3d ago

Could I theoretically keep gaming on windows 10, while doing any other work (banking etc) on linux?

Maybe a dumb question, the biggest reason I can't fully move is i do enjoy VR and sim racing, both of which I've seen have limited linux support still, and though I enjoy figuring things out and fixing stuff, I don't want to always be tinkering instead of just racing/gaming.

Would it be possible or safe to keep gaming on win 10 until it's totally not supported, but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?

I did just order a 2 tb drive to put linux mint on, to give gaming on linux another try. I haven't had a linux install for a few years now and kind of miss it. But i do wonder if I'll need to reinstall all my games again or can just access them off the existing hard drives (I know, NTFS formatted wont be optimum for linux).

If I'm in the wrong spot to ask, please inform.

59 comments

I did just that with Windows 7 long past its support date. All my gaming was in Windows, all my work and everything else in Linux. You can do that in 10 too and in fact it will probably become easier for you after support ends, because there will be no new Windows Updates to trash your bootloader.
Edit: Don't run programs from ntfs drives, icky stuff can happen. Just reinstall your games in Linux when you play them there. Gaming is also really good in Linux now, I'm primarily a gamer and do it all in Linux!

You can dual boot both Windows and Linux, and the reboot to Windows when you want to play games, and reboot to Linux for other stuff.
A bit of work, and extra space needed, but you can easily do that.
- If you need to dual boot, you should also use a dedicated disk to prevent Windows from deleting your Linux. It has been known to happen
- If you have the hardware for it you can run windows in a VM with GPU passthrough to a 2nd GPU
  
  Having done this myself, multiple times (I write a lot of graphics code and like being able to test stuff on AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs on multiple operating systems without having to switch physical machines), it's a huge hassle and frankly if you just need a Windows machine to play games on occasionally a dual boot setup is way more convenient, not to mention less buggy.
  
  VM's for gaming is not the best use case, lots of gpu needed....

Would it be possible or safe to keep gaming on win 10 until it's totally not supported, but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
That's how many of us upgraded to Linux.
- I started off using linux as my main and Windows 10 vm for some software (Visual Studio) that wouldn't run on linux. Then I just used linux full time because I don't need those applications anymore.

Been through the same situation. Find a distro that you like, any decently user friendly distro will handle setting up the dual boot for you.
No need to reinstall games etc, just make sure you partition has enough storage for linux and pick that part during the install.
After that start slowly transitioning your games to linux. In steam toggle the compatibility setting, this will try to run proton over your games. Then only boot into windows when its necessary for VR/online games.
- Going to try this !

Sorry I'm here not to answer, but actually ask a question as I've recently-ish moved to Linux basically permanently and I plan on focusing a bit more on simracing in the future: what's the issue with Linux? Is it peripherals like steering wheel lacking drivers?
- Along with hardware issues, where you may not have access to the software for the wheel or it might just not work at all. Games can also just not work. I know LMU doesn't work, ACC can be a bit spotty at times as well. iRacing seems to be broken.
  Unfortunately sim racing on Linux is not a good experience
  
  Thanks for the reply. I see, if a game doesn't run without random crashes or bugs it will likely cost you the race when those happens... hopefully by the time I'm ready, the games are too!
- Apparently yes, especially for any non mainstream wheels. Also not great vr support overall
  
  I see, thanks! I'll have to keep that in mind when shopping for HW then. I'm lucky I'm not into VR, so that's one less issue for me

That's what I'm going to do. My main game is Elite Dangerous and between VR, HOSAS, a future IR Track, and all the helper programs Linux just doesn't keep up. As we approach October the gaming rig is going to be isolated. Looks like I'll be learning how to make subnets to wall it off completely.
- I've got several friends that game 100% in Linux, and play E:D with flight sticks and shit. Not into the game so I don't know anything about the specifics, but seems perfectly doable...
  
  It seems to be hit or miss. I hear people online have no issues with HOTAS/HOSAS/other sim gear on Linux. But I could never really get mine to work 100% correctly.
  Plus it was a lot more fiddly every time I wanted to play my games than windows. Idk I just keep windows for my sims and do everything else on Linux
- I love ED also! And vr it's so fun.
  Ah. That's a good plan. I hate having to change to 11 and give MS the satisfaction
  
  I'm just not going to do it now that they are moving to always-online membership required bullshit.
  Fuck'em. SteamOS will be along shortly, I can hold out until that works well enough.

