I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.
All these posts about Linux have me curious, especially because I just updated my hardware and have enough parts leftover to make a new PC. My main PC still has to run Windows because I use Ableton for music, but you guys are making me want to make the 2nd PC Linux just for shits and giggles. Especially if it plays well with Nvidia, my old card is a 2070.
“Working well” is relative. You can make Nvidia work, but there are some caveats. Currently, there’s driver 535 and 545, and both have different quirks. Neither works particularly well with Wayland, certain applications can flicker when they need longer to draw than the display’s refresh rate.
So, when I tried with the 3080, I eventually gave up and used X11. X11 has a technical limitation though, and it prevents VRR to work with multiple displays. That’s because X11 combines all displays to a single virtual “screen”, so a full screen application on one display can’t set the refresh rate of that display independently. This isn’t a problem with single monitor setups though.
As I tested Baldur’s Gate 3, I found that choosing Vulkan in the launcher resulted in about half the performance compared to Windows, and DirectX 11 (which ironically gets translated to Vulkan by DXVK) had graphical glitches like black boxes instead of houses etc.
Knowing all that and if you’re willing to experiment with driver versions, it’s not that horrible, it’s just not as straightforward as AMD Radeon on Linux (or Nvidia on Windows for that matter).
Your old PC is better than my current one, lol.
Nvidia doesn’t like Linux desktop users. The situation is getting better, but it’s still not great. If you stick to the mainstream distros (Ubuntu, Fedora) and officially supported game stores (Steam), you should be totally fine. Other distros and game launchers can be a pain, how much depends on how experienced you are with computers (required skills ranging from “editing text files” to “knowing the difference between DirectX and Vulkan”).
If you have a leftover PC, you could consider taking a look at one of the SteamOS forks and turn your PC into a living room console/media center, especially if you have a decent collection of Steam games already. After installation, you can control the entire system with just a controller, and with a little messing about you could add streaming services such as Netflix to it as well.