So i have a gaming desktop that not the best or the newest. What takes up most of my drive space is games, updates, and software’s. Im wondering if i should switch to linux and if linux will improve any performance for my main machine? If you believe i should switch what os should i go with or why or why not should i switch?
I mostly game and do mess with ollama/ai tools because i think that’s cool. I want to do more things in the future but that might beyond my drive space?
What would you advise?
The biggest downside of ditching Windows is losing that comfort zone where everything just works without thinking about it. But if you’re cool with putting in some effort to learn new stuff, Linux will feel way snappier right from the start.
Since you’ve got an Nvidia GPU, I’d definitely go with CachyOS - it’s been my best Linux experience for gaming and daily use. The Linux community respects it too: https://cachyos.org/
For your setup specifically, you’ll probably like how much less space Linux takes up compared to Windows, plus it’s way lighter on system resources so your older hardware should perform better. Gaming works surprisingly well these days thanks to Proton, most stuff just runs.
You could dual boot first to test it first without committing. CachyOS would be perfect for what you’re doing.Given that Windows 11 won’t support your device, Linux may be your only option for a supported OS.
You can use Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) to activate Extended Security Updates for extra 3 years of support or upgrade to IoT LTSC for 6 years
Meh. That assumes that games and applications bother still supporting it when EoL for most people has passed. Good option, though.
Linux will continue to support their hardware for easily another decade.
You know the answer!
Exactly, that’s it.
So why not do it?
Nvidia is a bit of a risk under Linux. It might work.
There’s hardly any risk anymore. The drivers themselves are mostly fine, with a couple exceptions.
The only two risk factors are either using an immature distro with no properly packaged drivers, or an outdated one
Mint won’t properly display games with my RTX 3080 unless I reboot for some reason. There can still be issues but they might be fixable.
When it’s not displaying them properly, what does it do?
The game runs fine but there’s a black screen. I might get a few frames actually rendered once every minute or so before it goes back to black. It usually only happens after I let the screensaver go on after each reboot.
Is your computer going to sleep as well or just screensaver? I’ve ran into a similar issue on both AMD and Nvidia because the power management on each has caused me problems. I basically turned off the auto sleep to give myself a bandage fix to it. My PC runs pretty cool on idle though, so that’s not too horrible.
Screensaver. Ran a test to confirm it by letting the screen go dark before it went to sleep. Turning off auto sleep didn’t do anything, the PC would just switch to screensaver and go to sleep like nothing changed.
Yep, for example Ubuntu took like 4 extra months to get a late enough driver to fix the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth texture issue. Completely unplayable until I believe driver 570.123. I had the updated driver pretty early on Arch, but wouldn’t ever suggest that to someone casually considering switching.
Yes
The answer: Yes!
The why: Why not?
yes
You’ve already got plenty of comments explaining why you should switch. You obviously should ideally. Check Protondb.com to see if your games runs on Linux.
As long as you back up your data, experiment to find what you want. If you have an empty spare drive, try out the different options there. It’s been a month since I moved to Bazzite. My plan was to try Mint and Bazzite while also keeping a Windows 10 ISO in my boot drive (Ventoy will allow you to have as many ISO in your USB stick). If things get too difficult, I could always go back to Windows 10. But using Bazzite has been a breeze, I decided I didn’t even need Mint. Every time I think I need to open up the terminal for any issues, I find that the solution doesn’t require it.
You can bypass the TPM requirements for windows using Rufus to get Windows 11. There are tons of videos on how to do that.
That being said, I use Linux as a daily driver and love it. You can always test it out on a USB and decide if you want to install it. It won’t run games well from a USB, but it at least will allow you to see what you like.
Either way good luck with your adventure and if you have questions this community is spectacular and really likes to help people!
My biggest problem right now it picking a linux destitution or os. There’s so many how do i choose?
Also if anyone is wondering this machine is a overpriced prebuild i got because my parents forced me to pick a prebuild instead of building a pc.
Linux takes like 5-10mins to setup. You can dedicate your first day/week to trying out a few different flavors to see which one you like.
I’d try distro’s in this order Mint with Cinnamon > fedora KDE > Ubuntu Gnome > cachyOS if you’re a baller > Arch if you want to learn and break things while doing it > NixOS if you absolutely hate having things work easily and learning transferable knowledge.
NixOS if you absolutely hate having things work easily and learning transferrable knowledge.
Ouch. Accurate, but ouch. 😄
I only roast NixOS from a place of love.
