I run to Ubuntu or Linux Mint on everything except my gaming PC. Every year or two I try out Linux for gaming and usually go back to windows. With steam deck out it seems like Linux gaming is the best it’s ever been. With that said I’m still a bit frustrated with freezing (halo mcc) and Bluetooth being super flakey on my 8bitdo controller. I guess I’m rambling, but curious if dual booting is the way to go? Have most of you axed windows all together?
Yes. I think Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 were my last “anchors” to Windows (7, at the time). I barely ever booted into it… I wanted to be NOT IN WINDOWS more than I wanted to play big fat luxury games.
But I did keep it around until there just wasn’t anything left that I wanted to run but couldn’t. The first Humble Indie Bundles with games like FEZ and Limbo had been out by that point as well as a few bigger titles like The Witcher 2. Wine was much more painful than it is now.
I’ve generally made sure not to buy too “crazy” hardware (like Bluetooth controllers… yes, I’m old and a neophobe and I don’t know what else).
I ended up figuring out the Bluetooth issue! I think I just need to give it a solid go for a month or so and see how often I go back to Windows. Maybe like you I’ll eventually stop using it all together. My main game, Deep Rock Galactic, runs great in proton. Rock and stone everyone.
I don’t game on windows just linux, but I have a windows VM on hand for the occasional bit of windows software I need. But these days that’s becoming a rare occurance. I still love my old Nikon photo editing software which lives on the VM, I just dont edit so many photos these days.
Regarding your bluetooth issues on your 8bitdo, I had an issue with my 8bitdo pro 2 where on linux there was a higher input delay vs Windows. I then updated the controller firmware and that fixed it. Works great on linux now.
Maybe try updating the controller’s firmware, if you haven’t yet anyway.
Regarding dual booting, I do dual boot, sometimes I like using windows, others i like using linux. It’s nice to have the flexibility. Ideally i would like to switch to linux one day, but there are still a few small issues, at least on KDE wayland.
I don’t think I have input lag, but I am on a newerish firmware. As far as the fix I needed to enter a pin of 0000 for pairing. Not sure why it needed that and windows doesn’t.
I think you’re talking mostly to a community of Linux users, so it’s not going to be a great sample. Personally I dual-booted for quite a while, and eventually realized I had unintentionally not used Windows in months, so I backed up my files and removed it.
If you’re having issues with Linux, I would definitely dual-boot spend some time trying to figure the issues out instead of just going to Linux 100% and putting up with them.
I have axed Windows since they started to get really aggressive with their bullshit on Win11 and so far I don’t regret it at all. Admittedly I’m not that much of a multiplayer guy anymore, single play is working fine however. I’m on Garuda Linux and it’s super handy, because it comes with a lot of stuff already set up for you while still offering the benefits of Arch. Luckily, because this isn’t Windows, you can just remove what you don’t need. Depending on your choice of image, there isn’t too much to worry about tho.
I really want to try some older Windows games at some point. From what I’ve heard (and seen on Windows) they run better on emulators or Wine than Windows these days.
I dual boot Windows and Arch but most of my time spent is on Arch. It’s probably been a month since I last touched Windows.
I axed Windows a while ago, I play exclusively on Linux with either my keyboard or a wired Xbox 1 controller. It fits my needs pretty well as I don’t play online or super recent games. Steam with wine/proton does a great job at running my games on my shitty x230.
I think it’s the best of both world
I usually play almost everything on my Linux distro , but I keep my small windows partition for games that sometimes I play and cannot on Linux (aggressive kernel anti cheat etc)
I’m currently dual booting to game on Windows. I’m trying to game on Linux but keep running into a few issues. Such as for the life of me I can’t get Zwift working with Lutris. Once I work those few issues out I’ll completely get rid of Windows.
I stopped dual booting long ago. If a game doesn’t work on Linux, I find it much easier and more fun to simply do something else. At this point, the threat of losing my browser tabs would be enough inconvenience to dissuade me, and I generally have quite a bit more active state than that on my computer that would be lost with a reboot.
Before I gave up on Windows gaming I did use a dedicated machine with a KVM switch for a while. But even that simply stopped seeing enough use to justify it.
