I ran Linux Mint on a Lenovo Legion gaming laptop for 2 months.

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?).

> Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.

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.

I can only guess!

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.)

Mint, because I'm a filthy casual :)

I just love Mint, but I think any Debian based distro should work just fine for playing.

I started with Red Hat 5 bought in a box in 1998 from Microcenter, compiled my own kernel with the original Gentoo, ran XMonad under Arch, and need both hands to count the number of distros I've used as daily drivers.

I have settled on Linux Mint. It just works, and looks good.

From one "filthy casual" to another...

Haha, good to know that my laziness is not looked down :P

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.

I've used some form of *NIX since 1999, almost exclusively.

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.

Basically whatever runs Steam, if you want to play games.

Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile; signficantly worse to native game binary running on a tablet or laptop.

> Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile

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 runs natively. It is a linux application (to my knowledge, and it wraps "a webview", so there might be some nuance here. But native enough for this distinction).

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.

Functionality for older windows games is a little bit more absurd. I have a few games I kinda gave up on because they stopped working on windows 10, until I chucked them into proton or wine and suddenly those games were working. That was a confusing evening for a moment.

> Steam doesn't run natively

What do you mean by this?

If you're worried about battery life when gaming on the laptop as the decider between Linux and Windows, you should go with Windows.

Otherwise, Steam doesn't really emulate anything, it just reimplements Windows API calls, so games run roughly as efficiently as they do on Windows.

Not true. Some games perform better on Proton (less power consumption than native). Overall no difference in power consumption.

I was referring to "Steam games" not (obviously) "the Steam client".

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.

If you like simplicity, Alpine.

Just not if gaming is the goal. Steam would be only available as a Flatpak, says https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam. And the Flatpak version is problematic.

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’ve used Alpine, Void, and Debian for years.

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.

They are much easier to use for gaming, as you can install Steam without any hurdles. Note how the grandparent comment of your response mentions that being able to game easily now was what made the switch to Linux possible.

I’m currently building a rather powerful W10 box solely to run MS Flight Simulator 2020.