I am looking for help with switching from Windows to Linux
I’ve been thinking about switching to Linux for a while, but there are some things that make me want to stay on Windows. For example, Gaming and installation of graphics card and software availability.
My G-Card was GT 730 2 GB ddr5.
Can I be able to play the games that Windows supported without losing frames?
My suggestion is to use a beginner distro with easy dual boot options. Linux Mint comes to mind. Get that going and try it out. If it works for you, you can then move on to ditching your Windows install and/or using a more advanced distro.
Unless you’re more of a “dive into the deep end” sort. If that’s the case, grab Fedora Workstation and make sure to enable the proprietary software repositories. Fedora is stable, and the desktop will be a reminder that this isn’t Windows and it won’t act like it. From there, you can find help all over the place, from Fedora’s documentation and forums to simple internet searches.
I wouldn’t dual boot because of the possibility of Windows breaking the bootloader. If OP could spare a separate drive or USB stick specifically for toying with Linux, they may get more out of it before committing.
This is the way. My advice is to add a second hard drive to your pc and install linux on that. Distro hop, install arch and break it horribly, swear at your printer, learn. Then when you screw up, you’ve lost nothing, you can switch back to your “‘ol faithful” and get the job done. What will eventually happen is you’ll find yourself spending more time in linux than windows until you almost never boot it up.
If you do it this way, there’s really only two things to worry about. 1) if you’re using mbr or want to still use mbr with uefi, you’ll have trouble dual booting cleanly and will probably want to reinstall windows. You can’t break anything, but you can’t dual boot from both methods (or at least I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a motherboard that can). 2) when installing linux, learn and be careful about what drive contains windows - don’t ever pick that drive when formatting and partitioning. Bonus points if it’s a different brand and size - makes it almost impossible to pick the wrong drive. When using a single drive for dual booting, there’s much more opportunity to make a mistake and break your windows install if you’re not familiar with partitioning and boot loaders.
I literally can’t think of a way to break windows if you keep the above in mind, and then you can “make the switch” gradually.
Oh yes, god forbid anyone take any downtime. I can’t believe all these people waste so much time on recreation! Start working the moment you get up! Work until you go to bed! If you’re not putting in a 100+ hour workweek, you’re just a lazy piece of shit.
I mean, I’m abjectly miserable and I’ll be dead well before retirement age, but at least I’m not lazy!
Your choice. But you could go for a run instead of gaming or mow the lawn, make your front yard look nicer, start a YouTube channel or a website for some interest, learn to code and write a passion project, do some creative writing and publish your first 200 page novel; the list is endless. All of those things are work, but most things in that list are FUN. Sometimes downtime can be spent working. I spend my time reading and contributing to Wikipedia and supporting FOSS projects like this fantastic social media site! Because… this site doesn’t throw shit at me with intent to grab my attention with some advanced creepy algorithm. The code is publicly available. These fediverse socials are the only ones that aren’t extremely harmful.
There are more useful hobbies than gaming, I guess. But you mentioned a novel. Novels are fiction and therefore reading them is a waste of time. By your standard, as established here, by you.
Enjoyment is a perfectly good reason to do a thing.
And nobody’s advocating for Facebook here, so that horse manure is 100% beside the point.
You could also do a run rather than waste time commenting on here. Obviously you are enjoying your free time in some way, so stop gatekeeping what others should be allowed to do in theirs.
You shouldn’t do this at all. Poorly supported hardware, and if this is the point where you are asking for help then you don’t have the basic computer skills to keep s Linux desktop going.
It takes very little effort to maintain a linux desktop. This isn’t the 90s, you know. Here’s a quick guide:
Install Fedora Workstation. Once a week, run sudo dnf update --refresh
Got an Nvidia graphics card? When you install Fedora, enable the non-free repositories. Actually, unless you have a reason not to, do that anyway.
Done. System up to date and more stable than Windows. And that’s on what’s referred to as an “intermediate” distro. A “Beginner” distro like Mint is even easier.
Oh, wait, you’re a gamer you say? Well then use Nobara or Pop_OS instead. They’re a bit more advanced, but nothing reading a wiki can’t take care of.
Getting on a high horse and pretending Linux is as hard to use in 2023 as it was two decades ago helps no one. Not the potential new user, not the community or its reputation, no one.
I hate this RTFM/yur 2 dumb attitude more than damn near anything in the community. It’s such bullshit.
It sounds like the best option would be a dual boot, Linux for everything except games and when you want to play just boot into Windows. If you do this i would strongly suggest a two HD set up, one for windows and one for Linux, for two reasons, if you don’t like Linux then you still have the original windows setup, two Windows will at one moment wipe the dual boot grub and you’ll ‘lose’ the Linux startup, unless you have one OS per Hard Disk. I don’t game anymore. Like you I also have an old card Gtx760 🤣🤣
I would also recommend using drives with different sizes. The different drive enumeration means that it’s really easy for beginners to format their windows drive. Different sizes help as a way of double checking that you are on the right drive.
Your GPU is very weak, and because it was a budget card back in the day it doesn’t have support for a “new” technology called Vulkan which is an alternative to OpenGL.
Vulkan is used by Proton (you can think of it as a Windows emulator, even though it’s not exactly an emulator) to convert DirectX calls to something native. Without Vulkan Proton needs to convert DirectX to OpenGL which loses a lot more performance, and in the case of newer games (ones that use DirectX 12) it’s not possible.
So it really depends on what games you want to play, realistically I don’t think you’re playing anything with DirectX12 because those games are all newer than your card, so I don’t think your GPU would support them even in Windows.
I would say give it a go in a separate partition/disk/thumb drive and see how it goes. I don’t think the experience of gaming will be good for you, but I can’t imagine the rest of the PC has good specs if that’s the GPU, so day to day might be a lot more comfortable on Linux without windows hogging down resources.
@Harry_h0udini, in case you don’t know, DirectX (just like ‘Vulkan’) is a graphics rendering software. It draws graphics. I have seen many people being confused by these terms so I thought I should clarify.
Also here’s a video that explains how to dual boot windows and fedora (a pretty good linux distro) or maybe you could use Pop_Os! since they have pretty good nvidia support. I don’t know about legacy ones though.
Actually his card does support Vulkan 1.2, which included Kepler, just not the newer 1.3 that requires Maxwell or newer. He’d have to find the latest compatible driver.
edit: also possible that latest drivers could be used, but would be restricted to 1.2 features, not certain how that works with nvidia drivers and older gpus.
Vulkan is a graphics API next to OpenGL and DirectX, generally faster than OpenGL which is why most emulators like yuzu, cemu, dolphin, etc use both Vulkan and OpenGL as backend options.
Your card is supposed to be vulkan 1.2 compatible so you could play any vulkan-related thing that doesn’t require 1.3. Not sure what that means for you exactly.
OpenGL would probably still work if it’s an option, pretty sure DirectX wouldn’t since it’s a Microsoft thing, but I could be wrong about that.
Also vulkan 1.3 was released in Jan 2022, so theoretically it should still be possible to find 1.2-compatible versions of a lot of things. Older emulator versions, etc. Though those likely won’t be compatible with newer games.
Why do you want to switch to Linux in the first place ?
Personally, I wanted to be in absolute control of my PC. I am a professional book cover illustrator and after ~30 years of using Adobe Photohop and Illustrator, I blindly went all in on Linux. I found my way, differently than I imagined, but happier than ever.
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