Hi all, I bought a gaming PC with the intention of installing Linux to play recent games. I chose AMD for the GPU because I know the drivers are more optimized on Linux.
After receiving and assembling my machine, I installed Fedora without any problem. I found a lot of software on Github to replace the proprietary software for my AIO and headphones. Everything worked the first time except… Steam! Unable to launch it, black window which restarted in a loop.
After searching on the internet, I found that it was enough to modify PrefersNonDefaultGPU on steam to solve my problem (but I understand that ordinary people do not want to bother with this kind of hack and prefer the windows experience that works out of the box).
Then I installed Cyberpunk and… well the game runs at 120fps in ultra, what more can I say… Oh yes, the keyboard preset is in Qwerty even though I have an azerty keyboard (sorry Baguette) and in the first hour of play, I was able to notice a bug in a rather disturbing shadow/light and in the drops of water on a windshield which appeared and disappeared in a strange way.
So with my €1500 machine I got a little upset… and I wanted to install Windows out of curiosity.
Installation is…complicated! No driver for my network card, a ton of software that I don’t need, in short, Windows…
I installed steam, launched Cyberpunk and… my keyboard is recognized, 120 fps too (I am offered raytracing which does not interest me and makes me lose fps but it is available) and in the first hour of play NONE bug.
So here I am, I hate Windows, but it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost. I’ve just discovered Nobara, I would have loved to try it but I’m tired of starting the first 3 hours of cyberpunk again and I’m convinced that I’ll have some graphical bugs with it.
(also another problem, there are too many Linux distributions, too much choice kills choice)
TDLD: I bought an expensive computer to play under Linux, but a few bugs made me reluctantly install Windows.
All my PCs are hand built by me since 1990-s. All Windows installations are from ISO. I haven’t installed a single network or WiFi driver since Windows 7. XP - yes, nothing worked out of the box. But W7 and above the only drivers I install are NVIDIA drivers (it works without them, but the default driver doesn’t have all game optimisations) and printer drivers. Even Bluetooth works out of the box. You don’t even need ADB driver for your Android phone anymore, everything just works out of the box.
I’m also not sure what you’re installing for 1-2 hours, it takes about 10 minutes or so over here. It might be dependent on how fast your storage is though.
This was Windows 10, and it’s mostly drivers and utilities. I had a ton of trouble getting my wife’s mic working, which apparently needed some user space utility to be configured, and this was just a simple 3.5mm mic (AMD audio card apparently). And then there was random stuff in Device Manager that didn’t have drivers that I needed to track down (motherboard level stuff, not accessories). I spent like 30 minutes messing with a weird flickering issue (only happened in games), and it was solved by switching which monitor was primary (she apparently can’t use her 144hz monitor as primary, but whatever).
The actual Windows installation process was quick (she has an NVMe drive), it’s just all the nonsense afterward to get stuff running correctly. And that doesn’t include installing applications (she handled most of that, I hate tracking down SW on Windows), this is just to get the hardware to work properly.
On Linux, I just install the system, install packages from the package manager, and I’m done. No googling anything, no configuration, I just install the handful of packages I need that don’t come with the base system and I’m done. I had more trouble in the past (muted audio, Wi-Fi cards that need to be force enabled, etc), but the last time I had anything like that was something like 10 years ago. I do pick my hardware carefully which certainly helps, but surely Windows should provide a better experience since that’s what manufacturers target.
That never works like that on Linux though :)
It did for me on my last few installs, though I picked Linux compatible hardware from the start (Lenovo laptops, desktops with Intel WiFi and decent sound cards, etc). YMMV of course, especially if you’re trying to install on some random, cheap laptop with bottom of the barrel components.