I’m a total Linuxlet aside from some extremely limited tooling around in Ubuntu 4 or 5 years ago. I am curious about getting into it as a daily driver, but I have a few different use cases for my W10 machine that I’m not sure I can easily cover.
Gaming: I play a handful of new(er) titles, mostly indie, and more retro PC games. I know VR is a bit of a bust right now which isn’t great.
Emulation: Pretty much all consoles that can be emulated.
Streaming: OBS
Development: Godot
Anyone know what kind of compatibility issues I’ll run into or have any distro recommendations?
Most of your games should just work fine these days. If you’re playing live service shooters (usually competitive ones, think Valorant and such) you may have issues with their anti-cheat not liking Wine/Proton, but everything else is usually fine. You can check if your games work here https://www.protondb.com/ and here https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Pretty much every emulator has a Linux native build, or can be built yourself for Linux with minimal effort. I’ve never had issues with things like Dolphin, Xemu, pcsx2, etc.
OBS Studio runs natively on Linux and works great.
Godot also runs natively on Linux and works great. If you’re using other tools in your workflow like Adobe products, you may have issues, but there are a ton of free and open-source alternatives.
And honestly, for distribution, I’d just use Ubuntu. I know I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for saying that, but Ubuntu is much better than Linux Mint and Co. simply because it is more up-to-date (nerd speak, can ignore: Wayland being the biggest thing, Cinnamon is still pretty far behind in this department, and slapping KDE Plasma or GNOME onto Linux Mint has been known to cause issues) than other distributions. It also has the benefit of having the ability to install proprietary codecs and drivers (think Nvidia graphics drivers) out of the box unlike other distributions people like to recommend such as Fedora. Just know whatever distribution you use, at the end of the day, 98% of the software is the exact same across each distribution and there will be no noticeable difference between them for a new user really. If you can get comfortable with 1 Linux distribution, you will be able to get comfortable with any distribution fairly quickly with minor changes.
I’m not personally a fan of immutable distributions myself, and I’m definitely not really a fan of recommending one to a new user. Most of the solutions for problems that someone may search for on the internet are going to assume that you are not using an immutable distribution and will not help that user what-so-ever. I also really don’t want to have to teach someone who is already worried about moving to Linux about things like distrobox, Flatpak sandbox permissions, why they can’t modify certain files, etc. I think it’s counter productive, and will just play into the “Linux nerds need to run 500 commands just to install 1 app in their distrobox container and modify their Flatpak permissions so they can mount their external drive with their games on it in Steam” mindset. I just want to give them something that works, and will work most similarly to what they are used to. Honestly, this is why I’ve strayed away from Linux in general over time and went back to NetBSD, I want my things to just work, I want it to be simple, and I don’t personally have brand new hardware so all the modern amenities that Linux offers to me don’t entice me.
I’m daily driving Bazzite. I couldn’t get VR to work on it properly. Couldn’t get my Silhoette machine to work either. I keep Windows quarantined on an SSD on the occasion I need it and every time I use it, it upsets me on a deep, primal level. Literally right now I’m resetting it cause, after an unrequested update, the start menu and a bunch of other things stopped working and I would rather reinstall the 3 programs I use than deal with it.
bazzite has a developer mode you can switch to, which will install and set-up a bunch of tools for you. There are also simple commands you can run from the terminal, they make it easy. Just open a terminal and read the prompt and follow the directions to launch a script and choose what tweaks you want.
Bluefin and Aurora are related to bazzite but are more stable, or have more stable versions available, and are developer focused. The biggest difference is that game software like steam isn’t layered in, but installed via flatpak, which may cause issues with VR.
Depending on what you are doing you should be familiar with or want to learn how to use a containerized development environment.
For me it’s music production and development. Development isn’t hard to move over but IIRC Renoise and FL Studio aren’t friendly with Linux. Actually I don’t know if any of the major DAWs run on nix.
I thought renoise has a linux version that works, but you might have issues getting all vst’s to work properly. there are compatibility programs like carla that should help.
you can get fl studio running with wine/bottles but it would be better if there were native versions.
Compatibility layers always make things a little unstable. With proton it’s gotten significantly better, but that doesn’t always translate to audio apps. The only way to know if it will work is to set everything up and test it.
If you ever tried to mess with audio on linux in the past, it’s gotten a whole lot easier with pipewire. There are very few config issues now.
Ok you convinced me to give this an honest shake. If I cam use Renoise and Vital, or even a workaround for Vital, and the audio drivers aren’t so bad that I can’t plug in Midi controllers then we’re good to go. I can keep a Windows install around for games but for daily use Linux sounds great
I’m a total Linuxlet aside from some extremely limited tooling around in Ubuntu 4 or 5 years ago. I am curious about getting into it as a daily driver, but I have a few different use cases for my W10 machine that I’m not sure I can easily cover.
