My plan is to buy an NVMe today, install linux as a dual boot, but use linux as a daily driver, to see if it meets my needs before committing to it.

My main needs are gaming, local AI (stable diffusion and oobabooga), and browser stuff.

I have experience with Mint (recently) and Ubuntu (long ago). Any problems with my plan? Will my OS choice meet my needs?

Thanks!

  • Crabhands@lemmy.mlOP
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    2 years ago

    Thank you to everyone’s support. I did not expect as much support as you all provided. I’m happy to announce a huge success! Ubuntu is installed, I’ve overcome several hurdles, and have a few more to go. I’ll try to post in next week to summarize my progress and challenges.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    If you use Steam for gaming, then probably most games will work either directly or through a specific Proton version (you can set this in Steam). Games that won’t run are most 3rd-party launcher games and games that intentionally use ring 0 spyware.

  • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
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    2 years ago

    Something to note for the future, never install windows after Linux, even they are on different drives. Windows boot manager is very invasive, it likely will overwrite your Linux boot manager.

  • anthr76@lemmy.kutara.io
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    2 years ago

    In my opinion in modern computing I’d rather be on a “faster” releasing distro such as Fedora, Arch Linux. Modern hardware depends constant patches to the kernel to keep up with new sleep management changes and improvements to the GPU stack etc.

  • Presi300@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    The biggest problem you’ll encounter with mint in particular is that multiple monitor support can be… hit or miss, other than that, gaming on Linux has been very good for a while now and it’s only getting better. Unless you are really into valorant or destiny 2, pretty much all of your games on steam, epic games and all other stores should just work

    • GNUgit@lemmy.perthchat.org
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      2 years ago

      Are you using Bookworm? I had trouble getting sddm on it to use system resolution. Normally I would ignore that but I only installed it on a VM so I could record an intro for my stream of Debian booting into the gaming.

      I haven’t updated my machine yet because I have no experience with wayland or pipewire and Nvidia with gaming. I was also interested if it’s pretty decent with games and nvidia yet.

      • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        I am. SDDM should work properly out of the box, maybe it’s a wierd issue with virtualization?

        Wayland is pretty much plug and play if you install xwayland (with the exception of OBS studio which used to be wierd about Wayland surfaces, I think that’s fixed now). Pipe wire has been working fine for me.

        I use AMD though, so ymmv with Nvidia.

        • GNUgit@lemmy.perthchat.org
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          2 years ago

          Yes, I thought it might be a weird sddm bug so I installed gdm and configured that too with the same result. Next option is to try a different distribution.

  • dank_imagemacro@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Gaming on Linux is absolutely possible, but you have to have the right mindset for it. Put it in its own category. There are games that work on XBOX, there are games that work on PS4, there are Games that work on Windows, there are games that work on Linux. There is significant overlap between all of these, with many games working on all the platforms. Some games work better on some platforms than they do on others.

    If you go at this with the mindset that you are going to play all your favorite Windows games on Linux, you will be as disappointied as if you got a PS5 to play Zelda and Animal Crossing. But if you instead go into it with the mindset “this is a gaming platform with thousands of games I can play on it, I’ll play the games that work on this platform” you will find that gaming on Linux is a perfectly adequate gaming platform.

  • Clairvoidance@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    My main needs are gaming

    Most gaming needs, you’ll have to check protondb to see if you’d be comfortable not being able to play certain games. (games not on steam, you can look to Lutris for community made installers)
    While Gold and Silver means games require slight setup (setup is usually explained by user-reports), Platinum means you’re good out of the box, Borked means no chance, you especially want to watch out if your game has an Anti-Cheat (and read the latest user-reports on the game if you’re truly desperate to see if things changed in the last week, like sometimes something like Gundam Evolution quietly enables the linux option in EasyAntiCheat)
    If you have a steamaccount, you can log in to get the list of games that you already own on that account to easily see their ratings

    local AI

    Guides are straightforward, you just have to worry about whether you have nvidia or amd

    browser stuff

    no issues

  • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Gaming is the only area where things might get tricky at all, every other area will pretty much just be a matter of getting used to different UIs.

    Whether or not you find it sufficient for your gaming needs depends mostly on what types of games you play. If you’re always playing just the newest AAA titles, you might have some trouble, but there are a whole shitload of great titles that work perfectly on linux, and more are being added/ported every day.