In the past certain distros were better for certain tasks, but not really anymore. The thing that separates distros is how they do package management and how many packages they have. All that’s to say, just pick something easy to start with like Kubuntu, Mint, or Debian if you’re ok with older software.
Yeah but for a new user its nice to see how different groups configure linux out of the box. Once you know what you’re doing you can tweak the distro to your liking but new users seem to search for a default they like and stick with it until comfortable.
And there’s the issue. Guy is confused, and everyone is recommending him ten thousand distros. We need to understand that not everyone understands half of what we talk about more than half the time.
OP: just get mint, try it out, make a thread again in a couple months if you need help choosing another distro.
Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.
The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.
For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.
At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.
I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.
I’m using Nobara and Fedora. I think Mint is the most popular.
Check out distrowatch.com it explains it well.
All that matters is that you pick something popular enough that you can easily Google any issues that might arise.
A lot of folks will recommend Mint as the first option, since it’s pretty straightforward and will feel a lot like older editions of Windows. Personally, I use Fedora Plasma, because it feels like what Windows 11 should have been, and it supports just about everything I’ve thrown at it. It’s got pretty broad support, so it’s easy to get into.
The big ones for general use are Ubuntu and Fedora. KDE is gonna feel most windows like on any distro.
If you want something security focused there’s quebesOS that breaks everything out into VMs. For gaming there’s bazzite which is just modified fedora and several other gaming spins like steamOS.
Bazzite isn’t just modified Fedora, it’s based on Fedora Atomics, like Silverblue and Kinoite. If OP isn’t even sure about which distro to use, tossing them into the world of
ostreemight be a little much, since a lot of the online advice doesn’t take immutable systems into account. The Discord community they have is helpful, though, and there’s more than a few users here on Lemmy who use it, who I’m sure would be willing to help.Nobara is just modified Fedora, however, and it’s also nice.
There’s a lot of good suggestions here and I wanted to add pop os! it’s a beginner friendly Linux distribution but with more of a focus on gaming.
Pop is great, but I wouldn’t currently recommend it, since they’re putting 99.9% of their effort into Cosmic. I have heard longtime users mention how certain packages and updates are behind, and while they’re willing to wait, I wouldn’t want to put that upon somebody new.
Not a bad recommendation in general, but just my two cents about the current state of things.
That’s a really good point and I had forgotten about the updates being behind. Thank you for bringing that up!
Just pick something. They are all free (nearly all of them), so you can always install something else pretty easily. Spend some time to get your feet wet and get the lay of the land. After a week or two, you’ll probably have a really good direction on what you actually want. You can also run them as live oses, so download a few with different Desktop Environments you think are interesting and test them out. Then install one.
Do you have HDR monitors? If you do and care about having the HDR part working, you’ll likely want to pick one that uses KDE Plasma for the desktop environment.
I’m still going to ask how you ended up with a server CPU. Does it help with the tasks you do?
Other people have given you good responses about switching so I’ll give some distro recommendations:
- Bazzite. This is what I use on fairly similar hardware. Looks like you’ve got a v1 or v2 chip as it’s still DDR3, I’m on an E5-2680v2 and it works great under Linux while Windows 10 just caused it to freeze up so much by the end. All the background updates and indexing and whatever else were such resource hogs. The NVIDIA Bazzite iso also includes the official drivers out of the box, which many other distros don’t (looking at you Linux Mint!!). It’s designed to be super easy for gamers newly switching from Windows, with Steam pre-installed and everything just ready to go.
- CachyOS. I don’t have personal experience with it, but I know it also includes the official NVIDIA drivers out of the box, and it’s designed as a gaming distro first and foremost as well.
- Nobara. Another gaming distro, it also includes the NVIDIA drivers and is ready to go. It’s made by a dev known as Glorious Eggroll who is well respected in the linux gaming community.
The reason I recommend distros that have the official NVIDIA drivers OOTB is that they work much, much better than the Noveau open source driver that most traditional distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora) include. The offical drivers also have a steep learning curve for a new Linux user to install themselves, it’s nowhere near as simple as installing them on Windows.
I like bazzite but the immutable aspect makes downloading some thing even more complicated for a newb. Truly can never go wrong with zorinos or mint
I’ve been using Linux for 25 years and I kinda hate how clunky immutable Fedora is.
That’s exactly why I’m recommending it. For a user that just wants to game, it has the guardrails in place to stop them from bricking their install. Think about how comparatively hard it is to severely mess up a Windows install.
There are plenty of other ways to install software, Bazzite highly recommends Flatpak and AppImage. As well, if you do really need anything else, it can be run in a Distrobox and there are plenty of people on the forums who can help with that.
