I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade now full time, and somewhat before that too. I don't have a single Windows machine any more. My laptops are running Arch, my wife's personal Laptop runs Mint, her work machine is Windows because it has to, my work machine is Ubuntu, and my 5yo plays Minecraft on an Arch + Gnome laptop.

7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.

Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.

My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.

The case that this is true is only if you don't have an Nvidia GPU or don't play D3D12 games.

I tried it, discovered that Nvidia has a known regression that causes anywhere up to 25% lower performance compared to Windows in GPU limited games in D3D12, and immediately went back to Windows.

I'll never understand why people keep championing Linux for gaming when it has such a severe regression on the most common gaming GPU vendor. Steam says 75%. An Nvidia employee even stated that the fix is not trivial so they're not committing to a timeline for a fix. This is a year+ old issue. They're never fixing it because it doesn't affect CUDA.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/164#issuecommen...

I hear this all around and I am myself running GNU/Linux almost all the time, but running games on Steam on my default OS, which is a Debian with KDE currently, that is more miss than hit. I even know someone who has almost the same hardware, also runs a GNU/Linux system and for them almost all games work using Proton. For me however they don't. I already tried proprietary graphics card drivers instead of the ones that come with the OS for amdgpu, HWE kernel, another distro, using Steam installer downloaded from website ... nothing seems to fix the issue. When I click on the big green "Play" button in Steam, for many times it loads for a moment, and the button turns into a blue "stop" button, but then just turns back into a green "play" button, never starting the game. Mind, some games work, like Stardew Valley for example. But I think those are mostly already made to work cross platform.

I have no idea what I can still try, and it annoys me, that for most games I still have to reboot into Windows to play them. I seem to have had more luck following guides for using WINE for specific games in the past, when I made games like StarCraft 2 work better than on Windows, than I have had with Steam and Proton so far.

So anecdote. It is not smooth sailing for everyone yet, unfortunately, and I don't know what the issue is.

For me Proton works sometimes, but I've had much more success with the third party Glorious Eggroll versions that include the Microsoft Codecs used by many games for in-game video.

Same. Finally no reason to boot Windows on any machine.

I’ve been wanting to do this for years on an old (and severely underpowered) MacBook Pro which I use with Windows exclusively for Games.

Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.

One thing I wonder about with people moving to linux is whether "it works like windows" can act as a safe and comfortable landing point, but then how many people explore and prefer the options that they then have access to.

One aspect MS has been criticized for over the past few versions of windows is that they are opinionated about how the base windows UI operates and looks for a very large number of users. One of the things I find interesting on the subreddits for some distros is a lot of posts is showing off how they've customized things, so you can nudge people towards the theming support or panel components you can swap out, or that you can have drastically different DEs with different operation models yet handle the same applications.

Yes, over the past 15 years I bought at least a dozen used thinkpads of the X series (x201, x220, x230 and x1). Most of them are now with other family members and friends (they are now also Linux Desktop user). And I still use 3 of them. One daily, the other weekly, and the 3rd for conferences. Beside that, I am also a fan of the T and yet of the P series. And I have a small collection of thinkpads with the big blue logo from the A and R series, but that's mostly just for fun.

>It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers.

Wrong. IT IS 100% stored in the UEFI firmware, specifically ACPI tables, MSDM field. Only if that exists, it is then verified on-line for activation to make sure the license is genuine and matches the device ID you're referring to for witch the license was sold(typically for OEM) or if it's portable.[1]

On linux you should be retrieve the license via something like:

  sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

  sudo acpidump | grep MSDM

Well, it's been 2 decades so things do have changed.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/activate-windows...

https://superuser.com/questions/1575650/how-does-a-windows-d...

Windows XP has been launched 23 years ago. Things may have changed inbetween.

I make a note of both in listings where that is applicable.

If it's tied to the hardware, there is no valid reason why the repair shop wouldn't be able to activate it -- a repair shop will use the same public license servers as consumers will.

Btw ACPI is a specification, not a separate piece of hardware. ACPI tables are stored in BIOS nvram, there is no other place for it to go.

How is that worse when the key is bound to the hardware and non-transferable anyway?

In case of OEM, the license is never directly owned by the owner of the machine; the license is tied to the hardware, and you're selling it on with its license key attached. If you activate Windows using a bought license, that license does not get copied into the hardware.