Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.

But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual drive?).

I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.

I’ve had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it’s own folder for it’s virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it’s store page and looking at the URL. You don’t usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.

My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.

Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.

I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.

Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.

Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).

Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.

Yeah, “linuxism”, that must be it… That or it’s possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.

As in: between today and six months ago, when I moved my personal PC to Linux and encountered various weird shit that just doesn’t happen on Windows?

secure (please don’t try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please)

Wait, are you one of those weird people who believe that there are no viruses on Linux and no security tools are needed?

Windows servers are under constant attack… Just like Linux devices are at all times.

I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.

I didn’t say “it’s coming back”. WS is still losing market share, but the losses slowed down pretty significantly in recent years. Sorry, I can’t find the source again because Google is shite. Feel free to disregard this point.

Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn’t surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.

Fuck off with this tone, mate.

I mentioned MacOS as an example that Windows is not as buggy as you seem to believe. I guess that went over your head and I should denigrate you now?

Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,

The OS would autoremove them?!

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.

Microsoft has plenty of console exclusives, so they are on PlayStation and Switch but not Windows for whatever reason. Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is one I’m confused why they don’t trust their own platform with.

That said, they don’t trust their own Windows on ARM devices either and those should definitely be capable enough to run games that come to Switch.

This is good. This data will eventually help influence game developers to support Linux. It won’t happen over night, but we this trend continues, it’ll eventually start getting some attention.

That doesn’t seem to take a lot of effort. It’s still a windows binary. And it’s unfortunately simpler than figuring out if the user runs X or not.

Well, would you look at that…

It’s probably Windows update “fixing” you drivers by updating them to the Windows version because it is newer. I had to turn off Windows driver updates, because it kept updating my already fully working 5.1 Dolby digital driver to a newer one that only has dual channel audio, and it also broke the optional optical out my sound card supports (and has installed).

Welcome to gaming on Linux!

how to manage the games installed in Proton (virtual C drive)

They can be found in: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game app id>/pfx/drive_c/ For Elden Ring for example the path is: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1245620/pfx/drive_c/

Biggest blockers are games with invasive and unsupported anti cheat or very new games. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for the latest reports on games.

Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.

if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems

What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.

Yeah, it was super fun. I tried reformatting, I bought a new drive and put new Windows on it and the same thing happened.

They just won’t function properly. There are permissions problems and while some games might work, you will run into games that simply won’t launch, or that have regular crashes, among other issues. I recommend installing the games you want to play on Linux there, and the ones you can’t on windows.

Seems like an increase a bit in preparation. Who knows what they’ll be/what shortages will occur over the next couple of years. After all, the current bluff is a 100% tariff on chips. Which is why if you’re planning to upgrade in the next year or two and have the money, it might be a decent idea to pre-emptively update your parts before they jack up further.

I’ll have to look into seeing if I can mess with that! It’s a laptop 3070, so they:'ve already made some changes (fewer cores, lower boost clocks). My laptop sets a 100 W max TGP for it.

TBH though I’ve found myself caring more about the convenience of playing games (comfort, portability, ease of interrupting) more than graphics settings. Yeah it’s very pretty with ray tracing and all, but I’m totally fine with playing on medium or high.

Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.

Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.

It’s far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.

Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.

You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example, nvidia-smi -pl 80 will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC). nvidia-smi by itself will show all its default settings.

I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.

Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU’s “efficient” range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it “power up” for really intense workloads.

FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.