Maybe a dumb question, the biggest reason I can’t fully move is i do enjoy VR and sim racing, both of which I’ve seen have limited linux support still, and though I enjoy figuring things out and fixing stuff, I don’t want to always be tinkering instead of just racing/gaming.
Would it be possible or safe to keep gaming on win 10 until it’s totally not supported, but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
I did just order a 2 tb drive to put linux mint on, to give gaming on linux another try. I haven’t had a linux install for a few years now and kind of miss it. But i do wonder if I’ll need to reinstall all my games again or can just access them off the existing hard drives (I know, NTFS formatted wont be optimum for linux).
If I’m in the wrong spot to ask, please inform.
Yes. Dual boot, or even simpler, try running your games in Windows VM in Linux. Performance hit should be minimal.
Only if you have a second GPU that you can pass through to the VM. Otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time.
Dual boot is the simpler method. A VM is far from simple when it comes to gaming.
You can use one GPU and hot swap it to pass through when booting your windows VM
That would require an iGPU, no? Also, I’ve seen issues when hot-swapping where the GPU doesn’t get re-initialized properly. It’s much simpler to just dual boot.
This is an advanced setup, dual boot is far simpler for a new Linux user.
I would be surprised if they’d run well in a VM but I’ll have to try! I have an AMD fx 8 core and a rtx 580 so I think compatibility wise I’ll be good.
Other games I play a lot are cs2 and board game sim, some pubg and gtav (which i know I’d need to use windows for)
Having had similar hardware and reading about your preferences let me throw some cents in the hat:
Sim stuff runs mostly ootb. I don’t have a fancy rig, but both my G29 and x52 pro work perfectly fine. At most, some games will map the axis wrong, but that’s easily fixable (eg. AMS2 swaps clutch and brakes and inverts all axis). The insullary apps such as TrackIR and controller stuff is already available, although not official. There’s Oversteer for wheels and GX52 for hotas.
I don’t have a TrackIR device but I’ve used FacetrackNoIR with the neuralnet face tracker and besides needing a bit of background lighting, it woked fine.
It’s not all perfect and depending on the games, it might need some tinkering. For example Mechwarrior 5 refuses to work properly with my hotas, and when I had a weaker CPU, Beam.ng was unusable with traffic/opponents. Some older titles are a pain to set up, like the older WRC games that had some obscure config files for the mappings. The upside is that you can back up your “fake windows C:” (aka as compatdata folder) once you got everything the way you like it.
I mostly do office type stuff and vector graphics along with CNC, and the proprietary software I need runs 90% fine on wine/bottles, so I haven’t had much of any blocker issues with work stuff.
I’ve been running Linux way before proton was a thing, and I’m really happy about how things are moving nowadays. I got used to the gnome workflow and now any other OS feels cumbersome and clunky, but YMMV.
TL; DR:
Thank you for this ! Great tips
You’ll definitely be struggling with that GPU, so maybe that’s a no-go.
Yeah gtav might struggle in Linux. ProtonDB shows its a tough config. Dual boot is probably your only option if that’s a deal breaker. Sharing my experience, I had a game i was playing that required windows and I was dual booting for a while, as well as a 3d slicer that the only profile for a printer I own is still windows. Everytime windows updated it seemed to have a good chance of wrecking the bootloader. After about the third time that happened I just stopped doing that, wiped windows and ran fedora.
As of today, I have spent time trying to make that slicer profile work in Linux, got it most of the way there and got frustrated, so instead I repurposed an old laptop that gets powered on only for that one specific printer.
Every game I play now runs on Linux.
Yeah I figured, which is fine since I don’t play it often.
Nice! It does seem easier than it used to be.
What VM solution are you using? When I tried to do this on Unraid, I kept running into opengl issues. Being honest i was trying to run a slicer that only had a windows profile.
At the moment, just VirtualBox for simplicity, but have run flat KVM for similar things in the past. It is FAR from ideal, but better than fucking with dual booting for myself. Also breaks a lot with Nvidia hardware.
Take a look at qemu + virt-manager (gui) and maybe if 2 gpu’s plugged into same monitor check github for looking-glass
That’s not the issue, it’s the changing kernel extensions and passthrough methods of hardware. Causes hiccups from time to time.
I only meant it as a general recommendation that you or others can also take a look at it. :)
This is what I was using. And like another poster says, that isn’t specifically the problem.