Steams work with proton, steam OS, and the steam deck means after switching my gaming pc to Linux last year, the only games out of the hundreds I have that don’t work are the ones whose launchers refuse to run on Linux.
Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It’s simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.
I don’t personally use it since it doesn’t yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.
I’m legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.
I’d need to check into whether Linux is also viable with the software I use: I’m starting a game design degree in September, so there’s a wide variety of software, including the Adobe suite, that I’ll be tied to for at least the next three years.
I feel like it’s worth keeping in mind that you’ll likely be able to continue using some iteration of locally stored Windows for quite a while. The point at which Windows 10 becomes unusable is likely well past the point at which it makes sense for most people to use Windows 11 or whatever comes next.
I’ve definitely straight up skipped Windows releases before and kept moving along just fine. Of course that depends on what you’re working on and how much control you have over your own PC in the context of whatever class or company you’re dealing with.
But even then, there’s nothing to say you can’t dual-boot or run a second machine over a network and synergy the things together.
Personally, I’ve been using Windows 10 exclusively on my own machine for quite a while now, but I don’t like much of anything that I’ve heard about 11 so far. If it came down to letting Microsoft control most of my usage of my PC or to using Linux as my primary OS, I feel like it would be worth the hassle.
Most software works with wine anymore, including the adobe suite. Be warned there is probably going to be some tinkering to get it working perfectly, but nothing a bit of searching can’t solve.
My plan at the moment, I think, is to wait until I have a full list of which softwares I’ll be using (which I won’t get until the course begins - the college pays for it all), and then make a decision. Based on the partial list I have, about half are compatible with Linux. I do also have the option of having Linux on my desktop and Windows on my laptop.
I’m definitely going to do some more research. The last time I looked into it, Linux wasn’t compatible with the vast majority of the software I used and games I played, and there weren’t many suitable alternatives. That situation has definitely changed by the looks of it, so I just need to research some more specific things.
People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one’s mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you’re good to go.
It’s definitely an option under consideration, but one of the softwares I use that doesn’t work correctly in Linux is also very resource intensive, and VM’s are less efficient in that area. So I think in that instance, dual-booting is more suitable. But the suggestion is appreciated. 🙂
Omg are you in for a treat!
Steams work with proton, steam OS, and the steam deck means after switching my gaming pc to Linux last year, the only games out of the hundreds I have that don’t work are the ones whose launchers refuse to run on Linux.
Even Denuvo games work with a little effort
Highly recommend you give Linux another shot 😁
Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It’s simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.
I don’t personally use it since it doesn’t yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.
I’m legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.
Which distro would you recommend starting with?
I’d need to check into whether Linux is also viable with the software I use: I’m starting a game design degree in September, so there’s a wide variety of software, including the Adobe suite, that I’ll be tied to for at least the next three years.
I feel like it’s worth keeping in mind that you’ll likely be able to continue using some iteration of locally stored Windows for quite a while. The point at which Windows 10 becomes unusable is likely well past the point at which it makes sense for most people to use Windows 11 or whatever comes next.
I’ve definitely straight up skipped Windows releases before and kept moving along just fine. Of course that depends on what you’re working on and how much control you have over your own PC in the context of whatever class or company you’re dealing with.
But even then, there’s nothing to say you can’t dual-boot or run a second machine over a network and synergy the things together.
Personally, I’ve been using Windows 10 exclusively on my own machine for quite a while now, but I don’t like much of anything that I’ve heard about 11 so far. If it came down to letting Microsoft control most of my usage of my PC or to using Linux as my primary OS, I feel like it would be worth the hassle.
Most software works with wine anymore, including the adobe suite. Be warned there is probably going to be some tinkering to get it working perfectly, but nothing a bit of searching can’t solve.
It’s also worth to mention that there are options like Blender/Krita/Godot wich are quite good and don’t require tooling like Wine.
But those might not be a viable option if your courses are specific to Adobe products.
But really, check those out anyways, it’s worth it.
My plan at the moment, I think, is to wait until I have a full list of which softwares I’ll be using (which I won’t get until the course begins - the college pays for it all), and then make a decision. Based on the partial list I have, about half are compatible with Linux. I do also have the option of having Linux on my desktop and Windows on my laptop.
I’m definitely going to do some more research. The last time I looked into it, Linux wasn’t compatible with the vast majority of the software I used and games I played, and there weren’t many suitable alternatives. That situation has definitely changed by the looks of it, so I just need to research some more specific things.
For anything that you really can’t get on Linux:
People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one’s mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you’re good to go.
You can always run a windows VM on your linux computer. I used to do that when I had to use citrix receiver for work.
It’s definitely an option under consideration, but one of the softwares I use that doesn’t work correctly in Linux is also very resource intensive, and VM’s are less efficient in that area. So I think in that instance, dual-booting is more suitable. But the suggestion is appreciated. 🙂
Ngl, getting those tools working on Linux is going to be as marketable as working with them in the first place
Get hacking!