Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
All your concerns are valid and Linux handles all these well except:
If you play competitive games with kernel anti cheat it will simply not work on Linux courtesy of the game developers.
Linux is fully capable of running the game and the anti cheat but the game developers restrict it. Notable games are cod, fortnite, apex legends.
A notable competitive game that works on Linux is cs2 although you won’t be able to run 3rd party anti cheat like FACEIT as far as I know.
You can use the proton site to tell you how many of your games on your steam library are playable on Linux.
I’m on my 8th month or so using Linux to game and I’ve had no issues, most popular games will work. Most niche games use very simple tech like SDL and will just work.
Wine essentially creates a fake windows environment and handles a lot of internal API calls by kind of redirecting them to existing Linux services, so a lot of windows stuff will just work.
As for security. You realize most of the Internet runs on Linux ? Practically the majority of the internet is hosted on Linux machines.
As for a distrto there is no optimal choice you can make.
You can pick Ubuntu, Debian or Mint and find yourself disappointed in how restricting the power user experience is.
You can pick arch or cachy for the latest wine improvements but find yourself lost in how to handle the OS in case something goes wrong.
I personally think cachy (rolling release) is the best for gaming but you could encounter issues (skill issues really) that might frustrate you. These issues would lead to growth and improvement in your understanding of Linux but if all you want to do is game and you don’t care about understanding computers then it might not be for you.