I've been feeling inspired by the posts here and on /c/libre and have been switching over to a lot of FLOSS alternatives to software I use. One thing holding me back from switching to Linux is that my PC is how I play games and, as I understand it, most games aren't compatible with Linux so you either can't play them or they need software like Wine. How much of a problem is this really, since I've also heard that Linux gaming has been getting easier over the years.
Honestly? Don't let anyone shame you for having a Windows dual boot partition for gaming. While it would be great if WINE worked well with all games, it just doesn't. Currently, some games still need Windows, and if your choices are between not playing those games and having a Windows partition dedicated to those games, anyone who tells you you have a moral obligation to not play those games is a clown.
I actually made a comment against dualbooting recently but that was only a joke obviously. If the only thing that is holding someone back from Linux is gaming and they don't find WINE/Proton adequate then absolutely dualboot. I'd just suggest checking which games actually don't work well on Linux and only playing these on Windows so you boot it less.
This wasn't directed at you or anyone in particular -- I don't think I even saw your comment. I have seen this take unironically in the past though
I know :) I just wanted to add to your point I guess.
is it easy to keep those games on a shared drive so that they're accessible from both OSes? would be cool to not have to download games twice if i want to try it out on a diff OS
Yes! I do that, actually. My laptop has a 2TB hard drive that the Windows partition sees as D:\ and the Linux partition sees as /DATA.
On Windows, I moved all my user libraries (pictures, documents, etc) to that drive, and on Linux I replaced the library directories in the home folder with symbolic links to the folders on /DATA. For individual games, you have to manually set the install location to somewhere on the shared medium each time. For something like Steam, you can set the install location in settings.
nice! what file system do you recommend for that? is there any you recommend for compatibility across mac os x, windows, and linux as well?
My shared drive is NTFS, but that's just because it came that way and I didn't bother to re-format it. Linux can read from it and write to it just fine. Someone else might have a better suggestion though. Don't use the default Linux file systems, Windows can't read them.
i think the best option i've seen is exFAT, but i forget why i don'l like using that. incompatible with more advanced hard drive setups maybe?
Yeah, my hope is that one day I can dedicate my current computer to games and keep it mostly offline (except for downloading games and playing online ofc) and then do everything else on a laptop or cheap build running Linux. Until then, I'll look into doing this.