But I’ve spent most of the time tweaking and setting up and downloading stuff rather than actually playing. Games seem to work really well. Not doing benchmarking but I really like how stable the framerate is when frame cap is in place. So far everything I’ve tried was absolutely buttery smooth.
Haven’t been around Linux overall for long, with my first proper introduction around early 2021. But from what I hear and read, plus my own observations in those past 2.5 years, even if, most of the time, it’s not “ideal” (as in, “plug and play”), Linux as a whole seems to be getting better and better for gaming. And ever since behemoth Valve came with the Linux-powered Steam Deck, I expect it to help increase Linux’s naturally-slow-but-constant momentum even more.
I’ve trialed Pop_OS for a month when Valve released proton. I played Sekiro the first week of release and was blown away how well it runs back then. That said, there were a lot of quirks that made games still broken, and there are definitely still some, but the improvement since then is absolutely massive.
As someone who has dabbled in and used Linux since 1995. You are in at a good time. Linux has always been very stable and capable for most things. But it has definitely gotten much better in recent years in terms of gaming and windows compatibility. I still keep a Windows system or two around just in case. But I’m much happier with my daily driver being a system running linux.
It’s gotten really sad with Microsoft not supporting ~5 year old systems under Windows 11. Apple at least still supports roughly 10 year old systems. I had to laugh a bit about the controversy when the subject was broached of removing support for 486 and older 32-bit systems from the Linux kernel. Those being roughly 30 years old by this point.
And besides the discussion that brought the controversy, from what I can gather, Linux benefits the most from KVM, making using a virtual machine with some super old Linux system in it very viable. _
Well yes and no. Some things you absolutely can do that with. But not a lot of people realize just how common it is for industrial devices and applications to still use older chipsets. 486s and pentiums still in use today. Simply because by modern standards they are relatively low power tried and tested basic designs. And when you need a discreet portable device. Virtualization often isn’t really useful. One could argue why don’t they make a wireless dumb terminal of some sort tie back to a central system with a bear minimal system on it just for displaying information. But in noisy industrial environments that really isn’t an option. I do see some vendors Etc starting to use Android based devices. But it’s a slow change over. And only just starting.