Experience: I have a bit of experience with Linux. I started around 2008, distro-hopped weekly, decided on Debian until around 2011, when I switched to Windows as I started getting interested in gaming. Tried switching back around 2015, this time using Arch Linux for about a month, but had some bad experiences with gaming and switched back to Windows. I have had a Debian and Arch VM in Virtual Box since then for testing different applications and a more coherent environment to work with servers.
Understanding: Which brings me to now, I am really interested in using Linux for gaming, I know there is Proton from Valve and that they have been really pushing Linux gaming forward with it.
Thoughts: I have been contemplating dual booting by installing Debian to an SSD and simply using the UEFI boot menu to choose instead of having to install to the EFI of Windows.
I guess, I should just do it, as it won’t affect my Windows installation, and I could test different games and if all works well, move over. This would also allow me to try different distributions, though my heart is for Debian, I even like Debian Unstable.
Note: I am sorry for the wall of text, I am just kind of anxious I guess.
I’m a month or so into switching from Windows 10 to Ubuntu. I’ve never lasted this long in prior attempts to switch over.
Gaming has been quite good. Steam just works for 99% of the games I’ve tried, with the 1% being one or two minor bugs in games that otherwise worked fine. Lutris, on the other hand, did not work at all. 0% success rate installing or running games.
Linux does still seem brittle and/or unnecessarily complicated, though. For example, I have a super common nvidia card, and my first post-install experience was having to boot into safe mode to fix the drivers. Then Ubuntu updated the drivers and my screens didn’t come back up. I had to hard-reset to get them back. And I have yet to get NUT installed and configured correctly so I can have the PC power down gracefully when the UPS runs low, something which is trivial in Windows.
Is all the frustration worth it to have an OS that isn’t selling me ads and trying to move me to a cloud account? Probably.
Nvidia is the worst graphics card brand for linux. It’s not a surprise you’re struggling with it. If you have any money to buy a new graphics card, get yourself AMD. You can then sigh a breath of relief that you’re not supporting a quasi monopolist and finally have good linux support.