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6 months agoYeah, I don’t fully understand why Nvidia cards have this problem on first setup with so many distros. On Windows, the default display driver can at least boot with reduced resolution on most cards made in the last 15 years until you install proper drivers. It seems like the Linux kernel and common desktop environments ought to be able to do the same.
Maybe this is better in the 6.x kernel, I haven’t tried it. I’m not too much of a tinkerer, so the bleeding edge doesn’t interest me. I just want a good shell, POSIX for personal coding projects, and the ability to play games on Steam. Mint is great for that once you get past the initial display driver issues.
Steam + Proton works for most games, but there are still rough edges that you need to be prepared to deal with. In my experience, it’s typically older titles and games that use anti-cheat that have the most trouble. Most of the time it just works, I even ran the Battle.net installer as an external Steam game with Proton enabled and was able to play Blizzard titles right away.
The biggest gap IMO is VR. If you have a VR headset that you use on your desktop and it’s important to you, stay on Windows. There is no realistic solution for VR integration in Linux yet. There are ways that you can kinda get something to work with ALVR, but it’s incredibly janky and no dev will support it. There are rumors Steam Link is being ported to Linux, nothing official yet though.
On balance, I’m incredibly happy with Mint since I switched last year. However, I do a decent amount of personal software development, and I’ve used Linux for 2 decades as a professional developer. I wouldn’t say the average Windows gamer would be happy dealing with the rough spots quite yet, but it’s like 95% of the way there these days. Linux has really grown up a lot in the last few years.