It’s time once again to bang my head against the wall of Linux gaming to see if I can make the switch from Windows. What’s the flavor of the month for gaming distros for a Windows native that’s not a moron but also wants something that just works once its set up?
Bonus points if you can point me at resources for how to put Linux on my Windows box as a dual boot without breaking my Windows installation.
EDIT - Tried Mint and Nobara and neither could figure out how to dual boot with Windows on a machine with two physical drives. I’m sure if I had a CS degree I could figure it out in short order but a little googling and messing around trying different things didn’t work so I think I’m done. Maybe next time, Linux.
https://nobaraproject.org/ Nobara is EXCELLENT. It took me weeks to tweak my last distro to get to the point that Nobara is out of the box, and GloriousEggroll sets it all up and keeps it updated for everyone.
As for dual booting, you should be able to follow any online guide (and the Nobara installer might even have an option for it). The only caveat is Nobara does NOT support secure boot, so you may have to disable that in your bios (you can google the benefits of secure boot, I find that for a stationary desktop in the hands of any reasonable user, it’s not necessary. Only reason I ever turn it on is to play Valorant on Windows 11 🙃)
So after a lot of dinking around on two different machines and trying about 6 or 7 different distros, I’ve settled on Nobara and I’m really into it. It does everything I need right out of the box, it looks good, and it just works. I haven’t gamed a ton on it yet, but so far the light-weight games I’ve tried have worked perfectly.
For day to day stuff… linux is there. There’s no reason to use Windows for day to day computing stuff and, if gaming works out, I don’t see why I’d ever need to go back to the Windows boot. I’m impressed.
Anyways, thanks for the recommendation. I have a RL buddy who also recommended this distro. He said it’s a good balance between the slow updates from Ubuntu-based distros and the rapid updates from Arch-based distro. Too slow and your drivers get out of date. Too fast and you get a buggy mess. Makes sense to me.
Just use Manjaro KDE. It has “Install alongside” option during installation if you don’t wanna remove Windows. Also Newbie support and gaming performance is excellent.
