I recently made mention that I decided to try giving Linux a shot at becoming my daily driver. Today, I was roughly two weeks and 4 days into that attempt. I decided last night, that I was going to go ahead and scrap the attempt.
Ultimately, everything I’ve tried thus far, I have gotten to work; Every alternative program, game, or features I attempted (thus far), I have come out on the other side with success, or at least a compromise of something working.
However, I started to get the impression that it was only a matter of time, before that failure was just around the bin. In my case, I’m almost positive, it would be a game of some sort, that either I, my wife, or our gaming group wanted to play.
In my daily research, I continued to come across more and more posts of anti-cheat software just completely refusing to allow Steam’s Proton, or VMs to be used in their games. I already have several games in my list that likely would not work because they are: 1. Only available via online services, and 2. Using those exact anti-cheat applications. When I started the process several of those games were working, albeit, I never did get 7 Days to Die working with anything outside of the native client, without turning of the Easy Anti-Cheat software on the dedicated server Iron runs for our group. In truth, since no one has had interest of late, I haven’t tested Red Dead Online, or GTA V since I started the install and ran a short test of around a couple minutes each. Given some of the threads I’ve read, I suspect those two games alone were already in a broken state.
On Thursday evening, while I was gaming with Qvaid (my wife), I was noting some slight performance issues with one of our favorite games (Outward Definitive Edition). Now, I should mention the performance issue wasn’t really anything of a serious note, just some odd stalls here and there while one of us were opening our inventory, or crafting window, etc… Something more of an annoyance than anything else really. However, that said, I can’t say I ‘recall’ the issue happening while I was gaming with her in Windows. I talked with her about it, and she said she’d noted it from the beginning, but thought it was just part of the game, although she too didn’t really recall the issue when we were gaming on Windows.
I say all of that to say, I wish I could get past the desire to return back to Windows. The performance of the distro I choose, alongside of the success I had was an over all fantastic experience. Linux Mint is certainly something I would recommend to new users coming over from Windows that wanted to give Linux a try. In my case, however, it ultimately just isn’t the right time for ‘me’ at this time. I’ll do my best to keep an eye on how things are going inside the Linux community, and perhaps give it another try a bit later down the road. Linux has come a LONG way in comparison to what it was just a couple years ago. But… for ‘me’ it’s still not quite where I’d like in terms of the gaming side. I can add, that as far as work was concerned, I was in perfect shape for the most part, although, that’s a relatively easy task for me as I only need to be able to login to my work VM, and servers. Linux, of any distro can handle that with ease.
Gaming is a method for me to relax, and enjoy the time away from the typical grind. In some cases, especially with the request to play some other games while I was testing Linux as a daily driver, it started to become more of a grind to get to the point of being able to game. Since that is my main hobby, and I just got the feeling I was going to come to that game that I REALLY wanted to play, but could not, I’d rather make the jump back now rather than later if it was going to come to that.
I do still have Linux on my laptop, and I’ll continue to tinker and study on that for the time being. I’ve just decided I don’t have to go all in to make it work and to keep up with what might be going on in the Linux community in the meantime. 🙂
