My plan is to buy an NVMe today, install linux as a dual boot, but use linux as a daily driver, to see if it meets my needs before committing to it.

My main needs are gaming, local AI (stable diffusion and oobabooga), and browser stuff.

I have experience with Mint (recently) and Ubuntu (long ago). Any problems with my plan? Will my OS choice meet my needs?

Thanks!

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    If you use Steam for gaming, then probably most games will work either directly or through a specific Proton version (you can set this in Steam). Games that won’t run are most 3rd-party launcher games and games that intentionally use ring 0 spyware.

  • Crabhands@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    131·
    2 years ago

    Thank you to everyone’s support. I did not expect as much support as you all provided. I’m happy to announce a huge success! Ubuntu is installed, I’ve overcome several hurdles, and have a few more to go. I’ll try to post in next week to summarize my progress and challenges.

  • baseless_discourse@mander.xyzEnglish
    12·
    2 years ago

    Something to note for the future, never install windows after Linux, even they are on different drives. Windows boot manager is very invasive, it likely will overwrite your Linux boot manager.

  • anthr76@lemmy.kutara.ioEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    In my opinion in modern computing I’d rather be on a “faster” releasing distro such as Fedora, Arch Linux. Modern hardware depends constant patches to the kernel to keep up with new sleep management changes and improvements to the GPU stack etc.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    The biggest problem you’ll encounter with mint in particular is that multiple monitor support can be… hit or miss, other than that, gaming on Linux has been very good for a while now and it’s only getting better. Unless you are really into valorant or destiny 2, pretty much all of your games on steam, epic games and all other stores should just work. My personal recommendation is to try fedora, as I’ve had a much smoother experience with it…

  • dank_imagemacro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Gaming on Linux is absolutely possible, but you have to have the right mindset for it. Put it in its own category. There are games that work on XBOX, there are games that work on PS4, there are Games that work on Windows, there are games that work on Linux. There is significant overlap between all of these, with many games working on all the platforms. Some games work better on some platforms than they do on others.

    If you go at this with the mindset that you are going to play all your favorite Windows games on Linux, you will be as disappointied as if you got a PS5 to play Zelda and Animal Crossing. But if you instead go into it with the mindset “this is a gaming platform with thousands of games I can play on it, I’ll play the games that work on this platform” you will find that gaming on Linux is a perfectly adequate gaming platform.

  • abraxas@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Gaming depends on your game choice. It gets better every year, but gaming is always the category that Windows slightly wins on. Everything else is dramatically easier in linux.

    Ubuntu (or variants) is always a solid option. Apt is just the best (imo) packaging system, and since Ubuntu is #1 in popularity, you’re more likely to get support for issues there than any other linux variant.

    • mnemonicmonkeysEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Keep in mind that OP never mentioned what kind of geaphics card they have. From what I’m aware, updating Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu is still an awful experience

      • bundes_sheep@lemmy.oneEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I haven’t had any bad experiences updating nvidia drivers.

      • abraxas@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I haven’t had Nvidia issues in Ubuntu since the aughts. Optimus OTOH, is even worse on Linux than Windows.

        • mnemonicmonkeysEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I had to update my drivers a few months ago, and it was awful for me. Granted, I started having issues after a power outage, but just updating the drivers shouldn’t have been as hard as it was

    • Crabhands@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      I read this earlier and you convinced me to try Ubuntu. Initially not a fan of the way it looked, but customization seems limitless. It’s been less than 10 hours, but it’s already starting to look like ‘mine’. I’m sure that will evolve plenty in time.

  • themoonisacheeseEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I use debian for gaming and light LLM workloads and it’s been serving me quite well. Really like KDE.

    • GNUgit@lemmy.perthchat.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Are you using Bookworm? I had trouble getting sddm on it to use system resolution. Normally I would ignore that but I only installed it on a VM so I could record an intro for my stream of Debian booting into the gaming.

      I haven’t updated my machine yet because I have no experience with wayland or pipewire and Nvidia with gaming. I was also interested if it’s pretty decent with games and nvidia yet.

      • themoonisacheeseEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I am. SDDM should work properly out of the box, maybe it’s a wierd issue with virtualization?

        Wayland is pretty much plug and play if you install xwayland (with the exception of OBS studio which used to be wierd about Wayland surfaces, I think that’s fixed now). Pipe wire has been working fine for me.

        I use AMD though, so ymmv with Nvidia.

        • GNUgit@lemmy.perthchat.orgEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Yes, I thought it might be a weird sddm bug so I installed gdm and configured that too with the same result. Next option is to try a different distribution.

  • NukeTheFridge@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I recommend to Install windows on its own drive. I had Windows one time do something to the EFI partition and I wasn’t able to boot linux after. I have heard of people having a separate EFI partitions for linux and windows to avoid this problem.

