I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?

EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.

  • s20@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    It depends. Do you play stuff with kernel level anticheat? If no, then the current state of Linux gaming is, by and large as good as, and occasionally better than, Windows - even on games that don’t run natively.

    Proton is astounding, and the state of Wine is amazing compared to 10 years ago (and it wasn’t bad then). Get Bottles or Play on Linux going, plus Steam, and there’s very little you can’t do…

    Except kernel level anticheat.

    (To be 100% transparent, there are other issues. I have a couple games I can’t get to run reliability, but they’re all obscure edge cases. But like 90% of stuff without anticheat just works at this point.)

    Edit: proofreading

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      To be fair I could not even get Valorant running on Windows. Anti cheat like that is complete and utter bs and will make me never play any game with it. Just like I don’t buy a game until they remove Denuvo.

  • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 since day 1. That’s really all I need and a lot more than I expected just a few years ago. It’s only gonna get better from here.

  • simple@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    Check out https://www.protondb.com, to see which games work well on Linux. Games that are platinum should work out of the box, ones that are Gold might need some tinkering. Most games work great, but a lot of multiplayer games aren’t supported.

    In general gaming on Linux has been a pretty smooth experience lately. Games on Steam usually just work, but IMO running games outside of Steam is pretty hit or miss. They sometimes need following a guide or trying to fix an obscure issue that only like 2 other people have.

    The thing about Linux is that you might have some issues outside of gaming. Things you might not expect like Discord not being able to screenshare audio or that one program you need not working on your distro properly. Also you should know games on an NTFS drive don’t work well on Linux, so you can’t expect your drive full of Windows games to just work if you have them on a 2nd drive. In general I still think you need some patience if you’re going to settle on a Linux desktop, it’s not entirely a bug free experience yet.

    • JetpackJackson@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      I’m not the OP, but drat, I didn’t know that bit about the NTFS drive not working nice… that was gonna be my plan for my games so I wouldn’t have to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of games (Battlefield 1, Borderlands, TF2, Genshin, etc…)

      • VerbTheNoun95@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.

        • JetpackJackson@feddit.de
          0·
          1 year ago

          Oh ok, that’s interesting that there would be a performance impact! But that’s cool that it does work. I’m honestly more worried now about getting Nvidia to work since that’s what my pc has since I’m using sway, but I guess I’ll worry about that when the time comes. Thanks!

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        I run this setup right now and it works very well. The key is to disable fast boot in Windows (preferrably before even installing Linux), otherwise it won’t shut down all the way and leave the drive in a dirty state. The ntfs-3g driver will still read and write to it, but games won’t work.

      • simple@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yeah it’s a real pain point. I copied my games to an external drive, reformatted the drive, then put them back and everything worked smoothly then. On the bright side if you can’t do this, Steam makes moving games to your Linux drive pretty easy.

  • Gush@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    If your pc doesn’t support vulkan you’re fucked, unless you use steam

      • EddyBot@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Steam Proton (which does the heavy lifting of running windows games on linux) includes DXVK/D9VK/VK3D3 which translates Windows DirectX games (don’t work on Linux) into Vulkan (which works on Linux)

        not having Vulkan will result in falling back on the way older DirectX -> OpenGL translation which not many actually care about nowadays and hasn’t been opti.ized to run well in years (awful performance)