I run to Ubuntu or Linux Mint on everything except my gaming PC. Every year or two I try out Linux for gaming and usually go back to windows. With steam deck out it seems like Linux gaming is the best it’s ever been. With that said I’m still a bit frustrated with freezing (halo mcc) and Bluetooth being super flakey on my 8bitdo controller. I guess I’m rambling, but curious if dual booting is the way to go? Have most of you axed windows all together?
Yes. I think Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 were my last “anchors” to Windows (7, at the time). I barely ever booted into it… I wanted to be NOT IN WINDOWS more than I wanted to play big fat luxury games.
But I did keep it around until there just wasn’t anything left that I wanted to run but couldn’t. The first Humble Indie Bundles with games like FEZ and Limbo had been out by that point as well as a few bigger titles like The Witcher 2. Wine was much more painful than it is now.
I’ve generally made sure not to buy too “crazy” hardware (like Bluetooth controllers… yes, I’m old and a neophobe and I don’t know what else).
I ended up figuring out the Bluetooth issue! I think I just need to give it a solid go for a month or so and see how often I go back to Windows. Maybe like you I’ll eventually stop using it all together. My main game, Deep Rock Galactic, runs great in proton. Rock and stone everyone.
I completely abandoned Windows on my gaming PC. These days if a game doesn’t work on Linux I just don’t play it. There’s plenty of other stuff to choose from.
I think you’re talking mostly to a community of Linux users, so it’s not going to be a great sample. Personally I dual-booted for quite a while, and eventually realized I had unintentionally not used Windows in months, so I backed up my files and removed it.
If you’re having issues with Linux, I would definitely dual-boot spend some time trying to figure the issues out instead of just going to Linux 100% and putting up with them.
If You do not feel comfortable to leave Windows for gaming then of course keep it and dual boot PC with Your distro. Also, You can go to protondb to check how Your games run on linux
I don’t game on windows just linux, but I have a windows VM on hand for the occasional bit of windows software I need. But these days that’s becoming a rare occurance. I still love my old Nikon photo editing software which lives on the VM, I just dont edit so many photos these days.
Regarding your bluetooth issues on your 8bitdo, I had an issue with my 8bitdo pro 2 where on linux there was a higher input delay vs Windows. I then updated the controller firmware and that fixed it. Works great on linux now.
Maybe try updating the controller’s firmware, if you haven’t yet anyway.
Regarding dual booting, I do dual boot, sometimes I like using windows, others i like using linux. It’s nice to have the flexibility. Ideally i would like to switch to linux one day, but there are still a few small issues, at least on KDE wayland.
I don’t think I have input lag, but I am on a newerish firmware. As far as the fix I needed to enter a pin of 0000 for pairing. Not sure why it needed that and windows doesn’t.
I stopped dual booting long ago. If a game doesn’t work on Linux, I find it much easier and more fun to simply do something else. At this point, the threat of losing my browser tabs would be enough inconvenience to dissuade me, and I generally have quite a bit more active state than that on my computer that would be lost with a reboot.
Before I gave up on Windows gaming I did use a dedicated machine with a KVM switch for a while. But even that simply stopped seeing enough use to justify it.
I dual boot Windows and Arch but most of my time spent is on Arch. It’s probably been a month since I last touched Windows.
I setup my laptop to dual boot Pop!OS and I basically never boot into the Windows partition. I don’t do much gaming on the laptop but everything in Steam has worked perfectly when I have. I don’t regret setting up dual boot because it’s nice to have the option but if I start running out of disk space it’s getting blown away.
I built a PC for GPU passthrough. I can hand the whole GPU to windows in a virtual machine and it runs near flawlessly. I almost never do it because there are all of three games I can’t run either natively or with a layer like proton or wine. But I almost exclusively play single-player games, so your mileage may vary.
I use Linux primarily almost all the time, but because of some games like Ark, Eco and even Cyberpunk I haven’t been able to fully abandon Windows even though I want to. Most of the time my Windows install just sits there taking up a lot of space just so I can boot into it when I run into some game which just refuses to be run on Linux.
I still dual boot, although at this point its more rare for me to boot into windows at all. I had some trouble with diablo 4 on linux for example, so I’ve been mostly playing that in windows.
As long as anti cheat keeps only supporting windows you will need it to experience all games. You can go through the labor filled process of trying to VM windows with GPU passthru, but at that point are you really much better off? I swear one day we will get to a market-share that is worth supporting, but it just isn’t there yet. Even fresh titles like Battlebit support anticheat that is incompatible with linux.
I’m currently dual booting to game on Windows. I’m trying to game on Linux but keep running into a few issues. Such as for the life of me I can’t get Zwift working with Lutris. Once I work those few issues out I’ll completely get rid of Windows.
If you’re just getting started I think it’s totally fine to test the waters with a dual boot. A lot of games work great on Linux now even unsupported games like League of Legends and Blizzard games via Lutris or Bottles.
Another option I didn’t see anyone recommend is doing a QEMU KVM GPU passthrough. So you would boot up the VM for gaming in windows and pass your gpu through. It’s a bit of work to get running stable / performant but then you don’t have to restart your machine every time you want to game or run Windows only software. The downside is games like Valorant and Genshin Impact won’t work in a VM.
