Bonus points: I’m having fun with my computer again!
Gaming is what kept a lot of people on windows over the years, but thanks to valve and the proton team, Linux gaming works as well as Windows gaming (and some people say better than — I certainly don’t have to deal with all the crap Microsoft tries to put into windows).
Some people refuse to use Linux because they’re afraid of having to tinker with it, but that hasn’t been my experience in over a decade. Things have generally just worked for me.
AoE2:DE is one example of incompatibility. Simple game (by modern standards) with no advanced anticheat.
It's been a few months since I played but the only thing that doesn't work is Xbox login. I needed to download a DLL to get multiplayer working, which I agree isn't really userfriendly, but compared to the early Wine days Proton is a walk in the park.
What I do miss a bit is Capturage, apparently it's really hard to make it work in Proton.
It's even been less troublesome than when I used to use AMD GPUs, where IIRC accelerated graphics drivers and the ROCm drivers had some sort of conflict unless installed a certain way (a few years ago now, my last AMD card was a 5700xt).
This is true, but have also improved substantially in the last year or so.
The only problems I’ve had are that the intro video and menu for supreme commander forged alliance runs at very low frame rate (but the actual game runs without problems), and that Gothic 3 was very glitchy on steam deck. Everything else I’ve tried ran without issue.
I haven't tried that game, but I know for a fact that Fallout 4 works quite well, and it -- like Skyrim -- has a gold status on protondb.
There were also some rendering issues, but I could let that slide given my GPU is ~10 years old.
No idea where that came from but it's not the case.
- I download games from gog via linux and put them on an NTFS partition
- I boot windows 11 in a proxmox VM with passthrough gpu + usb controller for sound
- I mount NTFS partition in VM, install and run games
- my windows 11 install has no network device
- tbh there was a windows defender nag, but I managed to disable it.
I've been wondering if I can do something similar for steam, but haven't touched my steam login in 5+ years. I think you can use a proxy for steam.
That monitor, incidentally, is a 25-inch former iMac. I gutted it after it suffered the widespread burned-out-GPU problem that afflicted many (most?) Macs of circa-2010 vintage, and put an LCD driver board in it.
Everything else works well on Linux. Gaming included. I've run Linux many years, in fact.
But Capture One and Lightroom are not available over there, which is what draws me back to MacOS. Of course I could just use darktable. Have done that for several years. But at the end of the day, I just prefer Capture One, and that's enough reason for me to switch my OS.
The few I had a pleasure of using have a really good browser and mobile app support. The only problem I ran into is that sometimes mobile apps refuse to run on rooted Android devices.
The browser will only ever log in to one bank per tab, and with different UI per bank. If you have more than one bank, it becomes a hassle quite quickly.
I have been multi booting for 20 years, preferring Linux distributions the whole time, but other OSes when I want to use them.
I recently started using a dedicated Windows system for gaming and other Windows favored tasks. I am running a KVM switch, using AMD Graphics on a Linux system and Nvidia on this Windows system. I also have a macOS system, that I use as needed.
I do this with mobile devices as well. It doesn't seem worth it to squabble over choosing a path.
But hardware is more affordable than ever (unless you want a really powerful GPU). What's worse is that you have to separate the tasks between OSes, you can't easily have a default computer for everything, with everything relevant locally available. It's fine if you keep Windows for gaming, and want gaming to be explicitly separate. It's harder if you need Windows for graphics / video, or for CAD/CAM, or for Office. Having important related bits and software on another box may be a hassle.
Put all your fun things on one OS (or user account), and all your business stuff on another (possibly blocking distractions via hosts or firewall rules); and you've added a bunch of friction to switching from work to play. Not that it can't be done, but it needs to be a deliberate choice and you can't just bounce between them.
I don't really have a set work schedule, so it's normal for me to jump between a work context and a play context. It's much easier to do by very rarely rebooting my computer (once or twice a month), so I can always pick up where I left off. The regularly scheduled update meetings do a good enough job of keeping procrastination in check.
At least back when win10 was new, Proton is good enough that I haven't needed Windows in a good few years.
For me, there are evenings when I am hacking away on a hobby project for 2 or 3 hours. Then suddenly just go, 'I wanna just veg out for another 2 hours then go to bed.' When I'm in that mood, I don't even want to be bothered changing machines. Just hit the steam icon and veg. Thats also bout the only time I end up gaming though, haha.
Last time I dual booted though, I remember why I didn't for along time. Did a Windows update, windows rebooted my computer and it did something with grub and I couldn't easily boot into linux anymore.
[1] Doesn't work for games requiring kernel-mode anti-cheat.
[2] https://looking-glass.io/ to use both GPUs on the same monitor.