r/linux4noobs • u/ifearone • Mar 08 '26

migrating to Linux Don't switch to Linux immediately

Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between. Everyday I see people ask about switching to Linux citing various reasons. This post aims to solve all of those questions simply.

Don't switch immediately. Do your own research on what distro to choose. There are tons of them and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another person.
After you've narrowed down your choices load up VMware or something similar and test all the distros to your hearts desire. Get a feel for a whole bunch of them. I mean it.
If you're still adamant about switching at this point congratulations. Get a secondary drive and dual boot. You'll see that some games and software simply dont work on Linux. If you're a gamer I'd recommend dual booting 100%.
If you really hate windows that much and you dont mind not playing certain games or using certain software then backup all your files and give windows the boot.
Welcome to linux forever.

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u/ItzRaphZ Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

You realize that you can play 99% of the games, and you'll live a better life not playing the 1% that you can't.

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop Mar 08 '26

Familiarise yourself with Protodb, gamemode, and mangohud. The tools of the trade for Linux gaming

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u/AbbreviationsWide331 Mar 09 '26

Havent messed with those at all and been gaming happily for the last 6 months

Should I?

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u/ItzRaphZ Mar 09 '26

If you use steam, you are using Proton. Anything else is for other launchers, which if you don't use, you'll never hear about them.

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u/AbbreviationsWide331 Mar 09 '26

Yeah but it just worked, also with lutris. I never had to look up stuff on protondb

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u/HYPERNOVA3_ Mar 09 '26

It gets quite useful to troubleshoot things when a game doesn't run properly, so you can try the combinations the people who made it work use. It's also quite helpful to know if a game is expected to work fine before buying/installing.

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop Mar 09 '26

Your last point is what I use Protondb for predominantly. I see a game on sale, I search protondb see what it's rating is, check to see what the majority of the community says. if there's a lot of feed back maybe search for people who are using at least my brand of CPU and GPU(I'm AMD & AMD). If it save me headaches or money I'm in!

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop Mar 09 '26

I would gamemode helps with performance some.

Mango hud is the msi afterburner for Linux, let's you see frame rate lag, usage of all system resources. It is fully customizable. You can set up multiple configurations for different styles of game, and you can put a clock on screen as part of the information which doesn't seem important but helps you not get lost in games

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u/LaughingwaterYT Mar 09 '26

areweanticheatyet.com for multiplayer games

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop Mar 09 '26

Good resource!

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u/motorambler Mar 10 '26

We don't care about that one app keeping you tied to Windoze.

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop Mar 10 '26

I've made the jump to Darktable and PhotoGIMP for my photography work. Darktable isn't nearly why Lightroom is. However!! It's made me a better photographer, I have to take better exposed RAWs, I can't pull as much out of the lights and shadows...

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u/chick0ox May 05 '26

Could you recommend something I could do photo collage with?

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u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop May 05 '26

I'm glad you asked this!! I was helping someone the other day with this exact problem, Photofilmsrip. It's easy and you can add music. It can make things Ken Burns-ish if you want

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u/AbbreviationsWide331 Mar 09 '26

I can't play league of legends anymore. Has been good for my health though

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u/The_j0kker Mar 09 '26

Isnt dota2 similar to that game? Or you dont like it

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u/AbbreviationsWide331 Mar 09 '26

Nah I loved playing it with my friends, but if you play it long enough you get into this hustle mindset and it's just not about fun anymore. And it's a fucking waste of time to figure out all the kinks in your playstyle and learning strategies and all that stuff.

I don't want to go pro, I just want to casually have some fun with some friends. And I don't think those are the right games for that (anymore).

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u/The_j0kker Mar 09 '26

Yeah i feel you

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u/Tankyenough Mar 10 '26

I played LoL from 2013 to 2018 and from 2021 to 2023. There is a lot of nostalgia involved, and the characters themselves are important for me. It’s a bit like if one changed Pokémon to Digimon, if you get what I mean?

Also, as LoL was originally created as an improved commercial version of the Dota AllStars WC3 mod, and Dota 2 was released much later, retaining a lot of the original clumsiness and limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine on purpose, Dota 2 just feels incredibly sluggish and unappealing to me, even after 100h in… :/

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u/Clogboy82 Mar 10 '26

LoL

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u/Fresh-Toilet-Soup Mar 08 '26

Just have a second windows drive so you can play those few games. Use Linux other times. I do this, in time you will find that you won't touch the windows drive but once or twice a year.

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u/Ajaw86 Mar 09 '26

This where im at, each rebuild or new build sees the windows drive shrinking. I dunno if ill ever get rid of ot completely, but its there if I need it

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u/ifearone Mar 08 '26

I personally will be touching windows often because im a big Battlefield 6 guy. Dual boot is the way to go for people like me who play games that simply dont work for whatever reason on linux

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u/reg00late Mar 09 '26

I did that for a long time, until the constant rebooting got on my nerves.

