|OT| The Linux Gaming Thread - Thread of the Millenium

[Parsnip]

I've been on KDE full time since 2008, never used Budgie, so can't compare the two.

KDE is quite configurable, so you can make it very Windows-like if that's the goal.


While there was a time when XFCE was more lightweight than KDE, I'm not sure that's the case anymore; certainly not for RAM usage, at least.

Unless you're talking about an extremely old computer (10+ years), I don't think performance is going to be a differentiating factor in favour of XFCE.

My distro (EndeavourOS) used XFCE for the live USB for a long time, but recently switched to KDE. There was a looong debate about that, and the conclusion was, if I recall, that KDE was much easier for them to work with, and that the putative performance / old hardware support delta was not conclusive enough to justify staying with XFCE.

Choose a desktop you like, and start worrying about performance-based alternatives only if you actually run into a performance wall you can't tweak away by disabling a few effects.

I mean it's not my PC so I won't choose a desktop I like.

I actually don't remember how old the PC is. If it wasn't old, I'd probably just install Win11 and not worry about any of this. But it's old enough to not have the TPM requirements, and while I know it's possible to get around that, it's too much of a hassle for me because I'm the IT support, basically. The system is only really used for browsing the web, occasional libre office and playing solitaire. And occasionally when my brother is in town he stays the nights there and plays Kingdom Two Crowns on it.

 

[BardsTales]

At some point soon I need to install Linux on my moms PC due to the whole Win10 support ending and all that, and of course I'm aiming to make the transition as seamless as possible.
I haven't 100% decided on distro just yet, but I'm leaning heavily on some Fedora atomic spin right now.

Same situation, I'm my mom's IT support and I live a bit far away so I can't just go over there every week to update something. Plus I want to start using Linux more myself because Microsoft got so much worse, there's also a boycott because MS is very involved with the genocide in Palestine...

I installed Linux Mint on a laptop and it worked really well immediately, very nice. I've had previous linux experience with a lot of distros but every year it gets better. The laptop immediately booted and the wifi worked, which I've struggled with in the past and I'm too old/lazy now to spend time compiling/linking wifi drivers by hand. I hope to install this on a pretty fast (well) desktop too for some gaming. I used to run Fedora and then Ubuntu but Fedora became very slow on my machine and Ubuntu had that terrible window manager then (Unity) and Mint was a very nice change. Mint Cinnamon feels a bit XP / Win7 like so hoping my mom will be able to get used to that.

The main advantage is that she's already been using Firefox and Thunderbird for web / email so that will be the exact same software. Just hoping that that specific laptop will be supported and nothing weird happens.

Also since I live far away I'd like some "take over de desktop remotely" software but not sure what to use yet. There's RustDesk but not sure that works well? For gaming I'm going to try Lutris, see what happens. Lutris - Open Gaming Platform

 

[Parsnip]

Same situation, I'm my mom's IT support and I live a bit far away so I can't just go over there every week to update something. Plus I want to start using Linux more myself because Microsoft got so much worse, there's also a boycott because MS is very involved with the genocide in Palestine...

I installed Linux Mint on a laptop and it worked really well immediately, very nice. I've had previous linux experience with a lot of distros but every year it gets better. The laptop immediately booted and the wifi worked, which I've struggled with in the past and I'm too old/lazy now to spend time compiling/linking wifi drivers by hand. I hope to install this on a pretty fast (well) desktop too for some gaming. I used to run Fedora and then Ubuntu but Fedora became very slow on my machine and Ubuntu had that terrible window manager then (Unity) and Mint was a very nice change. Mint Cinnamon feels a bit XP / Win7 like so hoping my mom will be able to get used to that.

The main advantage is that she's already been using Firefox and Thunderbird for web / email so that will be the exact same software. Just hoping that that specific laptop will be supported and nothing weird happens.

Also since I live far away I'd like some "take over de desktop remotely" software but not sure what to use yet. There's RustDesk but not sure that works well? For gaming I'm going to try Lutris, see what happens. Lutris - Open Gaming Platform

Yup.
I don't live too too far away, like 30 minutes walk and I try to visit at least once a week, but I'd rather not spend any of that time doing PC maintenance.