    As far as distro goes, I think Mint is a good choice for what you describe, you could also try one of the gaming specific distros, but my understanding is that those are generally overkill unless you’re making a gaming box

  • Ben@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    This is the way.

    Unfortunately, if you don’t already know the answers it’s more a question of experience before you’ll understand them.

    When I started with Ubuntu I couldn’t do dualboot, so it was hard. It got better with each update, but my beloved Gnome2 desktop was threatened and Ubuntu went on to Unity - KDE sucked, so I jumped over to Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop.

    Whilst it was great, I had terrible issues getting software - PPA’s are often suited to Ubuntu and not Mint… so in the end I tried installing Arch, failed twice, then got a Manjaro (Cinnamon) ISO and tried that for a few days, got some snapshots (rsync to my HDD) and then figured it’s not a big deal to install KDE, as it’s easy enough to go back.

    KDE was so much better by then (about 5 years back) that I’m stuck with Manjaro KDE - having access to the AUR to install stuff is awesome, and flatpaks work at the flick of a settings switch too.

    Dual-booting gives you the luxury of (if you wanna play Genshin Impact) having the option to boot into your game OS but also the ability to install games on your Linux OS and decide which one runs best on your hardware.

    Everyone has such varied ‘needs’ that your question is impossible to answer - you must just suck it and see.

  • NukeTheFridge@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    I recommend to Install windows on its own drive. I had Windows one time do something to the EFI partition and I wasn’t able to boot linux after. I have heard of people having a separate EFI partitions for linux and windows to avoid this problem.

    • Crabhands@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 years ago

      Sorry what i meant was the NVMe will be used only for Linux. My existing HD with Windows will be untouched. No partitions needed.

      • BigNerdAlert@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 years ago

        When you install a dual boot system, Linux installs a grub loader. This asks you what you want to boot - windows or Linux.

        Microsoft doesn’t place nicely with grub and I’ve found many occasions when a windows update mysteriously disabled it, and you can only then boot into windows.

        If you only want to test the interface and see if you get in with it, you could create a Linux live usb. It’ll be the same but the os speed will take a hit booting from usb, so just be aware.

        Been a while since I had the problem, but then been a while since I even wanted to boot windows anyway…

        https://itsfoss.com/no-grub-windows-linux/

  • bumbly@readit.buzz
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    2 years ago

    Nothing wrong with it. Here’s a website to help you choose the distro: https://distrochooser.de/

    Personally, for gaming, I’d recomment Mint or Ubuntu. Probably your hardware will be supported. There’s also Pop!OS, which seems to be completely gaming related as well as SteamOS, but I’ve never used them.

    You can run a hardware probe from the live USB to see how well the distro handles your hardware too
    https://linux-hardware.org/

    • mihnt@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      It just recommended elementary OS to me and that’s the next one I was going to try, lol.

      I’ve got Nobara installed and it has shit the bed for whatever reason. Was way too unstable for me as well. Also, support is lacking there. A lot of hostile attitudes in response to any questions I had.

  • tikitaki@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    you should be fine. gaming is dead simple with steam + proton

    if you wanna torrent games, it’ll be a bit more involved but still doable

    the AI stuff should work just fine, you just wanna make sure you go for a distro with good hardware support

  • Uluganda@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    For the last two, it will more than enough. Gaming tho, it depends. If you wants emulator, Linux is THE emulator OS. For Windows game tho, if you are planning to play older game, Linux is better than Windows. Period. For newer games, like ‘just-release-game’, it is not ideal. Free to play multiplayer games, especially outside of Steam/Valve, forget it.

    • pizzaboi@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      To piggy-back off this, take stock of your current favorite games and do some searching to find out how those have worked out for others. ProtonDB is a great resource for games on Steam. Outside Steam it can often be done, but can be a headache.

      I will typically try a game on Linux first, but keep Windows around and will just boot into that if I cant get up and running pretty quick. Don’t have time to deal with the tinkering all day haha

  • throwsbooks@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Mint user here, did the switch years ago and never came back. Steam with Proton makes gaming easy, and for games not on Steam, you can look at Lutris (played WoW like that with no problems).

    My only experience with AI is tensorflow, but interfacing with Nvidia cards is easier on Linux than Windows, since I ended up needing to use WSL anyway.

    The only browser stuff that might get annoying is Pearson exams, if you ever need to do any. They really don’t like Linux users.