We see the nearly 33-year-old OS’s market share growing 31.3 percent from June 2023, when we last reported on Linux market share, to February. Since June, Linux usage has mostly increased gradually. Overall, there’s been a big leap in usage compared to five years ago. In February 2019, Linux was reportedly on 1.58 percent of desktops globally.
Gaming support on Linux is in a really nice place right now. However, if gaming is the only reason you use a laptop, you should stick with Windows, at least for the time being.
To add, if you are on the fence for this reason I’d do an 80/20 dual boot. Buy a second hard drive it doesn’t have to be very big, then move your personal files to Linux and use that as a daily driver and have the second drive to just use for nothing but games that won’t run on Linux but you really want to play/friends want to play with you. You’ll find that you rarely have to use the second boot but the second drive will cover your bases for the edge cases, 256gb or even less should be just fine for the second drive since you should only have 1-2 games that won’t play nice with Linux. I wouldn’t partition unless you have a massive drive with space to spare it’s just really annoying to get the space back into one portion if you decide to go back to a single partition.
I use Linux daily within my job, it’s just I’m curious which OS people find the best for gaming (I run servers etc but want to see what people find is the least painful for gaming).
Basically, come the evening after work, I CBA to spend ages configuring stuff to then be able to play as time is precious in the evening
I use mint and barely had to do much trouble shooting and once everything was working how I wanted it didn’t break for me I just boot up and play, the things I had to trouble shoot were getting my headphones to work and my Logitech mouse keybindings but they were both 5min searches to find programs to install and fix the problems, if you use Linux for work it will probably be even easier.
Got a desktop, and can support dual boot (I partitioned my SSD at the start to do it so I could test stuff out).
In terms of an os, which would you recommend
If you mean which Linux distribution I’d recommend for a gaming setup, I’d recommend Ubuntu. Many believe it to be the best for gaming on Linux. It also has a large community, so finding support (should you need it) won’t be a problem.