Almost everything related to gaming worked but I did have problems.
Under X11 + Gnome, fractional scaling was pretty badly broken for some things, especially the Steam app. X11 + KDE fixed that issue.
Under X11 + KDE with hybrid graphics mode (automatically use APU for light tasks, dedicated GPU for games), the laptop's brightness controls were totally inoperable. I tried to research this but could not find a working solution. If brightness was problematic enough, I could pick one of the fixed graphic modes and log out and back in - mostly I left it near or at 100% and didn't touch it.
One game (Anno 1800) would not connect to multiplayer, but works completely under Windows.
Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.
Other games like ARK, Conan, Valheim, StarCraft 2 (using non-Steam Proton), Deep Rock Galactic all ran identically (from what I can tell) to Windows.
Also about 50% of the time, booting would hang for Linux Mint and I'd have to hard-reboot, probably pick an older kernel to boot into, and then I could reboot and go back to the latest kernel (a minor release under Linux 5.15). Fortunately rebooting is mostly infrequent.
Overall it wasn't quite in a state I was comfortable with, so I'm back to Windows 10, which is much better than Windows 11 (or much less bad?).
Do you think this is because it's new? If I could only play games with a year or two delay that would be fine. Cheaper too.
It's very rare for me to even buy a new game (unless it's a $20 early access game) but my spouse was very excited for it and I wanted to play alongside. (It's not multiplayer but we can still talk about the parts we've played.)
I just love Mint, but I think any Debian based distro should work just fine for playing.
I have settled on Linux Mint. It just works, and looks good.
From one "filthy casual" to another...
I used Ubuntu for a while, but fell in love with Mint. I really like how the interface looks, and how things are organized very intuitively. It feels so unfair to use it for free thay I donated 20 bucks, just to show appreciation.
Honestly, easily beats Windows or Mac OS for me.
Began with Red Hat 5. Moved on to Slackware for my server at the time, and Debian for workstations (I also had various MacOS machines as well). Dabbled with Arch for a few years and Manjaro. Recently, I sold all of my Apple equipment and standardized on...Linux Mint.
Mint + Cinnamon DE is simply amazing and even with lower specs on the current laptop I'm running (Thinkpad T460S vs. Apple MBP 2019 i9), the difference is stark. Not to mention rock-solid stable.
No going back for me.
I'm assuming this statement is referring to the large amount of software that is Windows only on Steam and runs in a compatibility layer on Linux, rather than Steam itself.
This really isn't that big a deal vs "native" for Steam on Linux and it's getting even less so with time - the Steam Deck mobile console and other x86 handhelds use the exact same Proton tech to run Windows games under Linux on a pretty small ~40Wh battery.
Power consumption of the Proton compatibility layer isn't really any better or worse than running native in my experience - its a wash.
Steam uses a compatibility layer called Proton to run Windows games under Linux. Running the games that way is not significantly worse. It can get the same or even better performance (but sure, sometimes worse) and will affect battery life pretty much exactly as if running the game via Windows on the Laptop.
Proton is based on Wine, and Wine is not an emulator. Translating the calls does not make them heavier.
What do you mean by this?
Otherwise, Steam doesn't really emulate anything, it just reimplements Windows API calls, so games run roughly as efficiently as they do on Windows.
a) Not all Steam games are on Proton [https://www.protondb.com/]
b) Not all Steam games that are on Proton run efficiently without tweaks e.g. one that I found unplayable due to overheats (on MacOS) was Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [https://www.protondb.com/app/289070]
c) Not all Steam games where you had the pre-Proton version installed, download the right version update. See Steam's forums, people saying disable Steamplay; and have to do that globally, not per-game.
d) In addition, I found the Steam updater daemon (interacting with MacOS Mojave Quarantine) also burned power like no tomorrow.
Void would be a better choice if liking simplicity. Or to keep it simple, maybe Pop!_OS. Or Debian. Or Arch. Pretty much everything not Alpine ;)
I certainly would never use Alpine for gaming, any more than I’d use OpenBSD. I don’t use it for multimedia, either.
My normal setup is i3 on Alpine. I like to think I have a good understanding of how an Alpine system is built up via its install scripts and maintained by its packaging system.
There’s not a lot of cruft lying around that I don’t need and didn’t request.
That’s what I intended by using the word “simplicity”.
Why would you think that Debian and Void are simpler systems than Alpine? They are much larger.
But there are other options like Xfce, and there are quite a few variants, like Cinnamon, MATE, i3, etc. [0]
I still think Windows 10 looks and feels relatively polished (if you don't dig too deep and see just how many iterations they've gone through and still haven't gone back to fix.) I think Windows 11 feels a bit goofy - like they are trying for polish now, but it's in that modern overly spaced out and flat look that I can't seem to appreciate.
I found Linux Mint Cinnamon to be quite nice, and KDE is really nice in my opinion. More consistent than Windows in some ways.
Ditto, I am not an average user, but Windows was only really good on Windows 7, and I never really liked Mac OS (use it at work as a MCB is the laptop they issued for me)
Windows 11 and Windows 10 with the last updates as well are just awful in terms of UI; the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.
Mac is much nicer, nicer fonts, colors, overall look although personally I can't stand the UX too much (specially in terms of window management) apps are usually great tho.
I'd very much rather use something like Kubuntu or Pop_OS, Cinnamon works fine as well, honestly nowadays they just work and are usually better off than Windows by default.
The whole GTK2/3, now 4? and KDE, Plasma, Kirigami, what have you nowadays, isn't an inconsistent mess? I was using Linux (fedora 37) recently and it was not a consistent experience, either.
If anything, W11 is more consistent across all applications even if the settings/control panel have a weird Jekyll/Hyde personality to it at times.
Have you used gnome shell in the last five years?
My desktop experience on Linux is so clean. Everything is a "windows" key press away. I hit they then enter the first characters of the program name. It's all composited and GPU accelerated too, and interaction is instantaneous.
Almost anything that needs additional polish is on the web and looks the same on every computer...
For me, what seems janky is stuff with the systems on MacOS (planned hardware obsolescence = jank, batteries that die after a predetermined number of years, expanding until they break the motherboard = jank) or the user treatment and configuration of Windows (the article in question gives a lovely example of windows jank). In short, being treated like a consumer = jank. I can't understand how anyone puts up with it, much less says "polished" when referring to it. But I'll admit I'm weird!
Visual Studio has had free express editions, before community was introduced, since 2010.
Even those express editions were more feature rich than GNOME tooling.
Trying to force a UNIX shaped build environment and development setup into a Windows shaped hole on the other hand can be a pain.
What kept me from it was not being able to reliably play games, but I can confirm that is no longer a problem.
I can't properly describe how happy this makes me.