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[notseqi]

I finally want to get away from Windows on my gaming PC. My PC is used only for gaming. Any productivity is done on my Macbook. I am thinking Baazite is the way to go. I am currently Intel-based for my CPU (14th-gen i7) and NVIDIA for my GPU (5070ti). For the folks who have switched and use NVIDIA cards, what are your recommendations, and is there anything I should do in advance? I figured I would grab a drive from the Prime deals and dual-boot for now. I pretty much only play single-player games on my PC. Marvel Rivals is the only MP game I play there, and that is supported on Linux. I pretty much play only on Steam. I have a couple of games on Epic and Ubi. Give me the pros and cons. Should I use a different Distro? Thanks!

EDIT - How is emulation with Bazzite? I am assuming it's pretty good since it is on the Steam Deck.

cachyOS knocked linux mint off the first place in distro downloads and, from what I have heard, is a bit of a game changer.
Gaming works with Nvidia drivers but AMD gfx are more optimized, about 15% more performance.

Will give it a whirl soon.

 

[Durin]

EDIT - How is emulation with Bazzite? I am assuming it's pretty good since it is on the Steam Deck.

You can quite literally just use EmuDeck in Bazzite (or any Linux distro) like you'd do on the Steam Deck to easily setup emulation, do updates, and just throw roms into folders for the system to be either picked up in Steam itself with the Steam ROM Manager, or use stuff Emulation Station or Retroarch to launch games from. I even use Emudeck on my windows machine, because it just simplifies a lot of things.
Easy Bazzite recommendations: Heroic Games Launcher for easily installing/updating Epic Games (GoG & Amazon too), and for Ubisoft Launcher use Lutris instead. Bazzite literally pre-installs these.

Valuable Resources: ProtonDB is a great site that lets you look up any game, and find any fixes if something isn't working with Proton. PCGamingWiki also really good for older games that even have issues running on Windows, and will link you to any mods or provide concise instructions to get stuff working.

Bazzite's not a bad way to go if you just want a simple setup, it does automate quite a few things even more so than Windows, but it being an immutable you don't have write access to core system files. So some programs that need core system file access you have to use workarounds, but the most common ones the Bazzite team made ujust commands that make installation automated for stuff like DaVinci Resolve if you do video editing.

If you end up running into issues with this, PikaOS (I use this) & CachyOS are other gaming-centric Linux distro alternatives that don't have this limitation, but also like Bazzite simplify installing/updating stuff like Nvidia drivers/game apps, and support Windows 11 TPM for dual-booting like Bazzite (not ever linux distro does support this btw). You will eat some performance loss on Nvidia GPUs playing games, though drivers have come a long way from what they used to be, and anti-cheat isn't available for some competative games.

 

[pudel]

Also from my experience, Windows always hated my Dual boots. Would constantly ruin the bootloader, or a bunch of other random issues. Your mileage may vary on that. I know quite a few people with dual boots who have 0 issues. For me, it always felt like Windows doesn't like to play nice with other OS's.

Had zero issues with dual booting since the Win7/10 switch....around 5 years ago. Really...absolute zero! Its strange to me that Windows should do something to yr bootloader. Maybe that was something different.

 

[8BiTw0LF]

Bought a Legion Go S last week and installed CachyOS on it right out the box. I'd recommend it over Bazzite. It's very compatible with most hardware and based on Arch, so performance is top notch.

 

[Doom_master1122]

Had zero issues with dual booting since the Win7/10 switch....around 5 years ago. Really...absolute zero! Its strange to me that Windows should do something to yr bootloader. Maybe that was something different.

Yeah! As I said Its probably my set up and how I used dual booting. For me the bootloader would just disappear and it would default to Windows booting, or Linux(Or windows!) would suddenly disappear off the list.
Its fine now, I don't use windows any more anyways. So these headache's problems are gone now for me.

 

[grvg]

This thread is hilarious.

Ain't no Linux distro ever stashed unconsentual screen caps of my desktop in unencrypted folders.

Ain't no Linux distro ever harvested all of my user data to feed its AI division

I could go on, but I'll leave it at 2.

But if basic privacy and data security aren't anything you care about, you can get about 10% more fps on Windows most of the time.

 

[Durin]

Yeah! As I said Its probably my set up and how I used dual booting. For me the bootloader would just disappear and it would default to Windows booting, or Linux(Or windows!) would suddenly disappear off the list.
Its fine now, I don't use windows any more anyways. So these headache's problems are gone now for me.

Most of the time dual-boot issues (in my experience) came from both OSs being on the same drive, so some Windows updates will brick the efi partition for Linux that will make the bootloader fail.

That's at least what I was warned about when I switched over, so far dual-boot setup has been fine when each OS is on a separate physical drive.

 

[ShadowkillXNA]

People like to hate things.

 

[Mownoc]

If my main pc was only for gaming I'd absolutely switch to bazzite or steamos.

SteamOS on the Rog Ally has been wonderful.

 

[Boo Who?]

So dual booting with CachyOS seems like the best route with an NVIDIA GPU.

 

[Wolzard]

This is what I was hoping was better. Is there a chance SteamOS will have better NVIDIA support?

I believe Valve is waiting for one of the two evolutions below to occur:

- NVK, the new open source driver for Nvidia, has made more progress to the point where it can be used.
- In parallel, Collabora, which helps develop Vulkan, recently discovered the causes of Nvidia GPU performance loss. In short, it's related to how Vulkan works. Changes have begun to be made, so something should change in the coming months.

But overall, SteamOS isn't anything special. It's neither better nor worse than any other distro. The only thing it has going for it is that it was designed for handhelds, with features like resuming a game after sleep, better power management, and more. In fact, I don't think it's very good for desktop. I understand those who want to create a kind of console, but I think a traditional desktop using Arch ends up being better.

 

[The Mad Draklor]

So dual booting with CachyOS seems like the best route with an NVIDIA GPU.

As long as you install CachyOS in a separate drive. Also keep in mind Linux distros use different filesystems (usually EXT4) from the Windows' NTFS.

 

[kruis]

I said this in another thread before.
if you think you can deal with Linux and if you have the patience to deal with all the issues Linux will give you,
you should also be able to modify Windows to your liking and get around basically all the issues you might have with it.

Plus you can streamline Windows 11 in a couple of hours whereas if you'd want to switch your gaming setup over to Linux you'll be troubleshooting big and small problems many days, if not weeks.