Mint is a great Distro especially for former Windows users. Been using it occasionally for what seems like forever. Got away from it in the last few years once I picked up a new Chromebook. I can all but guarantee I pickup the old laptop that’s been sitting for a couple of years, plug it in, power it up and Mint will be there waiting for some updates and I’m off and running. (I should do that once I get a few more things done in the room.)
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So I’ve always had a dual boot setup. Windows/Linux. Windows 7/10/11 and Arch Linux got me through the last decades. Anything Wine related was always a hassle, so I always gave up quickly and used Windows for gaming.
Until now. I installed Bazzite (Gnome edition) and it’s surprisingly easy.
Three main issues I had to solve:
- My fans would not ramp up so the PC switched off under load. Installed out-of-the-box fan curve software, configured it — solved
- Games unstable. Switched Steam from experimental Proton to stable Proton — solved
- Microphone on Sound BalsterX G6 would need manual activation after every reboot for some unclear reason. The device doesn’t show up in Gnome Settings so I can’t make it the default. Scripted this with a shellscript and a systemd service in user space — solved
All but one Game running on Linux now. Need to add a couple of productivity things and I am ready to switch.
What i love about Bazzite:
- OS updates painless (so far)
- It comes with a convenient helper tool to solve common tasks. Named “ujust”. Wow, every distro should have this!
- Slick looks, good performance
- Supports Secure Boot. In fact, for the first time ever, I have it enabled.
- Flatpak and brew cover a lot of apps.
Let’s see how it goes. So far I am very impressed!
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The Arch Wiki says that Arch does too, but man that article is a handful. If I could get it running, I’d seriously consider switching from Fedora.
Anyone here on Gnome with nVidia driver 580? I’ve downgraded back to 575 because there were weird issues with GTK4 windows hanging on close, etc.
No, not a general improvement. It will be a mixed bag depending on whether you need to use Wine or the application is native, and in either case it will depend on how well the application is optimized.
Paging @Aginor
Bazzite, being a flavour of Fedora (i guess Silverblue, the immutable spin of Fedora) does get updates almost on a daily basis. Linux distros tend to not force you to update, you can always just defer updates (unless you’re on a rolling distro, then you want to not defer for too long or the update process might get buggy). Even so, Fedora has become really stable, so the probability of something breaking (compared to your run off the mill Windows update) is rather slim and with Bazzite, it is supposedly very easy to roll back bad updates so you get an extra layer of safety on top of that.
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Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It really depends on whether there is some enthusiastic person who maintains a driver.
For example: My TM16000 works almost like in windows, my Logitech panels work about 60% with some tinkering, my Oculus Rift S works wonky and without hand controllers.
Those shakers are standard audio devices IIRC, I wouldn’t be surprised if they worked just fine.
But yeah, flightsims are a niche and Linux gaming is still a niche. Specialized simmimg hardware is another niche.
Niche³ is usually bad news.
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On that note, anybody tried the TMHW under Linux yet?
I think so! At least I remember reading about it.
But that reminds me that I wanted to try that, a family member has one.
Muhahahaha
You know that Windows is dead when the game devs start running away, and lo and behold, this time has now come. Chapeau MS, you’ve really outdone yourself.
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Just saw a meme that just beautifully illustrates the difference:
And yes, I did break my bootloader in the past, and I’ll probably do it again one day.
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Reminds me when I started to compress and delete files in /etc to make space, as I think there were 100MB on the HDD only… Solid reinstall of probably Slackware thereafter 
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I recently inadvertently deleted my Download folder, because I’m a complete moron (for reasons I had 2 folders named Downloads inside each other and I deleted the outer while wanting to delete the inner, I set myself up for failure, I know).
I’d still rather that than my blood pressure exploding 10x per hour because a build fails because the darn file system failed to release reading privileges on a file. One day, the file system on Windows will be the death of me.
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So I put CachyOS on the old Win10 PC, and that was the easiest and quickest “insert USB to usable OS with most of the apps I need” that I’ve ever done. I like the CachyOS package installer GUI, but of course pacman is pretty easy to use (“apt install” → “pacman -S” if you’re a debian user, but check out the arch wiki as there are differences).
And it’s just so nice to press the power button and have the PC usable inside a minute (not something you can say about a Win10 install that’s been around for a few update cycles!)
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I’ve been thinking about moving to CachyOS myself, at least on my home machine. I might have to switch it to bash though for compatibility reasons.
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I was thinking to do the same but I kinda like fish, so I’m going to stay with it for now (I’m not having to bring any scripts across though).
It seems like it would be easy enough to change?
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On my CachyOS install bash was already installed, I think. At least I can hop straight in if I just type /bin/bash
I am quite happy with that OS after six months of use.
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Good. Another step into the right direction.
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I haven’t started gaming on Linux yet - the PC I’m using as my daily driver is an old low powered Lenovo mini PC - but so far I’m really enjoying using Linux. I am a bit of a tinkerer at heart I guess, but jut for two examples:
Installing software from repositories is so much easier than windows. Even adding repositories is a better feeling than installing another bloated spyware-ridden storefront on Windows. If you’re allergic to the command line, there’s even GUIs for most of it now (but get over it, there are modern shells that will autocomplete what you’re trying to type so it’s not even much typing compared to how it used to be).
Setting up network shares is initially a bit of a learning curve since it’s so different to windows, what you do is (badly summarised) create a folder for the share somewhere (traditionally in /mnt) then there are commands for temporarily attaching a network share but I’ve mainly been adding them to /etc/fstab so they automatically reconnect on boot. What I really like is that I can easily manage my permissions for the shares - with Windows it always seemed it was really easy to map the resource and log in the first time, but if you needed to change the login it was super hard.
And to close out, I love the fact that the PC takes less than 30 seconds to boot (maybe a bit longer actually, I put in a 5 second timer so that I can get into the UEFI if I need to) - I just shutdown the PC when I walk away from it to do something else and turn it back on when I want to use it again. It is a very power-efficient box already, but it’s nice to not have to worry about walking down to the office in the evening to make sure I’ve turned everything off!