I am so tired of windows. I can't stand it anymore. I think I have a very good pc, even if it's hardware is 1 or 2 years old and I'm sick of this stupid OS that won't let me use my hardware to full capacity. Plus, all the trackings and the behaviors or Microsoft really sickens me.
So! Time to man up and learn some linux. I have some basic experience with it, as I already played with ubuntu and manjaro. I want to try opensuse, as for what i've read, seems to be a very nice ''in between'' to a user friendly platform and a good developping platform. What do you guys think?
I will surely use wine for some gaming for WoW, Planetside 2 (if even possible) and some upcoming titles. I was thinking of a virtual machine for any high demanding games but as far as I know it requires specific components to work properly with the hardware directly, as a pass-through. Sorry if I sound like an idiot, it's never to late to start learning I guess but be gentle with me haha!
Anyway, if you have any suggestions or comments on things I should know, go for it!
Well WoW runs alright in wine, not sure about Planetside 2.
When it come to distro it really isn't that important.
I personally like opensuse because it does have a fairly professional feel to it via Yast (Like the control panel) But it does use some lesser known features . It does have great support for XEN one of the major VM suites.
Fedora is nice but sticks toFOSS but it isn't that hard to add non free stuff. Fedora has some of the best support for KVM the other major VM.
Debian is very stable but if you want newer software you will have to put into testing
Ubuntu is trying to create a full ecosystem with mobile so if that interest you have at it. Sailfish does take much of its DNA from Suse so they kinda have a mobile OS as well.
There is Sabayon which is Gentoo on easy mode and is very gaming focused. Using dual package managers is tricky and a bit of a downside.
Manjaro is easy Arch Linux and has the newest software like Sabayon.I had some issues with it and EFI. Suse, Fedora and Debian can be all set to rolling so Software age isn't a huge deal.
If you want to do hard ware pass through you will need VTd for Intel and IOMMU for AMD and you will need to check if your motherboard supports it.
This is exactly why I run linux. The second i found the right distro (Ubuntu in my case) I fell in love with it lol
As far as what distro to use, I agree with everything Taco Bell said
openSUSE is quite good, I recommend it to a lot of people.
If you try Fedora add the free and non-free rpmfusion repos (its easy as a couple of clicks to add), it has pretty much everything the official repos don't, binary graphics drivers, steam, etc.
As for your games, anything that doesnt have a GNU/Linux version check the wine AppDB https://appdb.winehq.org/ (go to browse and search for the game)
Planetside 2 is listed as gold which means it should work well with just some configuration tweaks or minor limitations.
Wow is listed as a mix of platinum (words perfectly), gold, and silver. The mixed results might be hardware dependant, but its listed as generally everything runs fine with a few cinematic and high graphics options problems.
Keep in mind your distribution of choice might not be listed as one of the OSs tested, this does not mean it wont work on your distro, only that no one has submited a test result for that distro. The instructions people add are generally distro agnostic and you can apply them to any distro.
I decided not to install linux on my main rig for now. Instead, I chose my old toshiba satelIite A200 as a learning platform. I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS version and I found it too heavy on my old 1.5ghz dual core 2gb memory laptop.
I went with openSuse and lxde desktop. It suits me! As this machine won't run any heavy games obviously I spare myself the pain of trying to get nvidia drivers working well with it.
I never heard about this one! I'll be sure to check it out.
I tried gnome for opensuse, it's not that bad on memory! Almost on par with KDE, which I though was heavy for it's kind but it looks a lot better.
It seems like most consumer-oriented stuff is aimed at the Debian family, so something Debian-based will probably give you an easier time. If you're willing to put in a little more time figuring stuff out you could try something in the Arch or Fedora families. The new Fedora is pretty slick, even more "generally usable" than Ubuntu, imo.
If you're wanting to switch to Linux because you want to take full advantage of your hardware then you might want to reconsider. Linux itself is designed to be incredibly efficient, but from what I've seen that doesn't necessarily mean your computer will be more usable or powerful. It's all about the driver and application support, and that is just now starting to really be developed on Linux on a consumer level.
If you're wanting to switch to Linux because you want to take full advantage of your hardware then you might want to reconsider. Linux itself is designed to be incredibly efficient, but from what I've seen that doesn't necessarily mean your computer will be more usable or powerful. It's all about the driver and application support, and that is just now starting to really be developed on Linux on a consumer level.
This is untrue.
Linux needs no drivers, except for hardware for which the hardware manufacturer has explicitly opted out of the enterprise market and linux support. This is only the case for "gaming" GPU's by nVidia and low-end Broadcom Wi-Fi adapters (mostly used for low-end ink jet all-in-ones) and some Canon low-end printers. Thanks to community effort, most of these hardware devices will still work out of the box in linux, because open source community drivers were madeThere is a lot more hardware compatibility in Linux than there is in Windows. Even hardware sold by Microsoft itself, like the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader, remains unrecognized by Windows 7 and later, but still works perfectly fine (without needing drivers) in Linux.
