Similar for me but I mostly play single player small studio games/no mods, and on Steam/Linux there are enough "out of the box working" games to fill all the time I still have left for gaming.

It's not perfect, but I anyway had the computer for other reasons and may need it for the other reasons again after which I would need to re-setup anything. Bazite default/w. SteamOS UI install + a minor number of setting changes (1) and a login to steam and it's ready to go again. Can't complain. Just which the SteamOS UI version would also do the same background download+apply of updates the main versions or distros like Fedora Silverblue do.

While not quite yet console experience, for many games it really is not "that" far away. (For some other games very much very far away, don't expect any competitive PvP games or games with real world money related online economy working. To some degree it's not even about anti-cheat not working on Linux. It's about many such games struggling making it work on Windows and having no room to bother with another platform, and dishonest managers potentially using "all Linux fault" as an excuse when the anti-cheating strategy failed on Windows where most of their players where... (happened before))

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(1): Mainly SteamOS UI is made for Handhelds and as such has some bad defaults for more powerful desktops (which likely will change soon). I'm only couch gaming on it, hence close to everything else just stays with default settings. Sure it's not fancy customized Linux or most maximal privacy preserving Linux. But it's in the "good enough" area of settings, privacy and similar, which Windows in many aspects isn't anymore. No fighting windows forcing things down your throat, weather it's Copilot, the nasty way it tries to deceive you into using it's online drive, etc.

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Oh and as minor tip: You can majorly micro optimize kernels, schedulers, drivers etc. If you don't need to, then don't bother. That is where unexpected perf. regressions, issues after updates etc. come in. Like you still find reports about Bazzite being slower then windows due to them having don that in the past and having run into an unexpected perf. regression on some hardware without realizing. I mean it is fun to tinker. But I'm in the "please mostly just work" age by now.

> Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again

oh man, do I have some really bad news for you:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/chart/SNDK

I typically install both systems on the same disk, different partitions. Then work with additional SSDs strictly for game storage. Only annoying bit is that some games _need_ to be on C, but very few in my experience. If you have enough space to shrink your Windows partition, that could work without waiting for an SSD. Though I guess the one OS per disk setup is ultimately cleaner.

Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.

I'm a little gun-shy of getting another Dell after two bad machines in a row (two separate models with swollen batteries < 3 years old), but I'll admit the 14 looks nice now that they've brought back the physical function keys!

I had an RX 5700XT at launch, that was about the most painful... but 6mo later it worked fine... But by then I did switch back to Windows because I couldn't deal with the day to day issues... A year later, I went back to Linux and haven't looked back though.

For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.

This sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome.

If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members.

Unforgivable btw

Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell

The 'upgrade to next version of ubuntu' has gotten pretty good these days.

The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable.

For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home

The laptop is 18 years old, Ubuntu was installed in 2017.

Probably not often I'd say, but at least there were some games I played with wine where some executables to apply mods also ran in wine and worked, I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering, sometimes just a strange combination of things is needed to get something to work. But that's actually long ago, these days everything just works in Steam instead

I use MO2 on Linux through Steam's Proton runtime, to play TTW (Fallout NV mod). Works fine. The TTW installer did require an older Proton version though.

Yeah. I recently tried to run an auxiliary program (Mass Effect save editor because the character creator sucks) on Linux which was only written for Windows. Getting it running in the same Proton "space" (bottle?) was not an enormous challenge, but it was very far from "just works".