I’m planning on switching to Linux on my main PC as I don’t want to move to Windows 11 and was curious about other people’s experiences doing so.
I have a Steam Deck and everything there works out of the box, but I imagine that’s a more curated platform compared to standard distros.
What are your experiences, good or bad?
Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.
For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.
Honestly, it’s my assessment of turning my only PC, which is primarily gaming, into a Linux machine and the struggles there with day-to-day usage. I have no idea what OP’s comfort level with Linux or tech is in general but my assumption is it’s enough to think “Yeah, I could install Linux and do this.” which was where I was at too. Nothing I’m doing was exotic but the investment required in finding suitable alternatives that worked nearly out of the box was too high at the time.
Gaming was decent by all accounts. I think I had a few compatibility items that will iron out as developers support Linux more and the technology that enables gaming on Linux just gets better and better. I have an AMD card and from what I gather that’s better for switching to Linux. A lot of my frustrations were not related to gaming and I recognize the issue is time and knowledge on my part. If those are in short supply when something breaks, you could have a bad time is all I’m saying. Everyone’s got to start out somewhere and if you’ve had Windows forever, it can be a mental shift.