Of course, if you're using Debian Stable or another distro based on a really old kernel, you'll typically find that the kernel is so old, that it doesn't provide support for hardware that was released in the last 2 years, and even if the kernel supports that hardware, that newer features of that hardware cannot be utilized by the operating system because it's too old. Debian Stable is usually about 3 years behind in feature development in comparison to bleeding edge distros, sometimes more, like for instance with systemd integration.
For a stand alone desktop install that will be used for gaming, Debian Stable might not be the best choice, at least use Debian Sid or a custom version of Debian Testing. These also have the advantage of being rolling release distros. The biggest advantage of Debian is that it's old and that nothing changes much, and that the packaging standards are pretty basic. That makes it easy to target. That's why there are a lot of .DEB packages made available for download on various websites that offer software. But this is just the thing: in linux, you should never ever download software from some website. If it's not in the trusted repositories, nobody should come near it. Advances users will be able to make packages based upon the source code of something that isn't in the repos. But there never ever is a reason to download a package from a website and install is, never ever. So measuring the software support or the orientation thereof by the availability of .DEB packages on various websites, is simply the product of a completely wrong mind set, inspired by Windows, where one would do such things (with all of the security risks involved).
There are a lot of bad examples all the time, like in the SteamOS video, where SteamOS was downloaded from the Valve website. This is of course a very bad example. One should install Debian, and then install the Steam Client from the repositories, and preferably only install the Steam Client in an unprivileged lxc, to make sure it can't manipulate or data mine your system, but even for that, you'll need at least Debian Testing, because unprivileged lxc's are only available after kernel 3.15. There is a big difference between saying "made for linux" and the actual reality of being present in an official repo. The great thing about linux is that the repos provide some degree of control (e.g. DEB-distros like Debian or Ubuntu, not much control and no secure package downloading system) to a lot of control on software (e.g. RPM-distros like OpenSuSE or Fedora, with very high packaging standards, a lot of source code control, and encrypted traffic to and from official repos, automated hash-checking of software integrity, etc...). The fact that the quality standards and requirements of RPM-packaging are a lot higher, leads to a situation whereby there is extra filtering going on: you don't find RPM packages on various websites that much, because it takes malicious or dumb people that offer linux softwar on their website instead of through official repos or git, too much effort to package their crap for RPM, and they only offer it prepackaged for DEB because that's easy.
I completely agree with this. To add my own little example on the driver issue you mention Demagolka. There are very specific cases where there is unconventional driver support (in GNU/Linux terms), as pointed out Nvidia drivers for example aren't great, but the 3rd party proprietary ones are very good, and generally available. The few outlying pieces of hardware like old wifi chips having poor support even they can be used with the windows drivers and a wrapper.
But that said driver support in GNU/Linux is in my opinion far superior than Windows. In almost all cases there is no requirement to install 3rd party drivers as the Linux kernel supports most hardware, this is something Windows is only starting to do, in only a few cases, and not very well either, and in most of these cases Windows still downloads the 3rd party driver its just a more integrated method. That said, anything above windows 7 or higher has very poor driver support these days in numerous hardware.
Where fingerprint readers were poorly supported on GNU/Linux, they now work out of the box in most cases in recent Linux kernels and the 3rd party drivers on Windows arent supported in higher Windows versions.
Intel, amd, NICs (all vendors) all work out of the box without the need to install 3rd party drivers unlike windows.
In my own experience, Windows has had a terrible time with my sound card, and fingerprint reader (with windows =>7), though it recognises 60% of my hardware and has drivers, for the the other 40% im required to manually download and install the drivers.
With Linux it recognises and has built in drivers for almost all hardware. The only outlier was my AMD and Nvidia graphics drivers. In the case of the Nvidia drivers there is a reversed engineered 2d driver (thats better than the integrated windows 2d driver) with experimental 3d support. You really need the 3rd party driver for good 3d support) With my new AMD card, I have good 2d support and basic 3d support which should see improvements over the coming year as AMD are increasingly pushing there open driver. with my integrated Intel GPU, its all built into the kernel.
So in my case ive had to install 2 3rd party drivers over the years on GNU/Linux, and by that I mean the equivalent of running emerge -a nvidia-drivers. Windows has its positives but good easy to use driver support isnt one of them imo.
I had less problems with my devices than on windows except for nvidia drivers. But that<s a known problem
If you're wanting to switch to Linux because you want to take full advantage of your hardware then you might want to reconsider. Linux itself is designed to be incredibly efficient, but from what I've seen that doesn't necessarily mean your computer will be more usable or powerful. It's all about the driver and application support, and that is just now starting to really be developed on Linux on a consumer level.
I have to agree with you. To the original poster. IMHO, I think you should dual boot. Unless the game has Linux support, you will have a better experience playing the game on Windows.
