I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it’s about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it’s 982 mods that I can’t be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it’s the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you’re wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.

  • Sophienomenal@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    13 hours ago

    I second that Nvidia is fine on Linux. I have an Asus gaming laptop with an Nvidia card that I use daily with no issues whatsoever, including in games (though do keep in mind some anticheat games blacklist Linux; that is not a compatibility issue, it is a conscious choice by the game makers, so not the fault of Linux). I recommend that anyone who is thinking about installing Linux checks their frequently played games on https://www.protondb.com/, and check any games they plan to buy there before purchasing them.

    I’d also like to make a recommendation for a distro. If you want the easiest, practically no way to break it distro, I’d recommend Bazzite. You can select an option on download that includes the Nvidia drivers in the install so there are no extra steps to install them. It’s about as easy as it gets for gaming on Linux (it even comes with Steam preinstalled!). Find it at https://bazzite.gg/. It’s always what I recommend for Windows gamers thinking about switching to Linux (and choosing the KDE Plasma image bc it’s more Windows-like than GNOME). The other great part is that it’s immutable, so there is consistency across installs, it’s much harder to accidentally break, and you can roll back to a previous version in the bootloader if anything does break. Most things a person will want to install can be found in Flathub via the Discover app (or sometimes an AppImage), so most people wouldn’t really need to mess with rpm-ostree package overlays (tho they really aren’t difficult, but only use them as a last resort since it often makes updates a lot slower). I personally think that atomic distros are the most newcomer-friendly option out there. They just work, and they do so consistently. Unless you mess with package overlays, your exact root filesystem will be tested before an update is pushed, and bugs that do show up will typically be found quickly and fixed quickly due to the fact that the same bug will likely happen for everyone else (the exception is hardware-based or firmware-based issues, of course).

    Just my 2 cents, having switched to Bazzite after over a decade on Linux, from Linux Mint, to Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Void, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Kinoite.