How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton? Is it so big or just small? Hows the performance of cartoonish Windows only games? And whats your hardware and how much is the price? I’m sorry but I cannot test it myself because I’m still on my mobile. Can you also tell about how many games are compatible with Proton? What about non-popular games?
I switched from win11 to cachyOS a few months ago and are never going back. For gaming it just works, my only struggle right now is some audio configuration to get a virtual amplifier for my guitar to work.
But troubleshooting on Linux is so so much better than on windows, because 99,999% there’s a solution in comparison to windows were often it’s just “well, we disabled the solution to the problem, so tough luck”.I’m running 32GB ram, rtx4080 and a 5800x on a dual monitor setup (32" 21:9 and 24" 16:9). Was basically plug and play.
You picked a terrible time. Hope you luck out on components though. If you try the Chinese ram, tell us how it works?
Yeah, do it 3 years ago.
The best time to
plant a treebuild a PC istenthree years ago.The second best time is now.
I’m honestly not convinced that’s true.
How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton?
The speed drop is negative. That is, it’s often actually faster.
Yes, I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.
Someone explained it in laymans terms as “imagine it not as a virtual machine, but more like a translation program converting windows-specific code into linux.”
I did not fact-check if they are just pulling the explanation out of their ass tho, so please correct me if inaccurate.
That’s correct. Wine, which is what Proton is based on, is not a VM or emulator. It is a re-implementation of key windows APIs so Windows EXEs can run. Assuming you’re on a x64 PC, the code is executing natively.
I got broke by just reading the title.
Apart from other things said here (e.g. AMD GPU), if you are planning on using wifi check that the adapter works well. Intel wifi usually works very well on Linux (although I have read that there are some issues with their newer wifi chips). AMD mobos usually use some kind of mediatek chipset. It might be better supported now, but I ended up replacing mine with another m.2 wifi (intel ax200).
A quick search for general support from the mobo vendor is probably a good idea too.
I got a good bundle deal from Microcenter on a mobo with a wifi card that took over a year to be properly supported by the Linux kernel (or whatever relevant entity). This is good advice, but it’s likely that since we’re at the end of the AM5 generation, no new mobos should come out needing updates to function properly.
Tap for spoiler
In my case, it was that I needed to hard power cycle (unplug, replug) sometimes to get Linux to initiate the networking card.
In addition to what other people have said, don’t sleep on Intel gpus, they’re great and they have great Linux compatibility. Even as vgpus for VMs.
Get more RAM than you think you need, I know it’s expensive, get more than you need.
I do everything through virtual machines, so I have a Linux gaming virtual machine that gets the GPU passed through to it directly, and I have a Windows gaming virtual machine that gets the same GPU passed through to it. Both work fine, some things work better on one than the other. Anti-cheat is annoying especially in a VM. There’s a ways to get around it, but if you can’t or you don’t want to, you can dual boot the machine directly into Windows. To make that easy simply have a full nvme drive just for Windows or Linux gaming if you want, and then boot directly into it when you need to go bare metal.
That covers all my gaming use cases, so Linux gaming VM most of the time, Windows gaming VM sometimes, and bare metal windows on occasion.
The benefit to using VMs, you can snapshot them easily, you can roll things back, you can limit the damage of bad games or mods you don’t trust, you can have multiple things running on your computer at the same time. If you’re running a game that doesn’t need all of your CPU all of your RAM, they can be doing productive work as VMs, or when your not gaming the GPU can be doing stuff like jellyfin transcoding.
In current climate? I’d say almost the opposite, get 16 gigz of RAM and only add more if you really need it or if it gets cheaper. You can add ram any time, it’s the beauty of a desktop pc builds.
Yeah, that is fair.
I am using Bazzite for my gaming pc and am happy that it simply works
Go with AMD GPU, be prepared for true happiness.
I tried out Bazzite with an Nvidia 40-series card last year and performance was the same as Windows for everything I tested
All things being equal I would go with AMD too, but if I was OP I certainly wouldn’t turn down a good deal on an Nvidia card if one presented itself.
Go back in time a few years when it was affordable.
Some tips for you:
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Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so
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Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it’s usable, but if you’re starting fresh 100% AMD.
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Don’t fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you’ll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I’ve heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have
/and/homebe different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that. -
Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that’s okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.
Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.
Mint is a good suggestion for a new user. An underrated distro, but solid, simple, and works well for any purpose.
Isn’t mint the most used distro after like catchyos?
CachyOS
“Top 10 most popular Linux distro” type articles I’ve seen usually list Mint near the top.
I don’t agree with the sentiment that Linux Mint is underrated either. As you note, it is quite popular and is mentioned a lot in the discourse.
However, I don’t think that CachyOS and Linux Mint are the most popular distros; that undoubtedly goes to Ubuntu. And, if anything, I’d think that Linux Mint is more popular than CachyOS.
Yet, if we’d limit it to the distros used by gamers, then CachyOS probably does take the crown for most used distro (aside from SteamOS). At least, there are metrics that suggest as such.
That is what I based my statement on. Cachy has consistently 1000 more page hits compared to mint.
Ah okay, thanks for clarifying!
FYI, DistroWatch isn’t a very reliable metric for gauging the user base of any given distro. Heck, strictly speaking, I’m unaware of any metric that does this any justice besides the opt-out DNF Count Me found on Fedora-based distros. And we will use exactly that to discredit DistroWatch!
So, Fedora (1112[1]) has put out a number (relatively) recently; 961k users. And Bazzite (770) outright displays it on their website; 90.8k users. Like, Fedora is roughly 10 times as big as Bazzite. But their respective DistroWatch rankings don’t quite reflect that.
As per DistroWatch’s 12 months, I’ll use the same table for Bazzite*. ↩︎
Underrated? It’s the single most recommended distro for beginners.
i mostly see immutables recommended to beginners on here
I’d also suggest Mint for getting started. I’ve been using it for several years with minimal hassle.
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proton is faster than games directly on winblows>
Thats good news, cause Linux is my OS choice.
It is more or less the same. There are countless comparisons and Linux usually wins by a small margin but not always.
try to have only one graphics card or something that can “mux” properly on linux.
try not to have secureboot for the Mobo.
EDIT : Check the driver compatibilities for all your components.
AMD gfx cards cannot meet or exceed 5080/5090 cards. That said, I think a 9070xt is the best choice right now, because it’s probably going to be cheaper overall to just upgrade in 3-4 years rather than buy a 5090 and hold onto it for 10 years or whatever. You do you, but for me, I think upgrading early is the better choice since 2 flagship AMD cards should equal the price of the nvidia 5080.
If you use WiFi instead of a cable, imo it’s worth it to use a WiFi chip/module that’s not from realtek. I’ve had insane amounts of trouble with their proprietary drivers and WiFi working crappy. Found lots of people having similar problems with realtek on Ubuntu here: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/WLAN/Karten/Realtek/ A WiFi module from e.g. Intel is 20-30€ an solves WiFi on Linux for me.
My first laptop i put linux on had a realtek chipset, back in 2016. It never fully worked, and actually made me switch back to windows for a short time. Now I use an Alpha external wifi antenna on my desktop and it just works
