I built my gaming PC shortly after my son was born. So just over two years ago. I was sick of the constraints being placed on me by modern games consoles, including the lack of ownership of games, online subscriptions and limited backwards compatibility. I sold my Xbox Series X and using a combination of used and new parts put together a fairly capable rig for not a lot of money.
At first I ran Windows 10, and largely had no issues. All the games I wanted to play (including Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come Deliverance!) played at max settings at over 60FPS, which was plenty good enough for me. Around this time Microsoft/Microslop announced they were discontinuing Windows 10, so I thought it would be best if I upgraded to Windows 11. I bought an external TPM2.0 card to avoid having to do workarounds and performed the upgrade.
At first, aside from the awful UI differences it was business as usual. Until I started trying to play games. Every game I played had taken a serious hit to its frame rate. I tried to update my drivers and started running into more issues. Out of my 32GB RAM Windows was using about 10GB at idle. Updates were constant and annoying, things were breaking faster than I could troubleshoot them.
Enough was enough. In absolute frustration I wiped the PC and installed Ubuntu. In hindsight I wish I’d taken a bit more time with this step because I lost some files and quite a few save games! I’ve used Linux mainly in Debian based flavours for many years now, and maintain a few Linux servers so I’m no stranger to Linux but what I’d never done was used it as my main operating system. I’d also never gamed on Linux before. I was prepared for a long battle with steep learning curves but I’ve been nothing but impressed.
The games I play are very varied. I have some games on Steam, some DRM free games from GoG, some physical PC games and I also like to emulate older consoles up to the PS3.
Steam was a walk in the park. Thanks to the Steamdeck being Linux based Steam supports Linux very well. There is absolutely no difference to what I’m used to. Thankfully I don’t play online games because I believe there are some problems with Kernel level anticheat systems working outside of Windows, but to be honest I wouldn’t want them on my system anyway.
The DRM free and physical games for Windows have caused me no issues either. I discovered a program called Lutris which makes the process nearly pain free. You point it towards your installer, and Lutris pretty much does the rest. It configures your WINE environment, and then launches the installer, which in most of my experiences just installs as it would on a Windows system. Once installed Lutris then behaves similarly to Steam, giving you a central location to launch games on.
Emulation has also been really impressive. Mainly I play PS1, PS2, PS3 and Gamecube exclusives. The emulators are just as good as the Windows versions.
What I can safely say in all of my above use cases is that performance in game has been better and more consistent than it was in Windows. I get about 3-5 FPS better than I used to on Windows 10 and I don’t get any random slow downs.
I can honestly say that there is nothing that Microsoft could do now that would tempt me back into their operating system. Ubuntu’s updates are quick and painless, very rarely even requiring a reboot. Drivers have become a non issue. My PC actually idles now, no creepy background processes hogging RAM and ramping up my CPU. No unaccounted for storage usage. Most importantly I can shut my PC down when I’m done with it, knowing with complete certainty that it’s not going to take hours doing updates, and it will turn back on without issue when I next need it.
If you’re on the fence about it, I urge you to take the plunge. It’s liberating and refreshing to have an operating system that doesn’t feel like it’s actively working against you. If it weren’t for the fact I work in a Windows based environment I would gladly never touch a piece of Microsoft software again!
Leave a Reply