Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up when filtering for English only. It’s worth noting that for all the official support Macs ever saw in gaming, they never represented anything better than about 5% of the market.
I joined that group today, but it wasn’t necessarily this support thing. I hated Windows update most of the time anyway. Mostly I just needed to buy a new SSD so I could dual boot, which will allow me to transition at my own pace while getting comfortable. I bought a cheap 500gb Saturday.
The other issue is my version of decision paralysis on choosing a distro, which generally is paralysis up until I suddenly just bite the bullet. I went with Nobara since it looked easiest to support my hardware and get into my games quickly.
So far I’ve gotten FFXIV, Warframe, and Enshouded running the way I want, and am slowly downloading my other current games. I have to keep a 200mpbs download limit because I’m working too. I also wiped one of my 2tb drives that mostly had games I was planning to play soon or just started playing to make it exFAT. I’ll probably eventually convert the others but may need to buy another 2tb drive for transfers if needed.
Update: exFAT gave me issues with another game so I ended up just making it a btrfs drive.
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.
I do have an edge there as I’m actually pretty technically inclined (I do tech support for living, and at the risk of sounding like touting my own horn, I’m high up the escalation path for my company). So partitions and stuff are common things I work with, and this isn’t nearly my first brush with Linux. It’s just more getting games and a bunch of small unique software working is somewhat different from working with business servers where you have either stricter policies on what gets installed or vendor backup if necessary.
Still, much of my actual work involves solving issues by looking up errors and symptoms, so figuring out the issues here aren’t that hard for me either. While I do appreciate the GUI making it an easy switch from Windows, I’m no stranger to CLI either and feel quite comfortable using it, and documentation for a lot of what I’ve messed with so far has been pretty easy to find and follow.
As for my plans, I’ll probably eventually limit NTFS to one 1tb drive, or maybe do what you said and repetition it down to maybe 500gb, and hopefully most of what I do will be in Linux. I am the type to force myself to learn by force, so I haven’t actually booted back into Windows except for an issue where I couldn’t delete the NTFS partition from Linux. And I’ll probably hardly boot into Windows going forward either.
It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.