Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I’m pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I’m not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.

My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I’m generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don’t like it due to the maintenance of it.

Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I’m fairly sure they all work decently since I’ve tried on my laptop.

I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.

Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.

I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.

  • Soleil (she/her ♀)@beehaw.org
    22·
    14 hours ago

    Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you’re ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.

    Here’s a few pointers based on what I’ve found out:

    1. The desktop environment or WM is important. Given your need for Steam Link to work I’d suggest using one with X11, as last I checked Steam Link just gives you a black screen and audio under Wayland. Linux Mint would carry over your knowledge of apt while maintaining an interface that’s pretty familiar to Windows users and is I believe still an X11 distro for now.
    2. I got the EA app working using Bottles but it constantly feels like a cat-and-mouse game fixing it whenever it has an update. I basically stopped using it altogether for that reason. Not trying to scare you off — it’s just not a great experience.
    3. Play with drivers for your GPU. The situation with Nvidia is, I’m told, not as dire as it once was on Linux but still needs more work than AMD or Intel graphics to work well. The proprietary driver may still give the best experience on games, though Nouveau seems to be doing very well. This is admittedly something I need to come back to in order to confirm (I have one machine with Nvidia graphics and it’s in storage specifically because Nvidia graphics under Linux were such a pain).