    • Crabhands@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Sorry what i meant was the NVMe will be used only for Linux. My existing HD with Windows will be untouched. No partitions needed.

      • BigNerdAlert@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        11·
        2 years ago

        When you install a dual boot system, Linux installs a grub loader. This asks you what you want to boot - windows or Linux.

        Microsoft doesn’t place nicely with grub and I’ve found many occasions when a windows update mysteriously disabled it, and you can only then boot into windows.

        If you only want to test the interface and see if you get in with it, you could create a Linux live usb. It’ll be the same but the os speed will take a hit booting from usb, so just be aware.

        Been a while since I had the problem, but then been a while since I even wanted to boot windows anyway…

        https://itsfoss.com/no-grub-windows-linux/

  • JumutaEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I did a similar thing when starting out with KDE neon, but I found having windows annoying as it would keep breaking Linux’s bootloader (grub) randomly because Microsoft is an asshole.

    On my laptop, I ended up removing the windows disk altogether, and it’s a much nicer experience.

    Dual boot might be necessary at first, but if you can just boot Linux and use a windows vm on it, that would probably be a better idea.

    • ward2k@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      From experience windows only seems to screw grub If they’re installed on the same drive, I use seperate drives for windows/Linux and haven’t noticed any issues

      • JumutaEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I used seperate drives, and installed Windows and Linux seperately before connecting them to the same pc, but I still had the problem.

    • falsem@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      My suggestion is to have separate boot loaders on separate drives then switch using your BIOS.

      • Jumuta
        1·
        2 years ago

        That’s the thing though - Windows deleted my grub boot entry so I couldn’t selext grub from the bios

  • Clairvoidance@kbin.social
    4·
    2 years ago

    My main needs are gaming

    Most gaming needs, you’ll have to check protondb to see if you’d be comfortable not being able to play certain games. (games not on steam, you can look to Lutris for community made installers)
    While Gold and Silver means games require slight setup (setup is usually explained by user-reports), Platinum means you’re good out of the box, Borked means no chance, you especially want to watch out if your game has an Anti-Cheat (and read the latest user-reports on the game if you’re truly desperate to see if things changed in the last week, like sometimes something like Gundam Evolution quietly enables the linux option in EasyAntiCheat)
    If you have a steamaccount, you can log in to get the list of games that you already own on that account to easily see their ratings

    local AI

    Guides are straightforward, you just have to worry about whether you have nvidia or amd

    browser stuff

    no issues

  • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    106·
    2 years ago

    You wont know for sure until you try. the main sticking point for gaming on linux is anti-cheat, so if you play a lot of games with that then you may run into some trouble. otherwise ProtonDB is your friend. Most games these days are pretty easy to get up and running.

    A lot of AI tools are developed on linux anyway so you shouldn’t encounter too many problems there.

    Browsers are no problem at all. I recommend Firefox

    • HidingCat@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      the main sticking point for gaming on linux is anti-cheat

      This really needs to be emphasised, #1 reason for proton to not work is this. Depending on the games OP wants to run, there will be issues.

    • JumutaEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      libreoffice is also a good browser and you can brag that you have a light blue browser icon that no one else has

      • sntx@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        I think Jumuta is referring to LibreWolf, a fork of Firefox with some hardening pre-applied. I use it on machines on which I don’t want to spend time configuring my browser.

        • JumutaEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          oh yeah, my brain just apparently died there

  • bitsplease@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Gaming is the only area where things might get tricky at all, every other area will pretty much just be a matter of getting used to different UIs.

    Whether or not you find it sufficient for your gaming needs depends mostly on what types of games you play. If you’re always playing just the newest AAA titles, you might have some trouble, but there are a whole shitload of great titles that work perfectly on linux, and more are being added/ported every day.

    As far as distro goes, I think Mint is a good choice for what you describe, you could also try one of the gaming specific distros, but my understanding is that those are generally overkill unless you’re making a gaming box

  • bumbly@readit.buzz
    3·
    2 years ago

    Nothing wrong with it. Here’s a website to help you choose the distro: https://distrochooser.de/

    Personally, for gaming, I’d recomment Mint or Ubuntu. Probably your hardware will be supported. There’s also Pop!OS, which seems to be completely gaming related as well as SteamOS, but I’ve never used them.

    You can run a hardware probe from the live USB to see how well the distro handles your hardware too
    https://linux-hardware.org/

    • mihnt@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      It just recommended elementary OS to me and that’s the next one I was going to try, lol.

      I’ve got Nobara installed and it has shit the bed for whatever reason. Was way too unstable for me as well. Also, support is lacking there. A lot of hostile attitudes in response to any questions I had.

  • sin_free_for_00_days@lemmy.oneEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver for a couple decades. Home and work (before retirement). Unless your work has some fucked up Windows-only requirement, there is no reason Linux won’t meet your needs.