I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
If she is immune to branding then marry that one! She’s rare.
My mother, who is the stereotypical boomer that doesn’t get technology, got upset with all the privacy invasion of Microsoft, and has been running Linux for over a decade
For what? Recipe keeping?
Meanwhile I have a riced setup with programmer dvorak keyboard layout and shortcut heavy interaction which makes my computer almost unusable to normies.
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Yeah - my wife has occupied for hundreds of hours the SteamDeck and really doesn’t care that it’s Linux. Her games do work. And after Microsoft switched off Win10, I moved her to Mint and she really had no issues at all with that. Everything she does still works the same. We just saved a few hundred Euros by being able to keep using the Laptop
The different file system was the biggest adaptive hurdle for me. Just the default knowledge of how windows worked from the MS-DOS era took a bit to adapt to. I think knowing Windows actually made it harder to switch compared to someone who wouldn’t know much more than opening the internet browser.
But for gaming: more than anything navigating all the compatability files being used by WINE and Steam can be a nightmare.
it is a shame some of my apps and games just dont work flawlessly with WINE.
If you’re explicitly using WINE to open games in 2026, then you’re doing it wrong. Launch the games through Steam and enable Proton in the compatibility settings.
That, or get a more lightweight launcher like Faugus, and select Proton (GE or Cachy flavors might work slightly better for some games)
i know, i’ve tried. some essential stuff breaks which keeps me from using it. for now i’ll use the web version
Games should work in Steam with “Steam Play for all titles” enabled. What are the apps?
zalo (vietnamese messaging app), polytoria (not sure if that has a linux client)
Zalo has at least unofficial linux client and polytoria seems to offer flatpack. So those should run on linux, but that’s just based on few quick web searches.
i’ve tried the unofficial zalo client, calls, notifs, and some other small stuff just doesnt work for me. for polytoria, i’ll try it out.
Yeah Linux’s biggest problem now is “oups, your application / driver isn’t available”
Not user friendlyness.
Yeah, other than photoshop/outlook, the day to day is fine for just about everyone.
The days of a kernel update screwing over a video driver aren’t quite gone yet. When things go sideways, they are much harder to fix for the average person, and the people with the necessary skill sets are still a bit scarce. Not every family has a cousin Jimmy capable of reading dmesg and screwing with kernel modules.
That said, most of the big ai’s are totally capable of walking a non-techie through fixing a pretty screwed up linux box.
I’m getting a new PC for my elderly mom and installing Linux on it. It’s just that easy for day-to-day stuff
Great use-case.
99% of the population just needs a good web browser.
But even outlook you can use in the browser for most functionality now which is nice.
What drivers are you missing?
Back then the LEGO mindstoms stuff was a problem. And my Logitech remote.
Not sure if that changed. Growed tired of dual boot, and went windows. The thing is, just one app or game you can’t use can screw up everything.
Unsupported LEGO mindstorm stuff seems to be a problem of the past https://www.ev3dev.org/ but even in the past, it was probably more a config problem.
Never the less, you don’t lower your overall efficiency because one out of a hundred apps do not work correctly. You don’t even need to dual boot. You can just fire up QEMU with a Windows VM and use this app and shut it off afterwards. That also makes snapshot handling way easier.
What I admit is, if you want to play a game, you can only use virtualization if you have a spare GPU you can pass through for hardware acceleration. Otherwise playing in a VM doesn’t make any sense. But on the same time I also have to say, WINE improved so so god damn much over the last 5 years. I am trying to get games to run with WINE since like 2005 or something and it was always painful and nothing from this side of the century worked…
But now, even with the proton wrapper, everything just works tbh. I have a lot of games, different games, new games, old games, multiplayer games with anti cheat etc…
Everything works on my machine. Now even my non-tech-friends are jumping this wagon, I now a handful of those people running Linux only for at least a year now and all of them are happy with it. I’m not saying that they couldn’t be happier, but they also sometimes overesitmate their Windows know-how, because in the end, most of their frustration comes from the fact, that they don’t know how to do certain things, but they actually didn’t know before either.
They would fake read some stuff, download 3 things, randomly click on a lot of stuff, change some settings they don’t remember and when they fucked the poor rectangular prism enough, they called me to unfuck it and get done whatever they wanted in the first place. It wasn’t too different from what they are able to achieve now on their Linux machine. But I have one or two people, that gaslight themselves into believing that they knew more about the Windows Machine, didn’t fuck it up on a regular basis and did not need to call me in to fix it.
