Linux, and the compatibility layer they made is called Proton.
To check what games work well on Linux you should look in the ProtonDB.
If there are games that only work on Windows, you could do dual booting.
Is dual booting as simple as loading the Windows OS off of a drive in the BIOS?
Yes.
But every other year Windows seems to “accidentally” mess with Linux bootloaders on other drives/partitions.
Pretty much, yeah.
I’d recommend using two physical drives (SSD/HDD) instead of two partitions if you can, because windows update sometimes messes with the bootloader. But most laptops only have one drive so that’s not always possible.
Do keep in mind that formatting a drive (e.g. to split it in partitions) will erase all the data, so make sure you have backups!
The games you listed all work on Linux.
Roblox sometimes has problems but currently works. You need Sober to launch Roblox.
With Minecraft it depends on the edition. Java Edition works great. Bedrock Edition is rocky. The Windows version doesn’t work at all but the Android version does through the Bedrock Launcher. You’d have to buy it on Google Play. But if he plays Java Edition he’s golden.
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.
There you go https://www.protondb.com/
Also consider that you can just try and if you don’t like it, remove it. It can be a weekend fun exploration together.
Steam for steam games, Lutris for anything else, Heroic for Amazon, Epic and GOG if you prefer it. Roblox is unsupported, but there are workarounds. For online, not LAN based, games, you will need to check title by title. I recommend Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? for this. Other than that, you are almost 100% cool. If you encounter any problem, you will need to check ProtonDB and Lutris/games sites for each case. But nowadays almost anything runs perfectly out of box.
