Why I Finally Switched to Linux

A couple months ago I made the Jump to change my main PC OS to Linux instead of Windows. I've been on Windows 10 since it came out, but with end of life coming in October of this year, I figured there couldn't be a better time. The thing is, there are 3 main things I do on my computer and Linux fits those easily, with some tweaking. So, today I thought it'd be a bit of an interesting diversion to go over Why I Switched to Linux.

Gaaaames

I tried Linux back in the late 2000s when it was much more intimidating. My dad had bought a new Laptop so was giving me his 5+ year old Compaq one. We loaded Ubuntu on it and went from there. Back then though the only real thing I wanted from my PC was playing games and it wasn't easy to get stuff running back then.

Here in the present we are post-Steam Deck introduction and Linux gaming has massively changed. I can play almost any game I want to on it. Obviously, I'm a gaming blogger so one of the biggest things I do on my PC is play games. Linux and particularly Steam has changed the fucking game when it comes to Linux gaming. Gone are the days of having to mess with a bunch of individual programs yourself, now you can simply activate compatibility mode on Steam and you're good!

Steve Jobs (a terrible person) talked about with the iPhone that the most important thing was that when you use it you don't have to fiddle. That when you use it "it just works". That's mostly how gaming on Linux works nowadays. There's occasionally the need to fiddle with compatibility settings but it mostly "just works" once you activate compatibility settings, which is a simple toggle in the games properties on steam. It's crazy because I remember so many issues I had back in the day with gaming that I just don't anymore. Back then I couldn't play any of the games I had. That was also before I even had a steam account, all my games were on CD. A lot's changed and Valve is responsible for pushing the Linux envelope, without their amazing work with Proton and the Steam Deck, this would not have been possible. After all that, it was pretty damn great and just made me wonder, Why NOT switch?

There are a couple issues for now with anti-cheat not working but I don't really play many games with anti-cheat. When it comes to anti-cheat games I've only been playing Sea of Thieves with my partner and I kept a small windows drive that'll allow me to do that on the occasional weekends when we aren't busy. Switching was a great move, even if I have to keep windows around for a game or two. And again, I would not have been able to switch without the work Valve put into Linux and Proton, it's pretty nuts how good it is.

Developing

I’m not just a gaming blogger, I'm also an indie videogame Developer (and TTRPG Producer/Developer). I don't talk about the developer side of me much just because the game I'm making isn't done or really announced yet. I use my experience as a Developer to feed my thought process on how to play games and how I approach writing about them on here but otherwise I keep it broadly separate. At least in my writing, I do notes every so often talking about my Producing at Just Roommates Games (shameless singular plug of both of our games, Cup o' Quest and Tome. CoQ is a more normal sized TTRPG and Tome is a small 3 pager. They're both great and were awesome to work on!)

Right now though I have to talk about it. The second thing I do on my computer is use Unreal Engine and VSCode (a coding IDE, Integrated Development Environment, for those not in the know) and I originally didn't want to switch because I didn't know if I'd be able to do the things I want successfully on a Linux PC. Well I'm happy to say I was wrong. While Unreal and VSCode both take some finagling to be perfect, particularly a decent amount of using terminal commands to be able to get them to work right away, once they work they work. I’m developing my game in Unreal and have been really enjoying it, in some ways it actually loads faster than on my Windows partition, maybe because you don't have to have the Epic Games Store launcher with the Linux version. That alone makes the switch so much more worth it because while I'm missing out on some useful things like super easy to manage plugins, a lot of those can still be done, just in less UI friendly ways.

This isn't something a lot of people will have to deal with, mind you. Most people aren't using Unreal out there on Linux, most people will likely just want to play games on their PC, and most people definitely aren't even Developers (which you can tell with all the armchair developer BS you see in the broader gaming community nowadays). But I am a Developer, even if it's an indie game, I still am. So for me, this switch might have been intimidating, it might have been scary, I might have gotten super frustrated with it and wanted to give up, but once I pushed through and started to actually absorb the different system and all the Terminal commands I had to do, it became so worth it.

Writing

This one is smaller because, well, I can write anywhere. Even right now this exact sentence is being typed on my phone in Proton Docs on the couch with a show playing in the background and my partner beside me reading a comic on their phone. But I still write on my PC a decent amount. I did so much of the writing for my series the History of Queerness in Videogames (that you should totally check out if you haven't already, here's a link to Part 1) on my computer. Once you reach over 4000 words in an article it's incredibly annoying to manage all that on your phone no matter how big the screen. So I use my PC and often use Proton Docs. But I also have used Word before I switched.

