Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I’m pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I’m not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I’m generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don’t like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I’m fairly sure they all work decently since I’ve tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
You should just test run it from a bootable usb.
Install steam. Mount your NTFS drive which contains your windows games. If you have sims on steam use steam. If not take a look at lutris before doing any of the above.
Your experiment ends when you’ve tested all games you want to play.
Now: You cannot use NTFS (windows) drive for games, although you did it in the experiment long extended usage is discouraged.
So you will need to find a way to transfer your games to a different formatted drive. (ext4, btrfs for example)
If you don’t need that advice you will eventually run into frustrating issues.
I actually don’t like this advice for this particular use case. The live session is gonna be sluggish because of the USB bottleneck which will make it look like the games run a lot worse than they would with a proper install.
Especially since this person also is already Linux proficient, I would say just jump into a dual boot setup or wipe the windows partition momentarily. Sure, it’s gonna take a little longer and it’s a bit tedious to have to reinstall windows if you change your mind but I’d prefer a bit tedium over a poor benchmark
I specifically said this advice because dual booting windows with Linux is a terrible idea.
Although you are right, if you USB read/write is slow it will be a sluggish experience.
Long term, I agree. To test for 3 hours, and then decide which partition to nuke and which to keep? For this particular use case I’d prefer it