Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I’m pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I’m not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I’m generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don’t like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I’m fairly sure they all work decently since I’ve tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
I’ve found CachyOS to be fairly uncomplicated and it’s gaming tweaks make most things work out of the box through Lutris. I’d probably avoid the standard Arch install for a newbie
they just said they’re proficient with linux in their post, did you read it?
Right, but I would say the same thing and for a gaming machine, I would much prefer something that did the Arch install for me and worked for most games out of the box.
idk gaming on arch works ootb on the 4 computers I’ve tried on, I’ve had no issues with it so far except when I tried to try some really experimental things with my gpu drivers. Every game I’ve tried works fine, and things like Steam and Lutris work just as well as on other distros.
also the archinstall TUI script comes with the installer and does the installation for you.
I’m honestly kinda tired of people making out arch as difficult/brittle without having tried it properly, it probably comes from the community latching onto the overused joke of “i use arch btw”, and so wanting to view arch as inferior in some way because they don’t want to be associated with the imaginary stereotypical arch user that doesn’t actually exist.
It’s probably also compounded by beginner arch users wanting to seem superior and above the others, so they present arch as something only them with their superior intellect could ever handle.
arch just works in my experience.