Experienced a weird reversal of the Linux gaming conundrum. I was running an indie game called “Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth” on my Windows gaming desktop with a GTX 970. And it was playable, but pretty choppy. I loaded it on my ancient Sandy Bridge laptop with Intel graphics running Fedora and it ran smooth as butter at 60fps. WTH?
Now this is not some game with killer AAA graphics. It looks 2D (but requires 3D support), so I’m not sure why the 970 is having issues with it. But it sure was a surprise to see Linux+Intel iGPU outperform Windows+Nvidia.
I used to use Windows 7 as my daily driver and kept trying to get into Linux not liking where Windows was headed and knowing Windows 7 time will be up one day. I also knew I wouldn’t get comfortable with Linux unless I used it as my daily driver. I made myself a deal: I would go back to Windows 7 if I ran out of games that I wanted to play on Linux. Between buying more games I wanted that came to Linux and my existing backlog being ported over here I am over 2 years later still running Linux as my daily driver. Sure there are games I wish would make it over such as Hellblade, Virginia, Stories Untold, Shadow Warrior 2, etc but there are still games to play that are on Linux. That’s what worked for me.
Personally I’ve come to a compromise. I have a gaming capable laptop that I use Linux as my primary OS, but that I can dual boot to Windows. My gaming desktop, OTOH, runs Windows at the moment. I’m working on virtualizing Windows and running VMWare’s ESXi as the primary OS/hypervisor. However, it only has 16gb of RAM, which isn’t really enough to run several VMs. And DDR4 costs more than gold…