Comment by drillsteps5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drillsteps5 | Hacker News Reader

I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.

But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.

For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.

That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.

My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.

>Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.

This is an overblown issue. For the most it is a case of installing the proprietary driver package following the instructions for your distro. One more step than AMD which just works, but not really any more difficult than installing another package.

That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.

I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).

That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some software I used on Windows and files it created (think Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except games I guess).

As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.

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