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.
I suggested a friend to try out Bazzite (KDE desktop). He told me it felt like he was playing on a console because everything works from the get go. He didn’t have to tweak or install anything.
I’ve also had a great experience with Nobara. I did try Bazzite, but the immutable nature of it stopped me from doing the things I’m used on Linux. However, I’ve got my partner on Nobara as well, and she’s verrry much not techy and still having a great experience.
That was exactly my experience with that same distro + flavor. One of my happiest moments of the past year has been buying a new prebuilt gaming PC with Windows preinstalled and immediately wiping Windows in favor of Bazzite.
(Because I know someone will wonder: I bought prebuilt because, for a brief time, a store near me still had pre-RAMpocalypse prebuilts for their original price. They had already increased the build-to-order and individual part price to account for higher RAM cost, so for that brief time I was able to get a reasonably-priced, decently-spec’d prebuilt gaming PC for cheaper than building my own. It had Windows preinstalled, and having them remove it for me would’ve saved me like $10 on the license, but made the machine into a build-to-order, which would’ve ballooned the RAM price by like $300. Plus, holding Windows’ head under the water until the bubbles stopped was unexpectedly awesome.)
It is indeed quite satisfying to get a new machine and never let the pre-installed Windows boot even once.
I’m usually frantically pressing del, f2, and f10 when I turn it on to make sure I can set the boot priority to the usb stick so the virgin machine is never tainted.