You CAN but it's a matter of time before you'll have to upgrade to 11 or go 100% Linux because drivers and game clients eventually stop supporting EoL operating systems.

simple windows 10 is not the best idea in some cases. its gonna cry and whine everyday about update, and sooner some of the launchers are going to ask for a newer version. if you are serious about 10 tho, i would recommend 10 ltsc, which is gonna give you plenty more years of security updates, and has a lot less bloat.

It's a bit advanced, but I have a GPU in my server that doubles as a home theater / couch gaming thing. I PCI passthrough the GPU to a windows VM where I get near baremetal performamce.
It runs ontop of proxmox and has a bunch of containers and VMs for my other stuff.
Currently, the linux part is headless, as in I don't need a screen for the linux stuff on there, but it'd be a matter of hooking up the onboards graphics to another monitor input.
I like the idea because unlike dualboot, it all runs at the same time.
My other desktop's mobo has issues with vfio and iommu groups so I can't really do this on that other machine, but for my next build, good iommu groups will be a deciding factor.
I'd love to have a similar setup for my desktop and just switch monitor inputs or KB/mouse USB switch between both.

Tip, if you go with dual booting, use the windows boot manager and not a linux bootloader. If you use a linux bootloader be prepared to have to fix it with a rescue disk every now and again since Windows will fuck it up with updates sometimes.
- Not saying it doesn't happen, but I'm triple booting Windows 10, Windows 11, and Linux for a few years now with GRUB, and Windows never broke it.
  
  It doesn't seem to always happen. But I dual/triple/multi booted on all kinds of machines over the years, and I can't tell you how many times a Windows update killed grub and I had to manually fix it

You would need to reinstall your games on Linux, to answer your question. Steam and Heroic Games Launcher make this process quite painless, but yeah, still gotta do it. NTFS supports ignoring upper/lowercase, whereas Linux (and other Unix-y systems) do not, at least by default. This can cause all kinds of weird issues down the line.
Now that said, one thing you could do is make a new steam library on Windows to a drive or partition formatted as ExFAT, then use Steam on Windows to transfer your games to that new library. If you did that, I think you could simply add that steam library to your instance of steam running on Linux Mint. Combined with setting steam to use Proton for any Windows game (it's just one checkbox to do so), I think maybe you'd be in business.
- Hosting the games on NTFS and loading them into Steam from there under Linux is possible. It is inconsistent and a hasssle, though.
  I will say the setup the OP suggests is totally doable, but when I've had it that way it turned out to be easier to just do everything else on Windows than to flip back and forth, so after I updated some hardware I haven't been on a hurry to set up Linux again.
  I'd say it's more convenient to do this long term if you have two PCs. Maybe a laptop for Linux work and a desktop with a powerful GPU for gaming. Being able to have both on sleep and quickly switching back and forth is less likely to make you (well, me, at least) lazy than having to reboot each time.
  
  I mean, personally I do all of my gaming on Linux and fully removed Windows from my gaming desktop in 2022 and haven't looked back. My VR headset is a Vive, so it works just fine with SteamVR on Linux, no additional issues there, even while using Proton.
  I was just thinking exFAT would work more consistently for a steam library under Linux than NTFS and it would also not introduce any issues on Windows.

Yes. Dual boot, or even simpler, try running your games in Windows VM in Linux. Performance hit should be minimal.
- Performance hit should be minimal
  Only if you have a second GPU that you can pass through to the VM. Otherwise you're gonna have a bad time.
  Dual boot is the simpler method. A VM is far from simple when it comes to gaming.
  
  You can use one GPU and hot swap it to pass through when booting your windows VM
- I would be surprised if they'd run well in a VM but I'll have to try! I have an AMD fx 8 core and a rtx 580 so I think compatibility wise I'll be good.
  Other games I play a lot are cs2 and board game sim, some pubg and gtav (which i know I'd need to use windows for)
  
