Title really says it all. In a world full of different opinions and many misconcpetions, its hard to know if im getting good advice. Linux is something I really want to get into and learn my way around, but I am a huge gamer. Is it TRULY as bad as some say?
It's not impossible, you're just really limited with games.
How does it run though?
Gaming on Linux is still in its infancy no matter what any linux elitests say. Its doable but the support for nvidia hardware especially is not there yet and well everything is not optimised for gaming yet. There are some games that run better on Linux but most do not.
To be fair, Its not as bad as people say. Its very much doable but the game library is limited.
Sorry if this seems ENTIRELY idiotic as a question, but is the whole "gaming on linux" thing something that could be solved by dual booting? I only know of the term in its most basic form, I dont even know how it works. But using common sense, would I be able to run games say through my windows portion but do everything else through Linux?
sort of. so you have windows portion and all your windows games there. and then you have linux portion and any games for linux there. have linux default boot OS, then when you wanna play a game in windows you reboot the system and at startup select windows to boot and then play your game. restart to get back into linux. i myself have wanted to game seriously on linux but the support from titles and hardware really isnt there yet. getting better but not fully there. however many engines are adopting linux now. cry has support for it. unity does too. unreal i believe has it or is planning to have it. so the support is slowly coming along now. which is great. your other option in this is that you could use steam in home streaming, it works pretty well but is by no means perfect. and not all games are supported. but this also requires you have say a linux machine and a windows machine. windows does the rendering and what not and linux just shows the output and sends back the input. can also be done with windows to windows. all in all, not worth it at this point. maybe another couple years when we start getting more games based on newer versions of popular game engines.
Ahhh. Thank you so much for the reply. So as im understanding it, the only way to run games in a dual boot type environment is to restart and switch OS when I want to game, correct? Theres no way to have Linux running full time, and Windows running in the background somehow for gaming? Essentially, running my games like so Linux-->Windows-->Game ?
DX10 and above are still not compatible with linux - only DX9 games will work and even then its going to be hit and miss.
yes and no, not like that, but what some people do is to run windows inside a virtual machine inside linux, this is not like dualbooting and requires some special hardware and software, it basically makes a fully functional windows machine running ontop/inside the linux installation
however this really can't be considered gaming in linux
You can run virtual machines or windows emulators in linux but your just adding extra levels of compexity and well your better off just rebooting to the windows partition. A choice of maybe 2 minutes rebooting or spending a few days trying to get a windows game run in linux maybe. For each individual game. Or a virtual machine which has poor support for 3D accelerated environments.
Interesting, makes sense. So perhaps would I be able to throw Linux, Windows, and select games on an SSD, the rest on an HDD, and save the time between reboots because of constant rebooting?
Are you aware of how WoW runs with Linux at all?
You can run virtual machines or windows emulators in linux but your just adding extra levels of compexity and well your better off just rebooting to the windows partition.
This is false. A lot of times, running windows in a VM on linux can be faster than installing it. You need to be able to passthrough, though. Which means no "K" CPUs.
At least not the older ones. The newest Intel refresh "k" parts support VT-d now.
world of warcraft is one of the few games that manages to run in wine with gold/platinum ratings down the entire version history, basicly meaning it should run without any issue.
hell, wow is on place 1 in their top10 flawless running games
https://appdb.winehq.org/ <- try searching your favourite games here, it gives a good idea what to expect when using wine for running applications.
ps. i should clarify in case you dont know: wine is a fairly good way of running windows programs on linux. i havent found much that refuses to run in wine at all (some things have poor results tho).
for games that don't run under linux you could try wine or play on linux and if your game doesn't work then, if you have a windows install disk with a legal licence then you can use virtualbox
gaming in linux is "doable". your choice is limited and you need to run 32bit libraries. i'm not too familiar with gaming in wine, but dosbox is way cool for older games and if you like older games you might be quite impressed. yes people still like wolfenstein and it has its own installer. i can recommend full virtualization, but not without caveats. i don't game in kvm but others do. in kvm you can configure the processor and drive cache to get "near metal" performance. also in kvm you can dedicate an entire GPU to gaming on a display, while having another display your linux desktop. these configurations take some familiarity and they are new. i don't steam, but that's where i think a lot of linux gaming is and there is a decent sized community. places like jupiter broadcasting is a good place to start. okay back to openarena...
Windows is but a software console. It's basically an XBox on generic hardware (well, the XBox operating system is more advanced than MS-Windows, cf. infra). The most practical solution in my opinion is sandboxing, like you do with all closed source spyware. In linux, this is pretty easy, if you buy the right hardware to do it. You can perfectly run a complete Windows-install with often better-than-Windows-on-bare-metal performance in a kvm container on a linux system, and use Windows like you would use MAME. It's very practical because you can snapshot the complete Windows install so that you can actually restore in seconds instead of some long restore process that often fails. When you use hardware passthrough virtualization, there are no downsides, there are only benefits. Even the complete waste of storage by the Windows system and inefficient NTFS filesystem, is solved, as in linux, the masses of Windows-zeros, are removed for storage in the overlay files, and the overlay file is dynamic on a high performance and safe linux filesystem. It's by far the best way to run the Windows software console, and with PCI or VGA passthrough, it uses the Windows graphics drivers, so DX11/Mantle/future DX12, will work without problems. At the same time, you could still benefit from the choice, customizability, stability, performance, security and ease-of-use of a custom linux install and open source software applications. The XBox One actually uses a similar system. It runs a hypervizor that is linux-ish by design, and that hosts two virtual machines with hardware passthrough, one a simplified MS-Windows, and one the typical XBoxOS. If Microsoft does it for it's favoured gaming platform, what's holding anyone back from doing it better on a PC?