Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I’m pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I’m not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.
My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I’m generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don’t like it due to the maintenance of it.
Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I’m fairly sure they all work decently since I’ve tried on my laptop.
I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.
Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.
I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.
Pop OS worked straight out of the box with the Nvidia driver build BUT it’s using an old version of Gnome desktop environment so doesn’t have support for HDR or VRR. Pop is based on Ubuntu so all the Debian and Ubuntu terminal commands will be familiar.
Fedora is leading edge and so long as you opt in for non-open source drivers works with Nvidia and runs HDR and VRR in KDE (haven’t used the Gnome version).
Haven’t tried any other distros but Bazzite seems well recommended.
Lutris is the recommended software for non-steam games. If you search for that and Sims/EA you should be able to find out if it’ll work for you.
I only use windows now for sim racing and Vr, but I also don’t play online games with anti-cheat. Linux seems pretty stable and I’ve found it easy to use.
I second bazzite. I tried arch since I heard it was so customizable that you gained performance but after numerous headaches of tring to connect to the internet, downloading packages one by one without even knowing what I was doing since Im still not even that familiar with the linux ecosystem, i just downloaded bazzite, used rufus to put it on a key, and it worked first try no hassle. Im a bazzite boi now. Im actually impressed with how well nvdia is slowly becoming useable too on that distro, half a year ago you couldnt even use wayland and had to still use x11 but now it works (DISCLAIMER FIDDLING IS REQUIRED WITH NVDIA I HEARD THAT WITH AMD IT JUST WORKS)
Does pop then use SNAP because then I don’t really want to touch it. Imo. SNAP is so slow and bloated I don’t want it on my system if I can avoid it.
Usually deb or flatpak if you use the popshop