I've been doing more reading and while I still lean on Fedora, I think I'm just going to go with the regular non-atomic version of Fedora KDE at least for now. By their own word Kinoite "is not complete and there are still some features missing to make using it a great user experience". It's hard for me to judge if any of the issues linked would actually be relevant in this use case or if the page is even up to date, but hey.
I need to read up on some of it either way and maybe that will change my mind back to atomic. I'd probably prefer atomic actually.

 

[Parsnip]

Oh right I completely forgot that I looked at the non-gaming focuses "sister" of Bazzite at some point, Aurora. It's also atomic and based on Fedora and probably more in line with what my mom's PC needs.

I really need to check the specs of the system next time I'm there though.

 

[Parsnip]

So I've been thinking about this linux stuff a bunch lately and instead of dual booting at first, I'm thinking about imaging my current Windows installation into a disk image, back that up on separate drive and just nuke my boot drive and go full linux on it.
And then run that imaged Windows inside a VM for a bit and get whatever files I need from it over time, and possibly keep it around as a backup in case I need a Windows installation for some specific game, photoshop or whatever.
Does that sound reasonable and workable?

Been reading about QEMU and KVM, single GPU passthrough and all kinds of fun stuff in relating to this.
Though I do have some questions about VMs in general that I haven't been able to find a clear answer on, quite possibly because the answer is obvious to anyone who has been working with VMs that they don't even think about it.

And some linux "best practices" elude me that I need to figure out before jumping in. Like, for example on Windows I have a "PortableTools" folder that sits at the root of my boot drive and it has stuff like FanControl, SAM, ColorControl etc. Not necessarily actually portable since some of them put config files in the Windows appdata. But stuff I didn't have to run an installer for, just unzip and run. Do such programs have a correct location in the linux file system? I have been googling around of course but found a bit conflicting info on that. Possible suggestions I've seen are things like just using /opt or $HOME/.local/opt or $HOME/.local/bin and such. Maybe it depends a bit on the program itself, I need to look into this a bit more. In truth it probably doesn't matter too too much and I'm overthinking it, but I guess I'm trying to unlearn some possibly bad Windows habits.

 

[undu]

Does that sound reasonable and workable?

I think the data-copying can be done, although having an extra nvme would help; fo running the VM with passthrouhh, last time I checked you'll need 2 GPUs because the GOU couldn't be detached from the host Linux and passed to the guest (VM); and later be reattached to the host Linux

The copying can be done with the commandline tool dd (please do read the manual thoroughly, it can destroy disks easily)

 

[jads653]

So I've been thinking about this linux stuff a bunch lately and instead of dual booting at first, I'm thinking about imaging my current Windows installation into a disk image, back that up on separate drive and just nuke my boot drive and go full linux on it.
And then run that imaged Windows inside a VM for a bit and get whatever files I need from it over time, and possibly keep it around as a backup in case I need a Windows installation for some specific game, photoshop or whatever.
Does that sound reasonable and workable?

Been reading about QEMU and KVM, single GPU passthrough and all kinds of fun stuff in relating to this.
Though I do have some questions about VMs in general that I haven't been able to find a clear answer on, quite possibly because the answer is obvious to anyone who has been working with VMs that they don't even think about it.

And some linux "best practices" elude me that I need to figure out before jumping in. Like, for example on Windows I have a "PortableTools" folder that sits at the root of my boot drive and it has stuff like FanControl, SAM, ColorControl etc. Not necessarily actually portable since some of them put config files in the Windows appdata. But stuff I didn't have to run an installer for, just unzip and run. Do such programs have a correct location in the linux file system? I have been googling around of course but found a bit conflicting info on that. Possible suggestions I've seen are things like just using /opt or $HOME/.local/opt or $HOME/.local/bin and such. Maybe it depends a bit on the program itself, I need to look into this a bit more. In truth it probably doesn't matter too too much and I'm overthinking it, but I guess I'm trying to unlearn some possibly bad Windows habits.

Do you have a CPU that has integrated graphics? If so an other option could be to use the integrated graphics in Linux for desktop, use the GPU for gaming. You then pass the GPU to the VM whenever you require the VM. Looking Glass is quite awesome for this kind of use case. Looking Glass - Home. Do keep in mind that most anti cheat won't work in VMs these days. There are workarounds but that can either get you banned if detected or in the case of Valorant not work at all.