I don’t know why they talk themselves into this fictional scenario, I don’t care, they are still on Linux, everything they want works and they already started customizing KDE to their liking.
I never had trouble, so others never had trouble and are lying…
That’s kind of a shity and condescending attitude to have.
And the official ev3 app never worked. Ev3dev never had the same convenience.
It’s like saying you don’t nedd Photoshop because gimp exist.
And yeah, i grow tired of having to spend time on getting stuff to run that on windows is just “install and run” because the manufacturer / developer actually made sure it would work on windows.
AMD drivers are so smooth on Linux!
The GPU is actually NVIDIA! But planning an upgrade to an AMD card soon.
I’m dumb, I mixed with CPU…
…but AMD drivers are still smooth !!!
AoE2DE never worked online for me. It always resulted in a desync error a few minutes in. I read between the lines that that’s been fixed?
Is this a known bug? I never had that problem to be honest.
I play with some friends on the other side of the world once a week. I’m on Bazzite (previously on Mint), one of them is on Mac, the other two are on Windows.
I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She’s got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it’s exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and “needs” it installed (as opposed to the browser version) so I didn’t continue down that road but I’m pretty sure it’d blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it’d be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
My mom was running slackware for a couple of years in the early 2000s. She kept downloading viruses on her computer and I was tired of her having her ship it across the country so I could fix it. I installed slackware on her computer and shipped it back, and walked her through setting up a port forward on her router for ssh access. She had no idea she was running Linux the entire time until she went to Walmart to buy Peachtree Accounting software. She couldn’t get it to install, so she called and asked for help. I got in with SSH and installed KMyMoney for her and she used that for a year.
It lasted up until she bought a laptop, one that came with Windows 7 I think. I stopped helping her after that because I didn’t really remember how to use Windows anymore. Windows had a subscription antivirus at that point, before Defender days, and she just paid for that.
if you can, get a 2nd hdd/ssd and install linux in parallel
i actually have mint on two older pcs with hdds and while it takes some time to boot, once it’s up, it’s quick, unlike windowsI got my mom (about the same age as your mom) setup on Linux for her new laptop about a year ago. She’s been using it fine, and was even excited to tell me how she figures stuff out without me.
Honestly, I’ve had to do less work on her machines since I switched her over. Package management makes it easy for my mom to add or remove apps.
I mean, if you have Windows like DE’s it’s really not THAT hard for a Windows user to use Linux. The issue is when you have Gnome and others installed.
But yes I agree with you. I definitely think we’ve come a long way from having to use the terminal for everything.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has been a blessing to me tbh
How so? If I’m not reading some blanket / feel good /empty statement like this about it, it’s bitching left and right about specific issues and actual experiences. There’s no karma system here, so why make karma farming posts?
I personally wouldn’t go as far as to call it a blessing… But mint was a super easy transition from windows for me. I’ve only had one issue where it locked up on login. Granted that’s fairly major but I was able to roll it back after a cheeky search engine review.
What was your reason for switching, and what do you use your computer for?
My partner is the same way roughly. Biggest issue she’s had was her drawing tablet pen not working. Turned out she was using the wrong pen for that tablet, the correct pen worked flawlessly. An hour of my life troubleshooting I can’t get back haha.
There have been a few games that have had issues, and the updates aren’t the most intuitive on Kubuntu, but she did manage the last update just fine on her own without me even being home, so that’s good.
Try installing opentabletdriver, it made mine work out of the box.
Hers did too without any extra software, she was trying to use the wrong pen from a different tablet.
drawing tablet pen
Soapbox: EMR is amazing. No need for charging, effectively infinite pressure gradient, no lag, open standard (which solves your issue because any stylus works on any tablet). The fact that Apple didn’t use it for the pencil is infuriating, and the fact that some other companies are moving away from EMR too is driving me up a wall.
As anti-competitive as Wacom can be, they cooked with that technology, and I’m so happy with my e-ink EMR tablet.
Some vendors offer computers preinstalled with linux. For instance, laptopwithlinux lets you choose your own build, choose a distro (or no distro), and they put it all together and ship it to you
As of this year, same with Framework. For their 13 Pro, at least.
I’m old and thus my relationship is old enough to drink. As we met they were using an utterly virus riddled Windows XP install. I suggested alternative and that Debian install has survived a couple decades. Sure, I’ll do anything major like hardware changes but mostly it has just been easy living. For most people working browser, some sort of office package and an image editor is plenty. Linux has been ready for that for a long time.