Recommending Mint to users that just want to game, that don’t want to learn technical stuff, needs to die. Sure, if someone comes in and says they’re happy to learn tech stuff, Mint is a great option. But for everyone else, something like Bazzite is just so much closer to “it just works”. Hell, I have technical skills, headless Debian over SSH is my happy place, but I have Bazzite on my desktop and handheld because I can’t mess with it. It’s always ready to game when I am!
True true, still modern linux doesn’t break as easily as u frame it. And is user friendly enough for even non tech ppl. A user would have to go out of their way todo something weird in cli. As long as they are just installing games then not a whole lot can go wrong.
On bazzite if u want to install something that isn’t virtualized like flats, than u would have to dive more into cli. That instead of simply typing sudo apt install.
I mean, I’ve bricked plenty of installs before I knew what I was doing more. I still regularly see, in certain places, people give purposefully destructive commands.
rm -rf /doesn’t work directly anymore, but it’ll work on your home folder for example. You also don’t need CLI to install games, I would say literally never.If a good third-party launcher that needed to be run as a system package showed up, Bazzite would just add that. Games that just ship a Linux executable like a lot of itch.io stuff generally works regardless and doesn’t need the CLI. Can you give an example of a gaming usecase that requires
sudo apt?You can also install packages to the system on Bazzite by the way. It’s atomic, not actually immutable. It’s just frowned upon because it makes things less stable, and increases the length of updates. You use
sudo rpm-ostree installin the same way, and it layers the package on top of the current version. It’s treated as an absolute last resort, but it is way easier to reset to the base image if anything goes wrong.No not a lot. Was just distro hopping and tried bazzite. When I tried to install something that wans’t in the software centrum it indeed said to try sudo rpm-ostree install. But monkey brain already found it too much. So yeah… My bazzite views probaly aren’t the best lol. Have to give it a better try some day.
I mean, Bazzite is Fedora so even if it wasn’t atomic, you’d be using
dnfinstead ofapt. Subbing outrpm-ostreeisn’t much different :P
Sandy Bridge is too old for CachyOS. Cachy compiles the kernel with optimizations for newer CPUs
Wrong, I’m running a sandy bridge on cachyos right now
If you look at recommended requirements on that page, it suggests the x86_v3 but minimum doesn’t. It’s a little confusing but the following section seems to just be explaining that term for the recommended level? If I’m wrong though I’ll gladly cross it out.
Linux probably wouldn’t make your games any faster, but it could make the OS feel snappier.
Reasons to switch:
- you hate Windows
- you like to customize stuff
- you’re curious about Linux
- you don’t play many MP games
- you tend to leave a ton of stuff open, which makes things run slowly
- saving 40GB or so of space means the world to you (Linux is pretty lean)
Reasons not to switch:
- you need Windows-specific software, like Adobe stuff or games w/ anti-cheat
- you’re not interested in tinkering at all, and having any minor issue would frustrate you
- you want the best possible performance for games
Linux is better at memory and task management, generally speaking, but performance in specific apps depends a ton on the specific app, from being slightly better to being noticeable worse.
As for which Linux distro to go with, I hear good things about Linux Mint, though I don’t use it myself. But honestly, look at the most popular distros and find one that looks cool to you, they’re all pretty good. Ones to check out are:
- Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition) - ol’ reliable, may have some issues on newer games
- Fedora - tries to be close to bleeding edge, without as many sharp edges
- Bazzite - gaming focus, tries to imitate Steam OS
- openSUSE Tumbleweed - my personal daily driver, though I generally don’t recommend it for new users since there’s not a huge community to find help
There are tons more great ones. If you list your must-have apps/games, maybe someone can give a better recommendation, though honestly most distros are similar enough that if it works on one, it’ll work anywhere.
Just a point about phrasing but pretty much all MP games work flawlessly, just not the esports titles with draconian anticheats.
Sure, my point is anti-cheat, which is a pretty common feature of MP games, at least the popular ones. But yeah, I could’ve been more clear, thanks for the correction.
Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition) - ol’ reliable, may have some issues on newer games
Used to, in the first year after Steam Linux client released, because of old libc. But since then, I’ve had only one or two games not work because of nvidia drivers not being new enough.
A xeon plus 3060 is an interesting combo…
He probably slapped the GPU onto a workstation.
Note how the 3060 already had 12GB VRAM, and they still try to push 8 today
I feel like if you’re asking on this community, you’ve already decided you want to switch and you want help being reassured that it’s viable
