After having run Windows on my desktop for years (as I thought it was necessary for gaming), I decided to take the plunge to try out Linux again... - eviltoast

… and it’s much, much better than I anticipated. Proton has solved so many things. I’ve been dual booting on a smaller partition so far, but this has convinced me to wipe the whole disk and use it for Linux only. I might still keep a dual boot in case there is some edge case, but nothing so far has been an issue. I’ve been running Pop_Os! which I also have on my laptop since some year back. Previously I’ve also always had Arch on my laptop, but always stuck with Windows for my desktop just because of gaming issues.

    • seadoo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Sadly I just gave up on bazzite/aurora after tinkering with it for months.

      Bazzite somehow nuked itself after a couple failed upgrades and eventually couldn’t even get to the boot loader. I searched around and the only GitHub issue basically said that there is corruption in the drive and to just reinstall.

      so I tried aurora today, installed ok but then wouldn’t boot lol. Switched to pop os with cosmic and no problems.

      Love the idea of ublue, but there are just weird problems with it for now.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m installing Bazzite on my Legion Go today, just curious how you like it, and if you ran into any problems.

      • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        Not OP, but for me bazzite has been great. The only issue I encountered was with a KDE extension breaking KDE on the next update, but I could just rollback and remove and admittedly you could only encounter this problem if you tinker with the desktop a lot

        • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Do you know if there is a way to have the battery only charge to 80%. I use it mostly docked to the TV and windows has this setting but I haven’t found it in Bazzite yet (only had Bazzite for like 10 hours).

          • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            if it’s not already an option in the power settings, it should be feasible to adapt any linux laptop guide on how to do this. Look in to TLP. There may be easier options or graphical frontends too.

            • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              It turns out that steam os (Bazzite) has this already enabled. I just didn’t understand what I was looking at because windows displays battery level and setting differently and the battery always read at 80% on windows when plugged in vs not. On Bazzite it reads as “full” but the bar only shows at 80% which is hard to see on a small screen but easier to see when docked to the TV. Thanks for the pointers though.

                • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  Actually really good. Deckyloader took care of a lot of the stuff I needed for the legion go’s native controller and so on. Only thing that’s bugging me at the moment is for some reason I can’t control or change the RGB for the thumb sticks or power button. The setting isn’t in the controller settings where it should be. But everything else just works, and it’s been great so far.

    • sir_pronoun@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      What do you do though when you need to compile a driver for some hardware you have and install it manually on Bazzite? Recently had that case, and switched to Mint because of it.

      • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        driver for what? I put all my old people on bazzite so I’m not maintaining 3 versions of windows and several linux distros and so far everything works except one printer I had to install the driver via rpm-ostree.

          • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            Oh yeah wireless dongles can be annoying. I had a stack of intel combined wifi/bt laptop chips mooched from an old job that I had been subbing in on family computers because they just work and motherboards with built in wifi use the same ones usually. I did that thing again where I resolved the problem for myself then forgot it existed for others.

  • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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    2 months ago

    Strongly agree! I switched as well, so did my wife and its glorious. We‘re both avid gamers and no issues so far. We have strong opinions about intrusive anti cheat software so that helped.

    I did make a windows vm for my wife since she needs to work with adobe sometimes and it seems to work perfectly so far.

    Feel free to update on your journey.

  • Null@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    Congrats on the move. I did the same to Linux Mint and have loved the experience completely. Gaming has been amazing due to Proton and Vulcan.

  • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’ve been running Pop!_OS for a few years now on my laptop and about a year on my gaming PC. I’ve been very happy with it. Even microsoft Flight Simulator works perfectly. I’ve built a win 10 VM in virtual box for the few pieces of software I can’t get going on Linux (old garmin GPS software and some ham radio programming software).

    • Treedrake@fedia.ioOP
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      2 months ago

      Awesome. Sounds like you made the same journey. Right now it feels like I might ditch the dual boot too in a near future.

  • Soleil (she/her ♀)@beehaw.org
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    2 months ago

    I moved to Pop!_OS entirely when I built my new system earlier this year (had already been using it on my non-gaming laptop for several years) and relegated Windows to an external SSD that has been essentially collecting dust — I think I’ve used it three or four times.

    My experience isn’t the same as everyone’s, but I’m not in love with most multiplayer games, my work uses software that can be run within Wine/Bottles or a browser, and my preferred creative outlet is writing, which could also be done in a browser if I wasn’t such a picky bitch (I am, but Scrivener barely needs massaging to work under Wine and can even be made to look native thanks to using Qt).

    • Treedrake@fedia.ioOP
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      2 months ago

      I use Proton for Steam games. You can enable it in Steam settings, just run it via Steam afterwards. For games purchased via GOG, I use Heroic Launcher which uses a variant of Wine.

    • ogeist@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It is highly recommended that you use Lutris, Heroic Launcher or Bottles to prepare an environment for the SW you are trying to run. This offers the most flexibility.

      To use the official Steam Proton, you need to add an “external game” which will be the SW you want to run.

    • polarbearulove@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m pretty fresh to Linux myself, but as far as I know it’s exclusive to steam. You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client, I played Fallout 1 this way

      • Kory@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris also support Proton versions, since some games run best with them. But most games simply run with the latest version of Wine or Proton respectively.

      • kbal@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client

        ohhhh so that’s how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.

        • polarbearulove@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I’ve since graduated to scripting stuff to launch through wine (mostly chummer5 for shadowrun) but proton was a great lazy way of doing it

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      2 months ago

      steam just works, maybe few menus clicks to change proton version. but if you know how to use wine that will work too, i don’t