Installing software in Linux often goes through a software repository. To install Chrome I just go to an appstore kind of application and select it from there. This is provided by your Linux distro maker. That is a bit different then installing portable software. Pretty much all "portable" software in Linux is either provided as a Flatpack or AppImage. As an example Nvidia just released a native Geforce Now application that is just a flatpack. Config files are saved to a hidden folder in your home directory, flatpacks are "installed" into the home directory as well. Both formats run in their own little sandbox, there are even Linux distros that exclusive use flatpacks..

 

[Parsnip]

I think the data-copying can be done, although having an extra nvme would help; fo running the VM with passthrouhh, last time I checked you'll need 2 GPUs because the GOU couldn't be detached from the host Linux and passed to the guest (VM); and later be reattached to the host Linux

The copying can be done with the commandline tool dd (please do read the manual thoroughly, it can destroy disks easily)

Single GPU passthrough is definitely a thing, these days at least, but a bit of a hassle to setup as you might expect.

Do you have a CPU that has integrated graphics? If so an other option could be to use the integrated graphics in Linux for desktop, use the GPU for gaming. You then pass the GPU to the VM whenever you require the VM. Looking Glass is quite awesome for this kind of use case. Looking Glass - Home. Do keep in mind that most anti cheat won't work in VMs these days. There are workarounds but that can either get you banned if detected or in the case of Valorant not work at all.

Installing software in Linux often goes through a software repository. To install Chrome I just go to an appstore kind of application and select it from there. This is provided by your Linux distro maker. That is a bit different then installing portable software. Pretty much all "portable" software in Linux is either provided as a Flatpack or AppImage. As an example Nvidia just released a native Geforce Now application that is just a flatpack. Config files are saved to a hidden folder in your home directory, flatpacks are "installed" into the home directory as well. Both formats run in their own little sandbox, there are even Linux distros that exclusive use flatpacks..

Sadly no integrated graphics.

The thing about recommended filesystem locations is specifically in regards to software that I don't expect to find through official distro repos. Though I guess anything's possible.




Also I just realized that this is a Linux Gaming thread and not a generic linux thread, but hey. I'll definitely continue gaming on my system, so it counts.

 

[Le Pertti]

Also I just realized that this is a Linux Gaming thread and not a generic linux thread, but hey. I'll definitely continue gaming on my system, so it counts.

Well at least its more on topic than me talking about linux in the steam thread.XD

Funny that Im already looking at distros for a future PC when Im like two years away from actually saving up for one.

 

[Parsnip]

The VM solution would be hopefully temporary, but my main big brain thought about doing that instead of dualbooting is that, well, I am already dualbooting. Kind of. Well, I was. I have a second partition that has EndevaourOS installed, that I fully intended to start using more and like, slowly grow that partition while shrinking the Windows partition. But I never used it. And then at some point I updated the bios and that nuked the systemd boot setup and while it seems easy enough to fix, I've been too lazy. And like I said I wasn't using it anyway. I kept postponing doing any further setup to it and just ignored it, so my galaxy brain idea is that I'll just install linux as the main driver, because otherwise I'm just going to keep pushing it back until oops it's October 2026 and I've been on an unpatched Win10 for a year.

One of the next things I probably should do is uninstall a bunch of big games before I start the whole imaging process.
And then I suppose the most sensible way to proceed would be to grab some live usb linux and do the imaging process from there so the partition won't be in use. Just need to make sure I know how to then turn the partition into a virtual drive that the VM can use without a hassle.

Trying my best to prepare and actually research in advance, for once.

 

[Parsnip]

It also just occurred to me that I have an empty 500gb sata ssd drive that's just sitting there empty, already installed on my system.
So maybe I'll shrink my Windows install and plop it there, and dual boot that way. Maybe I'm overcomplicating the matter with this VM business.

Either way, what I absolutely will do is nuke my current boot drive and just put some distro on it, other stuff is a bit up in the air I guess.

 

[Parsnip]

Well, I have now migrated my Win10 install to this older samsung sata ssd and am currently running from it.
Next step is actually pick the distro I want and do some installing.

I've been going back and forth with the whole atomic/immutable thing. Maybe I'll go with something more "traditional" at least for now.
So I'm leaning on CachyOS at the moment. Not sure when I have the time to jump in, maybe tomorrow, maybe a week from now, who knows.