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u/UnNamedBlade Mar 09 '26

That's an easy fix. two pcs. That way, you dont have to reboot to swap between them

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u/wolfighter Mar 09 '26

Two gaming PCs? In this economy? I don't make enough to buy that much RAM. /s sorta...

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26

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u/Dazzling-Airline-958 Mar 12 '26

So all the employees at M$ are to suffer for the actions of one person? That's a rather juvenile attitude. Also a boycott of M$ products isn't going to bother Bill Gayes in the slightest.

If you wanna boycott Micro$oft, it's definitely your right. But do it because their software is crap. And their business practices are crap. But if your only reason is the stick it to Bill Gates, I'll ask you to consider the other thousands of employees that aren't Bill Gates. They are the ones who will get the short end of a boycott, not the largest share holders.

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u/LynnIsReal Mar 09 '26

CS2 runs terribly. Just tried it today on Fedora with the nvidia drivers installed. Unfortunate

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u/True_tomato_soup Apr 08 '26

You have a driver issue. CS2 run flawlessly.

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u/LynnIsReal Apr 08 '26

How could i fix it? Im not sure what else i could try or what I should look for. I installed the newest driver and got it working with secure boot.

I installed the most up to date nvidia driver. I also have the most recent VBIOS installed on my GPU.

I used Wayland.

I am VERY particular with my setup. I notice many small variances in frame pacing.

I was 27k last premier season and peaked at 2200 last year as well (I don't play faceit too much though).

Here are my specs: CPU: 7800x3D GPU: RTX 3080 (ROG STRIX RTX 3080 10GB OC - got it on Newegg in Dec 2020) Motherboard: ROG STRIX B650E-F

Keyboard: Wooting 60hev2 Mouse: Hitscan Hyperlight (2000hz, but also tested the game in 1000hz, same results).

I also use a Scarlett 2i2 for my mic and headphones and have those drivers installed on windows.

Game settings: 1280x960 stretched 350fps cap. G sync + v sync, reflex not enabled (no low-latency mode either). I tested this with capframex too and i got the best results with that setup.

Windows 11 settings: Exclusive fullscreen (unchecked fullscreen optimizations in the cs2.exe properties HAGS off Resizable BAR off Game mode on (game bar disabled) Nvidia overlay disabled Steam overlay disabled

Observations:

1: the game feels very floaty compared to windows 11. The consistent input lag is immediately apparent. I enabled VRR/adaptive sync and it didn't change.

2: observed framerate was significantly lower. It barely hit above 300fps in Valve DM and often dipped to the 170s. It lived in the 200s.

After i felt this, i didn't even bother benchmarking the frame times. I legitimately will not play like this.

In W11, the game is nearly always capped to 350fps. The 1% lows usually sit in the low 200s. DM is similar. Frame times consistently sit close to 3ms.

No significant spikes that make the game stutter like stock Windows 11 settings; it very rarely goes above 5ms for any immediate moment (except for me dying, which doesn't matter).

Any ideas? I've just come to the conclusion it won't work.

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u/True_tomato_soup Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

For hardware I have a very similar setup to yours, only a difference with the video card. I have an amd 6800xt, one of my friend who also has the same processor has us has a 4080 and reports no particular problems with CS2 under cachy in 4k. Gamer nexus (they used bazzite for their test, which is just a fedora fork) reports that with Nvidia GPU, some games have a very very bad standard deviation for lows. Which kills the performance for Nvidia users. ( With my amd, it's the opposite, I have a much smaller standard deviation for lows under linux.)

At 300 fps (average fps don't matter anymore, if you have a 1ms monitor, worst case scenario, you will get an update a 3-2 ms (I doubt even pro player can notice that, personally above 100fps I don't see a difference, (so 10 ms in the worst case scenario)) what matters is lows and stability. Any stutter you see is FPS dropping significantly lower for a while and increasing your time reaction windows consequently.

As I stated before the problem come certainly from the Nvidia drivers which notoriously suck balls and give a huge standard deviation for lows on some applications.

Nvidia has promised to release better drivers this year, but in the meantime,

A few things ideas you can try:

Try x11 or check if CS2 perform better under x11 or wayland.

Wine 11 if ran through proton. (But I think there is a native linux version now? not sure) It's just out, maybe it will help.

CachyOs wizardery, my nvidia friend reported that NVIDIA worked better under cacyhy for him than under other wayland distros. (Not sure if true, I know they have their own version of proton, cachyproton, optimised for gaming, maybe there is more wizardery, but you need to ask the cachy community, I don't use arch, or cachy and the only complicated distro I would be willing to install is LFS )

Use 1 monitor , disable steam overlay in processes (that one really killed my perfo on some games), don't run other software in background like discord, or restrict discord via taskset so 2 cpu cores or so, ingame high res, mid to low settings only csmaa2 antializing.

