I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play FIFA 17 on his computer. After 5 whole hours of troubleshooting we were able to get FIFA running smoothly with some issues. Next, he wanted to play Roblox. I guided him through the process of installing Waydroid and libhoudini, only to discover that Roblox would run at 10 FPS. With Minecraft, it wasn’t any better. It took us 1 hour to get it working (not skill issue, he wanted to play cracked through Prism Launcher). Now, he wants to go back to Windows 10. I have already told him about dual boot, but he has only 256GB of storage and he wants to play a lot of games. What should I do? Install Windows to his laptop, install some other Linux distro, or try to convince him more about dual boot? Thanks in advance and sorry for the essay.
Linux and online multi-player games aren’t friends. Steam makes up for a lot. Tools like Heroic can help. Lots of games still don’t work.
Minecraft should work fine if you use the Java version. The other one won’t work. If you only get 10fps in Minecraft, I’m guessing you either ran the Windows version of Java Minecraft on Linux, or your friend is missing GPU drivers for some reason.
All of these issues can be fixed, but I doubt your friend is interested in fixing them. Probably best to go for a dual boot, unless you want to be one of those Linux users. Would also be helpful for determining if the laptop just has a weak GPU or if there’s something wrong with the Linux install.
Personally, I found the install steps for Windows 11 to be the best way to convince people not to use it. It takes forever, asks a million questions about privacy invasion, then gets bitchy if you try to use a local account. With the next update, it’ll also record your screen constantly to train some kind of AI! Setup also takes forever for some weird reason, it takes like three times as long to install and update Windows as it takes Linux.
256GB won’t fit a lot of games, no matter what OS you use. Check if the laptop can be upgraded with a second PCIe drive. If it can’t, check if it has a USB 4 or Thunderbolt port; external SSDs hooked up to USB4 or TB will be almost as fast as normal PCIe drives and offer a whole bunch of storage for a Steam library and such. If your friend only has USB 3 ports, USB 3 ports are also pretty fast if you get a drive with a 10Gbps USB logo.
For your Linux use case, you can configure both operating systems to use the same SSD for game storage if you use NTFS, and use it on other computers as well if that ever comes UP. You could even keep a Linux partition on the SSD (Windows too, I guess, but I don’t really trust Windows on removable storage}.