Technology

I want to qualify this comment with the fact that I am not a super gamer. Most my games are older. The newest and most demanding game I play is Cyberpunk 2077. Most my other games are multiple years older and less demanding.

I finally switched full time to a Linux desktop OS. I have used Linux more or less daily for decades, the first distro I ever installed was Slackware what feels forever ago. But until Valve put the work into running games on linux for their Steam deck I felt I was trapped needing to have Windows to play games. I have even spent the last decade forcing myself to rely more and more on cross platform available FOSS dreaming of some day making a permanent switch. Honestly it was so easy for me to switch at this point, most games pretty much just ran. My biggest problem took a bit to grok and it was just because some games do not like running in proton from an NTFS partition. I have NVME and SATA SSDs separate from my boot drive that I used to install games on and it was trivial to reformat the NVME drive to a more Linux friendly filesystem and I have not had an issue since. Eventually I'll do the SATA drive but I'm lazy and those games are working fine so far. You will absolutely have problems with some games, especially some that have overbearing anti-cheat systems, but man this has been so easy I couldn't really have imagined. The only non-gaming problem was a document scanner we own that is not supported by SANE. I could not find a solution to run it on Linux so I just spun up a Tiny 11 copy of Windows in a VM and passed it through. We only use it a couple times a year so this is an acceptable compromise to me. The VM doesn't have Internet access, it just sees a local drive as a network share. All it can do is scan something and save it to the shared drive so I can access it in Linux.

I chose Linux Mint because I am well versed with Debian and Ubuntu. But I suggest anyone new to Linux give Bazzite a shot. It's designed to be a lot harder for you to break. It's also more optimized for gaming if that's your focus. For me gaming is a requirement but I've never felt the need for top tier performance.

The path from 3.1 to 11 has been such a sour one and the last thing I am willing to put up with is being the product in the eyes of my desktop OS. My computer is mine and it will do what I want it to do or it will do nothing at all.