Everything has gone way smoother than I expected. ...The hardest part has been recovering my steam account.
I used to be a very avid gamer but fell out of the hobby more and more as my family grew. Gaming takes a surprisingly large amount of free time and I found myself only having smaller blocks of time to play. As a parent console gaming fit our lifestyle much better... but now my kids are getting older and we are starting to have a lot of fun gaming together as a family... so time to build out a new rig. But the thing is that my last rig was a Win7 based machine and when Win8 came out I committed to Linux and vowed that MS would be banished from my house. SO it was time to dive into the world of high end gaming on Linux.
- What did not work: Distros that are theoretically tailored to gaming
- What worked: Vanilla Ubuntu with one manually installed driver
I started with Pop!_OS because it has a great reputation and comes with Nvidia drivers out of the box and Steam available as a one click install from the Pop app store.The only thing I had to do to get it working was 1. Disable secure boot and 2. manually install drivers for the wireless network card. It was a very smooth install and it recognized the NVidia 1650 with no problem. Installing Steam was one click and everything worked. I abandoned Pop!_OS because it was not stable. it had power management issues and woudl loose it's mind everytime the system went to sleep. On wake up it would either loose the mouse or loose the video (black screen)
I tried Drauger OS... people said the installer sucks and it does... but it was not that bad. Everything was buggy and glitchy. I fucked off quick
I said 'back to basics' and tried vanilla Ubuntu 20.4. It was super painless. I checked the 'use propietary drivers' check box so it would install base Nvidia drivers and installed. Pretty much everything worked out of the box... running apt update got me very current drivers for the 1650 and it runs rock solid. I had been expecting to have to fuck with conf files but no... Nvidia was painless. I had to monkey with divers for the wireless card but I knew that going in because Ubuntu does not have the drivers in the default repo. Steam and Wine all went in with one click from the standard repos. All in all it was quick and painless.
...and then I realized Valve/Steam were going to be bitches. It took me like 6 hours of bullshit to get back into my steam account. I can't blame that on linux though... overall it was a smooth experience. Every game in my resurrected Steam library is a couple years old but so far things are running very well.
ps - The 1650 is pretty much a place holder for now until things calm the fuck down with the current gen stuff.
Everything has gone way smoother than I expected. ...The hardest part has been recovering my steam account.
I used to be a very avid gamer but fell out of the hobby more and more as my family grew. Gaming takes a surprisingly large amount of free time and I found myself only having smaller blocks of time to play. As a parent console gaming fit our lifestyle much better... but now my kids are getting older and we are starting to have a lot of fun gaming together as a family... so time to build out a new rig. But the thing is that my last rig was a Win7 based machine and when Win8 came out I committed to Linux and vowed that MS would be banished from my house. SO it was time to dive into the world of high end gaming on Linux.
- **What did not work:** Distros that are theoretically tailored to gaming
- **What worked:** Vanilla Ubuntu with one manually installed driver
I started with Pop!_OS because it has a great reputation and comes with Nvidia drivers out of the box and Steam available as a one click install from the Pop app store.The only thing I had to do to get it working was 1. Disable secure boot and 2. manually install drivers for the wireless network card. It was a very smooth install and it recognized the NVidia 1650 with no problem. Installing Steam was one click and everything worked. I abandoned Pop!_OS because it was not stable. it had power management issues and woudl loose it's mind everytime the system went to sleep. On wake up it would either loose the mouse or loose the video (black screen)
I tried Drauger OS... people said the installer sucks and it does... but it was not that bad. Everything was buggy and glitchy. I fucked off quick
I said 'back to basics' and tried vanilla Ubuntu 20.4. It was super painless. I checked the 'use propietary drivers' check box so it would install base Nvidia drivers and installed. Pretty much everything worked out of the box... running apt update got me very current drivers for the 1650 and it runs rock solid. I had been expecting to have to fuck with conf files but no... Nvidia was painless. I had to monkey with divers for the wireless card but I knew that going in because Ubuntu does not have the drivers in the default repo. Steam and Wine all went in with one click from the standard repos. All in all it was quick and painless.
...and then I realized Valve/Steam were going to be bitches. It took me like 6 hours of bullshit to get back into my steam account. I can't blame that on linux though... overall it was a smooth experience. Every game in my resurrected Steam library is a couple years old but so far things are running very well.
ps - The 1650 is pretty much a place holder for now until things calm the fuck down with the current gen stuff.
(post is archived)