Free and Open Source Software

In one year I have had exactly zero issues with Linux. In the same time, my brother had OS-breaking bugs happen twice from driver updates with Windows... Once from the GPU, and the other from a CPU firmware update.

You don't have to switch to Linux. That's OK. Just realize that you are simultaneously ok with making yourself a harvestable resource that Microsoft and others are milking dry.

My thing was I spent just as much time troubleshooting windows as I do Linux. That said I've been on Linux for ages so a lot of the issues I ran into on windows were frustrations with knowing how easy it would have been to resolve technical issues in Linux. The right path for you will be unique to you. I'd probably recommend starting out by just having a live media system you use to poke around with as you tinker on a side project. Maybe even grab a raspberry pi to Futz around on

Well, Ubuntu is definitely not the way to go. They are very microsofty at the moment and keep trying to make snaps happen, and they aren't gonna happen.

Wanna game? Use nobara OS, and if that is too hard then try bazzite. Literally all the tinkering is baked in for gaming by the guy who makes alternative windows emulator runtimes and hes a straight fucking boss.

Literally the exact same shit would happen if you switched to MacOS.

If you have a desktop maybe install a second drive, install Ubuntu on that, and see how it goes?

I made the leap a few years ago now, and since getting a (slightly) newer AMD GPU I haven't had a single problem that I didn't create by messing around with things without knowing what I was doing. I use steam and the Glorious Egroll version of proton and every game I have wanted to play has worked, even ones that are brand new. No tinkering past the initial steam setup. I don't really play competitive online games with anti cheat so you may encounter problems that I haven't if you do.

I use the advanced hardware support version of MX Linux, if that really matters. I had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but haven't tried it with this machine so I don't know if it was the OS or the hardware.

I'd say give it another shot on its own drive when Microsoft frustrates you again, you can always swap windows back in if you don't like it.

I was in the same boat as you a year ago, but Windows got so bad that I just accepted that I could only play 90% of the games I want and had to check protondb before buying a game.

Also I wouldn't use a distro that has GNOME as their default DE. KDE is (currently) superior in many ways that matter for gamers.

Just run windows in a VM for when you absolutely need it. It's how I can do my job but not be constantly barraged with ads in a start menu.

I just uninstalled windows after a mod of ets2 stopped working and the game itself has provided those features in the latest updates. I simply download games from john cena and they always work. 100% of the time to be accurate.

I can’t remember many native games not working (any longer). Basically only the Anomaly series, Ticket to Ride and some other indie game. Anomaly has a serious bug that gets it trapped in an infinite loop on modern systems during loading screen, but there is a community patch for that. Ticket to Ride removed the Linux port on steam instead of fixing it. The indie game worked, but they forgot to make the executable actually executable.

Though there are certainly a bunch of games from humble bundle era who got a half-hearted Linux port basically as a fee to enter the bundle, with no updates or support since then.

If you are talking about running game through wine/proton, then yes that’s expected. It works surprisingly well, but any new proton/wine version can have indeed regressions and game updates break stuff. Games that don’t get any updates anymore should work a bit better. An exception are games that are officially supported by Valve since those are bound to specific proton version and they even support some DRM solutions (steam+proton only), but they can break on updates as well.

Best situation is if they have a somewhat fixed release and maybe a few updates. Having updates very month is a bit a problem. Online games that lock out older client versions are a huge problem. Online games should generally rather be viewed as a temporary service, they’ll never be as reliable as fully offline single player games are.

Games that use directshow/Media Foundation for cut scenes also don’t work great when playing them through steam for legal reasons. Valve won’t distribute decoders and doesn’t want to depend on them being installed in the system. They convert videos on their servers, but only the first time a player encounters that video and that player will see a placeholder. Wine supports those cut scenes.

You won’t even have an perfect experience on officially support platforms, but you can expect it to work better and the devs to test stuff.

You generally can’t expect Windows/Mac/Playstation/Xbox… games to run on Linux, though they might do.