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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I am an avid linux user but never switched my gaming PC to linux, until the Win10 > Win11 debacle which has made me switch.

I am using EndeavorOS, my first Arch flavoured distro, it's excellent. Honestly it has all "just worked". Drivers were auto installed, I pointed Steam to my existing library on an NTFS drive originally used by windows, and it just plays my existing library fine.

Cyberpunk2077, Red Dead 2, Starfield all objectively AAA modern games, working fine. I even get a bit better performance in some areas, comparable in others.

I can swap back to windows and it still runs the same library. I really didn't expect it to work like that.

The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work, and an Alpha stage game which others are getting to work, I just haven't bothered to chase it down.

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Almost the same happy story here on my end. I had an Ubuntu home server, but with windows as my main. Then Win 10 --> Win 11 hit. I was already annoyed at MS for many reasons, and then I realized just how much money I would need to spend on getting equivalent functionality, for an OS (Win 11) that I hated and had a dismal preview of at work.

Now I have Mint. With an AI terminal to help guide/teach me, I find myself really enjoying the power and capability the terminal gives me. My computer has been genuinely USEFUL for debugging serious problems with WiFi calling on my phone and other network connectivity issues, and I still get to play games on steam! Sure, there were one or two hiccups on Outward when I first started, but Bannerlord and everything else I've tried so far plays just fine. It just works! Really!

That's awesome! I did look at Mint as well, it looks like a great distro.

I was surprised by some of the extras I got from KDE Plasma just for no extra effort, like KDE Connect is amazing and something super painful on Windows and Mac.

Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)?

Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days.

I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.

I will have to take note next time I play, but I haven't noticed anything so perhaps if it's there it's not too bad. They are SSDs and I do have 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram, so I bet quite a lot of IO bottleneck could be hidden by that.

I'll probably switch to ext4 when I decommission the Windows install entirely.

>The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work

Very interested in this: what kind of setup do you use for VR? What troubleshooting was required?

(My background: I have a 10gbit fiber network and wifi 6E to stream to my Quest 3, and play VR that way. Running Arch on a gaming laptop as a way to dip my toes in the water, haven't really tried anything to do with VR (my favourite way to play games) because I'd heard it was a nightmare.)

I must admit I haven't finished getting it to work, but others have got it to work and it seems like a pretty well troden path. I think the biggest issue I have is that I use a link cable, not wifi, and even on Windows that has been an issue.

The reason I stopped trying though is because SteamVR/Steam Link has been getting updates targeted at linux and well, I may as well wait for that for a more matured and hassle free VR PC link.

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