I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
If Debian Stable supports your hardware, go for it. If not, try Debian Sid, but it won’t be as stable. You can install up-to-date applications, like Steam, using flatpaks in any case.
Even if you opt for stable and there’s an update that you may take advantage from, you can always update your kernel in several ways or change to Debian Sid (unstable), but you can’t go back unless you change to Debian Testing and then wait the freeze of Testing which then becomes Debian Stable.
Started dual booting Pop a few weeks ago, kept Windows for gaming for the same concern, but if you’ve got the major of your games in stream, Proton really is amazing. Had 0 issues with any game so far.
Check out Protondb and see if your current games are supported or not.
Once I’m 100% comfortable with Linux again I’ll probably bin of windows forever.
I already had a Windows install so letting Windows manage the bootloader seemed easier as I know it can cause issues if it thinks it’s not the OS as others have said.
All my games are off steam currently lol. I'm hearing the collective message of how feasible Linux is for gaming, tho
Keeping windows is also an "in case" measure because I'm ignorant with both OS, at this point: in case some use case comes up where having Windows is easiest to get something done. My goal is to keep to Linux as much as possible. Purely because I want to become familiar with it
I never had huge problems with rolling release distros and Nvidia but recently got a AMD card and boi… Everything (hardware acceleration etc) basically worked out of the box with a very simple Arch installation… Never again going with Nvidia on Linux.
Debian is my go-to. So long as you’re already comfortable with Linux, you can get gaming working with a tiny bit of elbow grease… and unlike some other distros, Debian is rock-solid.
All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn’t come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn’t seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).
Well you technically don’t need mono or gecko, especially not if you’re just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.
There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn’t exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)
I appreciate it, I was more so wondering whether or not I could keep my existing build as is aside from the GUI. I’ve done it the headless/CLI via ssh route previously but thought I’d check out using the GUI during the setup stages and being able to enable/disable the GUI at will and how that would affect performance vs installing only CLI at the start of the build.
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