Well now that I'm on Linux I don't have to deal with Word and instead I use just as good software that I don't have to deal with BS licensing agreements for, like OnlyOffice. Now when I'm doing an outline for a project that I'm working on slowly in the background, or on my next research-based blog series, I can use an app that has everything I want. Writing is one of my favorite things I do. I love playing games and writing my reviews, I love writing articles like this, I love doing hours and hours of research to get just the right article with the right balance for my in depth history series'. Writing on my Linux partition is just as easy as it was on my Windows partition, in some ways it's actually easier simply because of me not having to deal with Word popping up every so often because of my opening a file and it defaulting to Word.

Linux is a wonderful and lightweight OS, it has so many distros that are interesting and some that are simplistic like Ubuntu (I'm using Garuda though). It's a wonderful move to go from the bloat of a Windows machine, the mild background frustration of dealing with some of my writing files opening with the wrong program, and the constant insistence on having programs that I don't want that are embedded in the Windows OS, like OneDrive and Microsoft Office 365.

Downsides

Unfortunately, I can't give you the reasons I switched without also giving you the downsides of doing it. There are only a couple but they still exist.

First, some games on Linux just plain don't fucking work. This isn't about Anti-Cheat games, this is that some games on Linux are just fucking broken because of either the GPU driver or the Dev. For instance, I bought Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth a couple months ago when it was on sale to play it for a review, a normal thing I do for games. When I downloaded it and started to play. It looked like this.

If you can't quite tell because of whatever reason, the entire level textures don't exist. Objects, sure. People, sure. But the level itself? Nope. It seems this is a thing that is just happening to this game when played on Linux and might eventually be fixed with a Nvidia GPU update (now I’m wishing I had bought an AMD GPU) but until then, I can't play it on Linux. This has lead me to the very very unfortunate reality that I am going to have to either wait for a maybe possible fix for this issue, or just play the game on the Windows drive I still have left. This fucking sucks as a decision. I want to play the game because I think it would be a good game to review and am very curious if it has improved on my gripes with Remake. But I have no other choice. So now I've realized there are a couple games I'm just gonna have to run in Windows.

This also applies when it comes to games Launchers. Now I know there are ways to get most of them, and their games, to work rather well. But in my experience, the launchers I've used are all finicky as fuck. For instance, the Ubiconnect Launcher is down right broken on Linux, even going through all the instructions online for how to install it through separate software. Which is to be expected since it technically wasn't made for it. But I was trying to run the new Assassins Creed on Linux, because I'm an easy bitch who will pay the 17 bucks for a month of a subscription for a single game, and it just kept freezing at start up. So this lead me to having to run this also on Windows. Which sucks ass. (I also never ended up completing the game and I’ll go over why in a future article… eventually)

The Epic Launcher is also important for Unreal plugins as I've covered above but it's still crazy how I just can't get new plug ins easily without it. The result I've found is to just install it on my windows drive, and then copy the files over to my Linux drive and rebuild unreal using a terminal command. This isn't the end of the world but it does suck and I wish Epic would just support Linux directly for their launcher. Unreal is officially supported, why not the launcher?

There's also just learning about all the frustrating to understand console commands. As you get used to it everything gets significantly easier and you start to learn a lot more about how computers work in general. Yet, it's incredibly intimidating. Thankfully, my distro has the ability to, in the terminal, auto fill in certain words and remember the prior things you have used in the entire time you've had your machine. It's this great little feature that really helps with learning. I believe multiple distros have this feature and you can almost definitely get it in the ones that don't have it, but distros like Ubuntu don't have it by default and that sucks ass.

When I was going between distros I had the frustration of dealing with this terminal stuff a lot as different distro bases also have different keywords. So mine uses pacman for a lot of terms but some use sudo. It's this small tiny thing that can make things frustrating when looking stuff up.

Overall, the problems with switching to Linux exist and are frustrating. They can be intimidating and make you want to just give up. But if you push through, they really aren't that bad.

The Conclusion

Listen, I'm not saying everyone should switch to Linux. Far from it, I think there are many who shouldn't because of how disconnected they are from how a computer works, but there's a fuck ton of people who should switch. Gaming on Linux is so much easier now, developing is easy, writing is easy, so much has improved. The downsides just don't outweigh the positives.

Switching to Linux allows you, as a user, to separate yourself from the Monopoly that is Windows and without pushing into the overpriced world of Mac. It allow you to customize more, to fuck around with large parts of the computer that the other OS’s refuse to let you do, and it allows you to not have to worry that the company that makes the OS you use will just decide one day to stop supporting it and try to force you to upgrade to its new version. Maybe through a little popup on the bottom right that says that "your system qualifies for a ....11 upgrade! Do it now?".

In short. Don't upgrade to ....11, if you are at all knowledgeable of how computers work or are interested in learning and are willing to get frustrated then you should switch to Linux. I use Garuda but you might want to go with something less gaming specific, maybe Ubuntu, or Mint. Look some stuff up, find a distro that interests you, and then give it a try. I promise you're capable of making the switch. Even if you have to keep a windows partition around. I believe in you.

Meow,

Cat

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