Switching (back) to Linux

August 06, 2025 godot, linux, personal, rant, unity Comments

As I very subtly (😅) hinted at back in the previous post, I have indeed switched to Linux this year. This March, to be more precise. And actually back to Linux, as I did use Linux as my daily OS in the early 2000s. In fact, I remember choosing a Radeon GPU when I got a new main PC in 2012 specifically for the better AMD Linux support compared to NVIDIA. (Which is the still case today. But we'll get to that!) Ironically I ended up not installing Linux on that machine after all, and stayed (relatively) happily with Windows 7 and finally Windows 10.

Anyway, I finally got myself a much needed upgrade: a new desktop PC last year — and even though I had at that point been using Linux Mint on an old Macbook Air over a year — I didn't anticipate switching from Windows on my main rig. And thus I ended up with a NVIDIA GPU.. 😛🤦‍♂️ The new PC has Windows 11; surely I'll eventually start to tolerate it, right? Right..? 🥲

Not quite! Due to the ever increasing enshittification of Windows, I had been growing more and more weary of it (and Microsofts antics in general), up to the point I decided to try an experiment:

Could I switch to Linux and still keep doing my work, personal projects — maybe even gaming? 🤔 Well, only one way to find out!

The Linux Experiment

So, in March I bought a new 2TB M.2 SSD, dropped it in and installed Linux. I'm still keeping the dual-boot with Windows 11 for the time being, as a backup. (Plus I still have my Lightroom photo collection on the Windows-side, have to look for a Linux-alternative at some point. Adobe in all their kindness terminated my perpetual Photoshop CS6-license 🙄, but so far they have left LS alone... But I digress.)

Despite some issues and annoyances, for the most part my experiment has been successful and quite refreshing! No more AI bullshit (Recall, Copilot — I mean what the hell!? 🤯), spying/privacy concerns or ads. No more forced Microsoft accounts & ninja-updates resetting my OS settings/adjustments! 🎉 I can choose. What to install, when to update, etc. What an outlandish concept: I am in charge of my PC and OS, not Microsoft — the way it should be. As I said: refreshing. Liberating.

I don't use Arch, btw. 😉 I did my fair share of distro-hopping back in 2002-2009 or so, and eventually settled on Debian and Ubuntu -based distros (after trying lots of things like Red Hat / Fedora, Slackware, SUSE and even Gentoo). With recent positive experiences using Mint on various older systems, that's what I went with for the main rig too. It's been fairly stable, and Cinnamon is nice if not the most modern looking of desktops. But it's well thought out and simple. The way updates are handled is 👌 (no nagging, no forced reboots). Still rocking the 6.8 kernel, so by default Mint is not ideal for very new hardware! 6.14 HWE is now available, though.

Anyway. I probably can't be bothered to distro-hop much, but I'd still like to check out KDE at some point, seems really pleasant these days. And I used to prefer Gnome 2 over KDE 2.x and 3.x (IIRC Plasma was 4.x and it was in rather rough shape back then). 🤔

Not perfect, but experiment will carry on...

After the switch, I got my personal projects (such as the movie collection -web app and the static site generator for this website) quickly running on Linux. Godot Engine naturally works well, did the AudioSplitter and related benchmarks 100% in Linux. Funnily enough: my sitegen — a .NET-app written in C# — works way faster in Linux! Generating this site takes a couple of seconds in Windows, and about 0.15 seconds in Linux. 😂 In fact Linux seems more efficient in general and uses much less RAM than Windows does in comparable scenarios. Which is nice.

Now Unity (Engine) on the other hand, for my day job.. The editor is usable but it has annoying quirks and feature omissions (such as setting the editor UI scale), so I do prefer the Windows-version. OpenGL rendering has occasional issues and Vulkan isn't perfect either (freezes Unity occasionally after waking up from suspend; might be NVIDIA related, too). At least with Unity 2022, haven't tried anything newer. Despite the annoyances I've kept on using the inferior version just because I enjoy time spent in Linux more. In fact, I reckon I've booted into Windows less than 10 times since March, and even then only to quickly check or adjust something. 🤷‍♂️

In general there have been some other issues here and there, for example I cannot read my fan RPM speeds in Linux due to Secure Boot (I guess I'll disable it should I fully get rid of Windows in the future). But nothing major and/or painful enough to make me go back to Windows.

What about gaming?

Now I haven't really been gaming on PC in a long while (as evident by the now-mercifully-retired 2012 desktop 😅), but did get back into it last year with the new PC. As one does, in my experience. I picked a mid-tier GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti OC 16 GB), but of course now that I have played more, should have picked a 4070.. Or a Radeon, rather, for Linux purposes. Maybe I'll switch some day.

One of the most interesting aspects of this "Linux experiment" has been testing gaming. These days — with Proton, DXVK, VKD3D and friends — the Linux gaming landscape is a bit different than what it was when I last used the OS. 🙂 I find it fascinating, that one can play Windows-only games on Linux with native-like performance (or sometimes even better, on AMD-based hardware!) with the D3D → Vulkan translation going on. Of course, not everything works and NVIDIA drivers take a big performance hit (15-30%, can be even bigger in DX12-games) compared to Windows, but still impressive. Who remembers the days of Tux Racer and only handful of other playable Linux 3D games? I do. Anti-cheat is another topic (although I'd say it's more of a developer/publisher issue than Linux-issue), but doesn't matter to me personally as I don't play any of those games.

Even with the infamous NVIDIA Linux-driver performance hit, I've been happily playing games, such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance, The Witcher 3, Dead Island 2, DOOM (2016) & Eternal. All but one of them worked great. Only Witcher 3 gave me some trouble with the ray-tracing DX12 perf. being especially bad (granted, I have 4060 Ti...) and freezing frequently. DX11 works much better. The new DOOM games use Vulkan and especially DOOM 2016 ran like a dream w/ settings maxed: rock solid 180 FPS (max on my monitor)! 🔥 Thus I enjoyed the game a whole lot more than I did first playing on PS4 back in 2017. 👍️ Shout-out to ProtonDB, a useful site for checking out Linux-compatibility on lots of games.

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So, that's the current situation. I've spent 98% of my time in Linux since March, and even with some occasional issues, I don't expect to switch back to Windows any time soon. Perhaps if some must-have game I buy doesn't work at all, or some work-related emergency requires it, I'll have to boot into Windows, but so far it's not been the case.

I have casteth away the shackles of Windows once more and it feels good! ⛓️💪😬

If you have an older PC with Windows 10 fast approaching its end-of-life (and don't especially fancy updating to telemetry-ridden Windows 11), I do recommend checking out Linux as an alternative.

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Anybody else fed up with Windows-bullshit, AI or otherwise? Tell me in the comments! Feel free to scold me on my questionable GPU choice, too! 😄 And — as always — thank you for reading this far!