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?
So far, my experience on this depends on your graphics card. If you’re using AMD, you shouldn’t be too significantly impacted. If you’re using Nvidia, god help you. In my experience trying to get games running on Linux with an older Nvidia card, you’ll have a lot more fun bashing your head into a wall until the wall breaks.
As someone who used Linux on both team green and red cards since 2005 or so, can confirm. Nvidia is more troublesome to get working and will suddenly decide your card won’t work the way it worked for years before just because their driver has had a version change. AMD runs fine on open source drivers; Mesa mostly has out of the box support without too much hassle.