See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.
But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.
Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).
Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.
Manjaro was buggy in my experience (used it for a year), and seems to be a well hated distro at this point. I am not suggesting that will fix your issues, just mentioning. I had a friend switch from Windows to Linux for the first time and Bazzite was the one that worked the best for their Nvidia card. As the other commenter said, dual booting on the same drive with Windows makes it a headache to manage.
I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.
But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.
The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.
And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.
I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.
See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.
But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.
Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).
Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.
Manjaro was buggy in my experience (used it for a year), and seems to be a well hated distro at this point. I am not suggesting that will fix your issues, just mentioning. I had a friend switch from Windows to Linux for the first time and Bazzite was the one that worked the best for their Nvidia card. As the other commenter said, dual booting on the same drive with Windows makes it a headache to manage.
I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.
But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.
The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.
And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.
Well I tried. Sharing the same drive between Windows and Linux is a big no-no. It’s just not a thing Windows is designed to be able to do.
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.
I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.