Hi folks!
I was using PopOS regularly a few years ago, and it was working great. Good performance, and I was actually noticing a lot of my gaming was running smoother too. I ended up going back to Windows because I could not play VALORANT, Destiny, or HUNT: Showdown on the platform. While I don’t play VALORANT anymore, I don’t think that the other games have support on Linux either.
The other reason was Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and DaVinci Resolve. I need to do some video editing, and general live streaming too, and I never really dabbled with that on Linux.
I guess my question is for those who game / content create - has Linux been viable for you? Or do you often find yourself dual booting anyway to get the latest updates, driver support, anti-cheat support, plugins etc.
As a “gamer” I’ve found that while gaming on Linux has become a lot easier over the years there is still a lot that needs to be worked on and while for some people it might be good enough, personally for now I’ll still be dual booting.
anti-cheat isn’t an issue per se, as long as game developers decide to add the required files to their games (eg what Apex: Legends devs did a year or so ago, around the time the Steam Deck launched, to ensure proper Proton compatibility), but in short - yes, many online games will still require you to dual boot anyways, unfortunately.
i’m no content creator, so i can’t recommend good alternatives to the apps you mentioned, however OBS works flawlessly on most Linux distros, so you should have zero issues with live streaming.
oh and i would say driver support is usually better on the Linux side, although I think Debian based distros (like PopOS) might lag a bit behind compared to other distros? this might be outdated knowledge though, so take that with a pinch of salt
I game on Pop. I left windows on dual boot just in case, but I have only logged into Windows 2 times in 18 months and that was just to run updates because I realized I hadn’t logged in.
Since the Steamdeck came out, TONS more games work on linux.
Davinci Resolve works on Pop as well. You are kinda screwed with Lightroom and PS though.
I do a lot of gaming on Linux, usually running Windows games with either Lutris or Steam’s compatibility mode. Lots of games work perfectly with performance just as good as in Windows. The dxvk project has been a fantastic help in that respect - it translates DirectX calls to Vulkan equivalents, so we don’t need a reimplementation of DirectX anymore, and we get the same level of hardware acceleration you would get from DirectX. (IIUC graphics drivers have acceleration for high-level calls to both DirectX and Vulkan.)
Unfortunately from what I see in protondb Destiny 2 doesn’t run on Linux due to its particular anticheat implementation, and Hunt: Showdown has a “silver” rating which means some things don’t work perfectly.
Hunt works great on Linux I believe the rating is Gold now. It’s my go to game with 2.4k hours. I first went with a dual boot setup with win10 and fedora keeping windows because Hunt EAC wasn’t supported. As soon as it was I tried it out and ran into the early blobby texture issues. This was fixed by a proton update. Since then it’s been working well. I finally ditched windows this week just as the new Steam UI was released which introduced the first issue I’ve ran into(crashing when opening the overlay) which notably impacts CSGO too so should be fixed pretty quick.
I can’t speak for content creation
But Nick does alright https://mastodon.social/@thelinuxEXP
