The reason I am a windows user is to play games. I have never used Linux and am getting a bit fed up and bored with all of Windows' problems. All of my productivity I do on OS X(which is somehow a sin and I shall forever burn in fell for doing so). I only use my windows machine for gaming and with more and more games available for Linux and Gabe Newell hinting at Linux being the way forward for steam, is it time to think about ditching Windows and move to a version of Linux?
I don't want to jump into anything too advanced as although I can do Windows and OS X like a seasoned pro, Linux is something completely new to me.
What games do you play and what's your hardware, if you switch to Linux don't expect all your games to run. Many games are now available in steam for linux, but no major AAA titles yet. You might have some luck running some windows games in WINE or Crossover but not everything (Both programs are the same one free one commercial that offer support if you need that, basically they implemented the windows DLLs on Linux as a way to run windows programs, many programs run as fast as on windows, some under certain conditions even faster but many - as in the majority - run slower and are not feature complete). Usually if a game is popular it will end up being supported in WINE one way or the other after a few months.
Hardware support is generally good, if you have NVIDIA you will have better graphics support for now with the closed source video drivers according to benchmarks, but AMD is not bad to play either, you might just have some problems with it so be ready, also the new cards in AMD had slow performance in the binary drivers recently but that should be solved soon I guess.
Do you mean if you can play the latest AAA games for Windows on linux? I don't think so, not right now. There will be some time before people launch the big games on linux too. I don't know about Steam, I like my games without DRM.
Do you mean if you can play great games on linux? Yes, either native games or through Wine. I think 90% of the games on GOG.com work with Wine (rough assumption). I haven't found any that don't, but I'm an old-school gamer who plays old-school games (I finished just now installing Broken Sword 1 Director's Cut, for example).
Open source drivers and proprietary (NVIDIA, may be different for AMD) and it was... wel... meh. Lots of screen tearing, v-sync wasn't working for many games, and stuttering.
There are certainly ways to make things work, but don't expect anything to work like it would in Windows without some tweaking and research. If you are a hardcore gamer, then Linux is not ready for you just yet.
The open source AMD drivers kick some major ass recently. Load up Manjaro or another up-to-date distro with a new kernel and Mesa build, and open source radeon drivers are generally ~80% as fast as Catalyst, with much better stability and 2D acceleration. The last few months have been especially exciting for the AMD drivers. I think AMD might actually be preparing to push the open source driver as the driver for Linux.
Ok thank you, do you have any experience with Manjaro. I hope they do, I knew they were releasing open source drivers, but I didn't know they were that advanced. Thanks.
depends on where you look at it, for me its a mixture, I like playing Simcity, which is not on Linux, but I do also play stuff like TF2 which is better on Linux than Windows, so in a form yes its ready, but if you want to play the latest and greatest such as titanfall no (Sign :( )
There are plenty of indie games and small developers on Linux. Like everybody else said, no major AAA titles thus far. I believe that 6870 performs pretty adequately on Linux, heck you might as well try gaming with the open source radeon driver because there has been a lot of improvement with open source drivers on the AMD side of things. Why not dual boot and see?