Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
I’m pretty much the same as you. A lifelong Windows user who got fed up with the direction windows is going. I just recently switched to Linux for my new gaming PC and I haven’t had any major issues. The only thing I still haven’t figured out how to do yet is modding.
As for which distro to use, I would recommend something that comes with the graphics drivers already installed to reduce any initial setup difficulty.
I use Bazzite on my machine. It’s a Linux gaming distro which comes with all the stuff you’ll need to get right into gaming. It’s an immutable distro so it’s pretty difficult to really mess it up but it also makes things a bit more difficult to install anything that isn’t a flatpak.
Re: modding
Nothing is consistent with modding. The idea of a game having “modding support” is a relatively recent concept. For most of gaming history, “modding” meant hacking the game (or sometimes hardware) to do what they want in spite of the creator’s intentions, rather than in accordance with them.
All that said, if you can get a vanilla windows binary running on Linux, getting mods working is usually the same process that it is on windows, especially if the mod is just swapping out files. The same files exist somewhere in your Linux filesystem and can be tampered with just like they can on windows.
If the mod involves running a 3rd party tool to edit a process’ memory in real time, that could be more involved since the windows version of the tool might be making some assumptions that are not necessarily valid when running in a Linux wine/proton environment. In order to get it working, you may need technical knowledge of how the mod is doing what it’s doing.