  Having had similar hardware and reading about your preferences let me throw some cents in the hat:
  Sim stuff runs mostly ootb. I don't have a fancy rig, but both my G29 and x52 pro work perfectly fine. At most, some games will map the axis wrong, but that's easily fixable (eg. AMS2 swaps clutch and brakes and inverts all axis). The insullary apps such as TrackIR and controller stuff is already available, although not official. There's Oversteer for wheels and GX52 for hotas.
  I don't have a TrackIR device but I've used FacetrackNoIR with the neuralnet face tracker and besides needing a bit of background lighting, it woked fine.
  It's not all perfect and depending on the games, it might need some tinkering. For example Mechwarrior 5 refuses to work properly with my hotas, and when I had a weaker CPU, Beam.ng was unusable with traffic/opponents. Some older titles are a pain to set up, like the older WRC games that had some obscure config files for the mappings. The upside is that you can back up your "fake windows C:" (aka as compatdata folder) once you got everything the way you like it.
  I mostly do office type stuff and vector graphics along with CNC, and the proprietary software I need runs 90% fine on wine/bottles, so I haven't had much of any blocker issues with work stuff.
  I've been running Linux way before proton was a thing, and I'm really happy about how things are moving nowadays. I got used to the gnome workflow and now any other OS feels cumbersome and clunky, but YMMV.
  TL; DR:
  PRO: most sim stuff just works
  CON: some games perform a bit worse
  PRO: most hardware runs OOTB and popular gear have apps for setup and options
  CON: those are unofficial and might not support all bells and whistles
  CON: some games are finnicky to set up, especially with external software addons (eg crewchief, ED companion, TrackIR)
  PRO: you can save your games prefix so all that work is portable/reproducible
  most office stuff is more than adequate for everyday work.
  
  You'll definitely be struggling with that GPU, so maybe that's a no-go.
  
  Yeah gtav might struggle in Linux. ProtonDB shows its a tough config. Dual boot is probably your only option if that's a deal breaker. Sharing my experience, I had a game i was playing that required windows and I was dual booting for a while, as well as a 3d slicer that the only profile for a printer I own is still windows. Everytime windows updated it seemed to have a good chance of wrecking the bootloader. After about the third time that happened I just stopped doing that, wiped windows and ran fedora.
  As of today, I have spent time trying to make that slicer profile work in Linux, got it most of the way there and got frustrated, so instead I repurposed an old laptop that gets powered on only for that one specific printer.
  Every game I play now runs on Linux.
- What VM solution are you using? When I tried to do this on Unraid, I kept running into opengl issues. Being honest i was trying to run a slicer that only had a windows profile.
  
  At the moment, just VirtualBox for simplicity, but have run flat KVM for similar things in the past. It is FAR from ideal, but better than fucking with dual booting for myself. Also breaks a lot with Nvidia hardware.

I see a couple of other comments reccomending exfat; I've had problems with exfat with both the Steam flatpak and the Steam system package. Exfat does not support linux symlinks which are needed for some if not most Steam games to work properly. You will have to re-install your games onto an ext4 or linux-friendly filesystem, for Steam at least.
Emulation and GOG is a different story though. I have both on an exfat drive and I can access and play them with both windows and linux.
In terms of security, you will be at a slight risk using an unsupported os in the future. But hey, some people I know are still on Windows 7, so it isn't a huge risk. As long as you practice basic computer hygene and have an antivirus running (windows defender (easy), malwarebytes (secure), or clamAV (open source) are decent picks) you'll be fine.

I run all my games through the Steam Proton compatibility layer and don’t miss Windows for anything. I don’t play multiplayer games outside of Marvel Rivals though so your mileage may vary. Single player games perform flawlessly.
Try dual booting for that extra piece of mins but if you’re anything like me and only do text editing, gaming, and web browsing on your machine, you might not need to stick to Windows at all.

Absolutely yes. You'd be better buying a dedicated PC for Linux tho.
t. Got a Orange pi 5 MAX with Linux installed. It's tricky to set up, but worths a lot in the end (low power usage while providing a decent performance -- can be used as a "mini server" to host your own personal file server or anything else you'd like while providing a smooth experience for anything your job may require from it.)

but not using it for any shopping etc where sensitive info is being transferred ?
Shopping is done through the browser so it won't matter what OS you're using. If you're concerned about security, Linux probably isn't doing you any favors.
- Having weak security on your operating system certainly isnt helping when there is some sort of exploit in a browser running on that system. The perfect operating system may not prevent issues inside your browser, but it may limit the damage these do. I feel like you suggest using Linux reduces security - why do you say that?
  
  Having weak security on your operating system
  Neither one has "weak" security.
  I feel like you suggest using Linux reduces security
  I didn't say that, I was just saying it's not any better.

59 comments

TL; DR: