Autism time.
So the biggest obstacle for me when I tried out Linux was installing stuff manually outside of steam and often steam itself wouldn't work which was probably a result of me not understanding how to setup dependencies etc. Maybe it's just because I've got more time to look through all of this but I think they might have changed a bit how Lutris works as well to be a bit more user friendly since I last checked. From my perspective I'd look at the damn interface and it felt like I was dealing with a virtual machine.
If I were sailing the high seas for example, how would I set everything up?
Yes, for the record I know it's not actually a virtual machine before the Linux autists rip me a new one but that's just my windows experience talking. I found it very confusing because I didn't know what files were where, if I wanted to for example put mods into Fallout 4 I wouldn't know where I could do it. How do you guys organise your files? What's your process for keeping track of multiple hard disks and naming conventions etc.?
Yes this is all really basic stuff by Linux user standards, but as a potential end user looking to give it a shot I thought it would be helpful having an up to date thread on this for people to spam information on because as it turns out there's a lot of out of date topics and videos I'm seeing floating around about this.
This isn't really in my wheelhouse, but would running Linux as your main OS and using a Windows VM to game solve your problem? That's one solution I'm looking into. I'm also looking into SteamOS, but I don't know if it would be any good for the machine learning stuff I do.
It's rather hard to do that without 2 GPUs, gpu partitioning just isn't a thing on Linux yet and virtual GPUs I have mostly found with virtual box with mixed success. You CAN have a full GPU passthrough but that's basically dual booting with extra steps, not really worth it for gaming(where it will complain with the anti cheat shit games).
Very, very minor games I have made work in a VM but we're talking so old you can just run them on Linux through wine.
VMs/emulators are a huge hit to performance, even a really good PC will struggle with a lot of current gen games if you have to nerf it with a VM.
Idk why emulators aren't written as live OSs rather than VMs, a lot of live OSs are really simple and performance would be so much better if you didn't force your PC to run a Russian nesting doll of OSs.
Edit: I could be mistaken but afaik emulators are a type of VM, hence why I'm lumping them together, and WINE is an emulator, so I'm not seeing the distinction.
Should we tell him guys? :)
Pretty sure it stands for Is Not an Emulator. It's a translation layer, not emulation.
I confess to being a tech retard.
No I just thought it was funny because it's in the name.
I totally get the VM argument, but I don't really call that a solution because at the end of the day you're still relying on Microsoft crap. I'd rather go pure Linux if possible then that way I'm completely free of it all. I think it will be potentially doable now because compatibility and user friendliness has gotten a lot better but I'll see what happens.
It's not necessary to run a VM for Windows games when Proton exists and works perfectly with 99% of all Windows games.