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Should i switch to linux? please tell me why or why not. (leminal.space)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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So i have a gaming desktop that not the best or the newest. What takes up most of my drive space is games, updates, and software's. Im wondering if i should switch to linux and if linux will improve any performance for my main machine? If you believe i should switch what os should i go with or why or why not should i switch?

I mostly game and do mess with ollama/ai tools because i think that's cool. I want to do more things in the future but that might beyond my drive space?

What would you advise?

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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Other people have given you good responses about switching so I'll give some distro recommendations:

  1. Bazzite. This is what I use on fairly similar hardware. Looks like you've got a v1 or v2 chip as it's still DDR3, I'm on an E5-2680v2 and it works great under Linux while Windows 10 just caused it to freeze up so much by the end. All the background updates and indexing and whatever else were such resource hogs. The NVIDIA Bazzite iso also includes the official drivers out of the box, which many other distros don't (looking at you Linux Mint!!). It's designed to be super easy for gamers newly switching from Windows, with Steam pre-installed and everything just ready to go.
  2. CachyOS. I don't have personal experience with it, but I know it also includes the official NVIDIA drivers out of the box, and it's designed as a gaming distro first and foremost as well.
  3. Nobara. Another gaming distro, it also includes the NVIDIA drivers and is ready to go. It's made by a dev known as Glorious Eggroll who is well respected in the linux gaming community.

The reason I recommend distros that have the official NVIDIA drivers OOTB is that they work much, much better than the Noveau open source driver that most traditional distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora) include. The offical drivers also have a steep learning curve for a new Linux user to install themselves, it's nowhere near as simple as installing them on Windows.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I like bazzite but the immutable aspect makes downloading some thing even more complicated for a newb. Truly can never go wrong with zorinos or mint

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That's exactly why I'm recommending it. For a user that just wants to game, it has the guardrails in place to stop them from bricking their install. Think about how comparatively hard it is to severely mess up a Windows install.

    There are plenty of other ways to install software, Bazzite highly recommends Flatpak and AppImage. As well, if you do really need anything else, it can be run in a Distrobox and there are plenty of people on the forums who can help with that.

    Recommending Mint to users that just want to game, that don't want to learn technical stuff, needs to die. Sure, if someone comes in and says they're happy to learn tech stuff, Mint is a great option. But for everyone else, something like Bazzite is just so much closer to "it just works". Hell, I have technical skills, headless Debian over SSH is my happy place, but I have Bazzite on my desktop and handheld because I can't mess with it. It's always ready to game when I am!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    True true, still modern linux doesn't break as easily as u frame it. And is user friendly enough for even non tech ppl. A user would have to go out of their way todo something weird in cli. As long as they are just installing games then not a whole lot can go wrong.

    On bazzite if u want to install something that isn't virtualized like flats, than u would have to dive more into cli. That instead of simply typing sudo apt install.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I mean, I've bricked plenty of installs before I knew what I was doing more. I still regularly see, in certain places, people give purposefully destructive commands. rm -rf / doesn't work directly anymore, but it'll work on your home folder for example. You also don't need CLI to install games, I would say literally never.

    If a good third-party launcher that needed to be run as a system package showed up, Bazzite would just add that. Games that just ship a Linux executable like a lot of itch.io stuff generally works regardless and doesn't need the CLI. Can you give an example of a gaming usecase that requires sudo apt?

    You can also install packages to the system on Bazzite by the way. It's atomic, not actually immutable. It's just frowned upon because it makes things less stable, and increases the length of updates. You use sudo rpm-ostree install in the same way, and it layers the package on top of the current version. It's treated as an absolute last resort, but it is way easier to reset to the base image if anything goes wrong.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    No not a lot. Was just distro hopping and tried bazzite. When I tried to install something that wans't in the software centrum it indeed said to try sudo rpm-ostree install. But monkey brain already found it too much. So yeah... My bazzite views probaly aren't the best lol. Have to give it a better try some day.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Sandy Bridge is too old for CachyOS. Cachy compiles the kernel with optimizations for newer CPUs

    https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_prepare/

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    If you look at recommended requirements on that page, it suggests the x86_v3 but minimum doesn't. It's a little confusing but the following section seems to just be explaining that term for the recommended level? If I'm wrong though I'll gladly cross it out.

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