I switched from XP to Mint 17 Cinnamon a few weeks ago and like it - until I need to switch users. I have three users set up, and Mint doesn't switch users with as much stability as XP did. Because of that alone, I've gotten to know the restart button again. In a few others ways too, it doesn't feel as polished as XP did. I haven't given up on Linux, but I might try a different distro. OpenSUSE looks interesting.
After reading through this i started thinking maybe I should try Linux but the problem is I am a gamer and have many games on steam most of which I doubt are Linux compatible so I guess the Linux dream ends there for me.
EA and ubisoft are the big hold outs at the moment. Valve and 2k are activity porting much of their library to Linux. Many indie and smaller studios have tons of games for Linux.
BioShock Infiniteis coming to Linux! Blizzard/Activision are playing it safe and letting Valve/2k drive the revolution but have said they are very interested. Hell Bioshock Infinite is coming to Linux
Porting between Linux and PS4 should be about as easy as Windows and Xbone.
AMD said they will bringing Mantle to Linux.
Linux has already drawfed OSX on steam user wise.
Leap Motion and Occulus are joining the party.
The question is, will you be on the ground level of this platform?
That is a very motivating speech except I didn't really get the part about the consoles but anyway I am stil not sure I have been with windows all my life and also I dont really have a test pc so the only thing I could really do while testing is dualboot my machine but that can get kinda tricky sometimes anyway I don't know I will think about it.
Try out different distros in vitualbox or VMware Veiwer try doing basic stuff in them, web surfing is safer in a VM anyway.
If it ain't your cup of tea no biggie but you never know until you try.
PS4 has a Unix-like OS similar to Linux and they both use OpenGL.
"[..] to take full advantage of your hardware [..]"
Your hardware means more than the GPU, and you can use you computer for things other than playing games.
"Another advantage is you can boot up from your external drive on other computers using the same brand CPU & GPU."
As far as I know all distros keep the microcode for both AMD and Intel in the kernel. They don't offer a kernel version for AMD CPUs and another version for Intel. And there's enough driver support in the kernel to boot into a DE no matter your GPU. From there on you're on your own depending on what drivers and GPU you have installed.
"If you have installed the bootloader correctly, it should work on any system without interfering with Windows MBR"
EDIT: the following only applies if you install grub on your Windows hard drive.
Actually, grub2 completely overrides the MBR. After it boots your machine it can hand over control to the proprietary Windows bootloader (it's called chainloading), but it's grub who does the actual booting. If you do a Windows update that messes with the Windows bootloader you can find yourself with the MBR overwritten by Windows and unable to boot into linux (Microsoft are selfish bastards with no respect for people's right to choose).
This might be true for games, but that's because those games are written specifically to be limited to the commercial software console of MS-Windows. Like a lot of games are hardware console exclusives, a lot of games are also software console (MS-Windows) exclusives. The thing is, that open source development has cracked this open much more than the commercial software manufacturers like, and that's the reason why the Microsoft software console is not the primary gaming platform any more, but rather the hardware consoles have become the primary x86 gaming platforms. The primary gaming platform over all these days however is linux, with the Android games, which have grown enormously and are now the most played games overall, and there is no reason at all why one would not install an Android-x86 lxc next to a Steam Client for x86 lxc on a GNU/Linux install of choice on a desktop PC to cover most of the gaming offerings. If you add those two linux gaming platforms, plus the entire hardware console emulation offerings which work great on Linux, you're already having a much greater portfolio than you could ever have on any MS-Windows install, at a much greater performance. The people that don't see this, are just not opening their eyes to reality. MS-Windows gaming is rapidly becoming a niche market, a specific software console with a limited offering in terms of gaming. I agree that it's a solid offering, because there happens to be a lot of commercial foul play, for instance by Valve, which insists on nerfing typical PC games like CS:GO on Linux, so that the preferred platform there remains the Microsoft software console, and those games are really important to the PC gaming market, but besides that, most modern games are targeted towards hardware consoles, not software consoles, and those games are then ported to software consoles, and run just as shitty on the Microsoft software console as on the Valve Linux software console (SteamOS).
The argument that nVidia cards still run better in MS-Windows is becoming ever less useful, because the fact of the matter is that Maxwell-based nVidia GPU's just don't work well anywhere, that is, they work pretty well for Windows games, but they don't work at all for either CUDA or OpenCL acceleration, even on MS-Windows. nVidia just doesn't seem to care much about any platform, because their Linux-only platforms, the Tegra chips, have a lot of problems also, nothing just works as advertised with nVidia.
The big advantage of gaming in Linux, is that both Intel and AMD GPU's work perfectly fine with open source graphics drivers (the drivers that are present by default, so no driver has to be installed), and if someone would need what little extra performance Catalyst can still offer, on bleeding edge distros, the kernel modules for AMD are now also open source, so no more binary blobs, kernel mode switching, no more SELinux exceptions, and no more proprietary closed source code outside of user space. And this is another reason to skip on SteamOS, but rather to install the Steam client (in an lxc of course) on a bleeding edge "normal" distro installation.
+1
People still use grub? lol