Disable Vsync completely.

Lower your framerate caps at 300 or 320.

I saw a while back that some people reported that killing virtual cores in bios actually increased performance drastically for CS2 I have never tried as I don't play competitive games. Here is the video , they use an intel proco, but sure if applicable to our amds but hey you asked for ideas.

Not sure any of this helped, but I tried my best. :)

Edit: 535+ and newer Nvidia drivers are apparently much better.

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u/LynnIsReal Apr 10 '26

Well, avg fps technically matters in the sense that it is my frametime baseline. And the lower the frametime AND lower variance makes the game look significantly smoother. Pro players can and do notice it. 3ms frame times with variance to 5ms tops on a 360hz monitor is obviously different than 10ms with variance. Im not focusing on ms as in a button is pressed and something happens that many ms later. 360hz is visible from 240hz and definitely from 144hz. My setup is 1280x960 explicitly because i get the lowest avg frame times and the lowest 1% highest frame times.

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u/ItsJoeMomma Mar 09 '26

And then also discover that there are a ton of Linux games out there.

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u/Pitchoh Mar 09 '26

Right now my main concern is not being able to install the sinden software on my bazzite installation. That's the main thing that kept me from removing windows entirely. I need to dig deeper though but I did not see many results while searching.

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u/LemonadeTower Mar 10 '26

literally this, I've been so much more social after full sending to ubuntu and not being able to play league of legends

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u/theguywithacomputer Mar 11 '26

It’s niche things that are still trouble like virtual reality and stuff that has anti cheat. If you’re a retro gamer emulators are 100% perfect. Otherwise, I genuinely want to see what the steam frame and steam machine is going to do for it. I bet even if they are mild failures they are going to completely change the market to a degree by allowing people to switch to valves open ecosystem. Things will definitely be way better a year from now. Steam Link already sort of works with vr with some beta upgrades to steam vr. It’s just not the best yet by any means.

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u/CosterLOL Mar 11 '26

VR?

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u/-turtl- Mar 09 '26

Most games run on Linux easily via Wine or Proton

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u/unevoljitelj Mar 09 '26

What one can do when basicaly all the games one plays cant be played on linux 😆

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u/ItzRaphZ Mar 09 '26

Unless you need Linux, just stick to windows.

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u/No_Elderberry862 Mar 09 '26

Complain to the game's devs/publisher.

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u/ItsJoeMomma Mar 09 '26

Stick with Windows, get a second computer to keep Windows on, or dual boot.

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u/semidegenerate Mar 10 '26

Dual-boot if you still want to use Linux for certain things. That's what I do. I like the flexibility having both at my fingertips.

Windows also has better hardware monitoring tools, and I'm into overclocking and tuning. I want to be able to pull up HWiNFO64 and check temps, voltages, and every other sensor after I make changes.

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u/ifearone Mar 08 '26

Can't play battlefield 6, can't play any riot game, will aion 2 run well when it's out? Who knows

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u/minneyar Mar 08 '26

you'll live a better life not playing the 1% that you can't

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26

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u/ZunoJ Mar 09 '26

Then maybe try to find help? This sounds terrible

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26

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u/ZunoJ Mar 09 '26

Bro, you got some serious problems. Worst of which is that have the image of an Andrew Tate version of yourself.
I work as a software developer since 15 years and started coding about 10 years earlier, so all in all about 25 yoe. I get the drive to become as good and knowledgeable as possible and as fast as possible. This shit is fun and there is a lot of competition. But what you describe is a fast track to burn out for the topic. You have a goal and what you do is actively sabotaging it. There is just too much to learn to fast track it

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u/riverty21 Mar 09 '26

Wow people use Linux.

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u/ifearone Mar 09 '26

I was literally only playing 2 games...battlefield 6 which does not work and final fantasy 14 which works. Half my games got cut lol. BF6 and mmos are like my drugs lol

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26

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u/ifearone Mar 09 '26

Bro I feel this deeply. What language are you learning?

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26

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u/ifearone Mar 09 '26

Any great free resources for learning python that you wanna share with me?

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u/Venylynn Mar 08 '26

Riot is one of my most hated companies for a reason. EA is up there too.

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u/ItzRaphZ Mar 08 '26

I can't speak for battlefield, as I don't play since bf4, but I can tell you my life is way better ever since I stopped playing Valorant.

My comment is mostly joking with the fact that most games that have a kernel access AC also just tend to be more addictive than good games.

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u/jr735 Mar 08 '26

Note that everything Microsoft and Apple and Adobe do to stifle your software freedom was pioneered by game publishers.