Anyone know what kind of compatibility issues I’ll run into or have any distro recommendations?
It took me about a day to get it set up well but I do play VR on Linux. It does work
And honestly, for distribution, I’d just use Ubuntu. I know I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for saying that, but Ubuntu is much better than Linux Mint and Co. simply because it is more up-to-date (nerd speak, can ignore: Wayland being the biggest thing, Cinnamon is still pretty far behind in this department, and slapping KDE Plasma or GNOME onto Linux Mint has been known to cause issues) than other distributions. It also has the benefit of having the ability to install proprietary codecs and drivers (think Nvidia graphics drivers) out of the box unlike other distributions people like to recommend such as Fedora. Just know whatever distribution you use, at the end of the day, 98% of the software is the exact same across each distribution and there will be no noticeable difference between them for a new user really. If you can get comfortable with 1 Linux distribution, you will be able to get comfortable with any distribution fairly quickly with minor changes.
Bazzite is a popular distro for gaming now apparently, I’ve never used it though
I’m not personally a fan of immutable distributions myself, and I’m definitely not really a fan of recommending one to a new user. Most of the solutions for problems that someone may search for on the internet are going to assume that you are not using an immutable distribution and will not help that user what-so-ever. I also really don’t want to have to teach someone who is already worried about moving to Linux about things like distrobox, Flatpak sandbox permissions, why they can’t modify certain files, etc. I think it’s counter productive, and will just play into the “Linux nerds need to run 500 commands just to install 1 app in their distrobox container and modify their Flatpak permissions so they can mount their external drive with their games on it in Steam” mindset. I just want to give them something that works, and will work most similarly to what they are used to. Honestly, this is why I’ve strayed away from Linux in general over time and went back to NetBSD, I want my things to just work, I want it to be simple, and I don’t personally have brand new hardware so all the modern amenities that Linux offers to me don’t entice me.
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Those should all be good in any popular distro.
Check people’s distro recs out on distrosea and pick the one whose out of the box experience you like the best. I like Mint (cinnamon).
I like Debian in general, Garuda might be pleasant for a Linux noob gamer, especially if you want to tell people you use arch.
I’m daily driving Bazzite. I couldn’t get VR to work on it properly. Couldn’t get my Silhoette machine to work either. I keep Windows quarantined on an SSD on the occasion I need it and every time I use it, it upsets me on a deep, primal level. Literally right now I’m resetting it cause, after an unrequested update, the start menu and a bunch of other things stopped working and I would rather reinstall the 3 programs I use than deal with it.
this’ll help with VR on linux https://lvra.gitlab.io/
Run Bazzite. The desktop version. It’ll give you a plug and play experience for gaming, emulation, and streaming.
Unsure about development though. Maybe other users can chime in on Bazzite’s limitations for godot development, if any.
bazzite has a developer mode you can switch to, which will install and set-up a bunch of tools for you. There are also simple commands you can run from the terminal, they make it easy. Just open a terminal and read the prompt and follow the directions to launch a script and choose what tweaks you want.
Bluefin and Aurora are related to bazzite but are more stable, or have more stable versions available, and are developer focused. The biggest difference is that game software like steam isn’t layered in, but installed via flatpak, which may cause issues with VR.
Depending on what you are doing you should be familiar with or want to learn how to use a containerized development environment.
For me it’s music production and development. Development isn’t hard to move over but IIRC Renoise and FL Studio aren’t friendly with Linux. Actually I don’t know if any of the major DAWs run on nix.
reaper has native linux support
I thought renoise has a linux version that works, but you might have issues getting all vst’s to work properly. there are compatibility programs like carla that should help.
you can get fl studio running with wine/bottles but it would be better if there were native versions.
Compatibility layers always make things a little unstable. With proton it’s gotten significantly better, but that doesn’t always translate to audio apps. The only way to know if it will work is to set everything up and test it.
If you ever tried to mess with audio on linux in the past, it’s gotten a whole lot easier with pipewire. There are very few config issues now.
Renoise has had a native Linux version for literally decades at this point lol
Although getting it set up is not as simple as setting the audio API to Wasapi and Bob’s your uncle.
For VSTs you can try yabridge for your Windows guys
Ok you convinced me to give this an honest shake. If I cam use Renoise and Vital, or even a workaround for Vital, and the audio drivers aren’t so bad that I can’t plug in Midi controllers then we’re good to go. I can keep a Windows install around for games but for daily use Linux sounds great
I think Vital also has a Linux VST but I could be wrong
I will look into it. Worst case is Lunux for web browsing & dev, Windows for music production. I’d rather be half off than put this off completely.
for the VR stuff: https://lvra.gitlab.io/