Do you guys recommend dual-booting a Linux distro on a secondary drive, or running Linux as a main OS, using Wine for Windows applications?
I’ve wanted to make the switch for a very long time, just worried about compatibility issues or even performance loss in gaming using Wine.
I would recommend just running Linux. Unless there is some game that you really want to play that is not supported (probably due to AntiCheat). Almost all games work really well right now, especially if you are using Steam. I’ve even stopped checking compatibility anymore and just assume everything works, and it almost always does.
Personally, when I had brief period of double-booting I never used second partition, it is just too much hassle to switch between systems. So unless there is something stopping you, I would embrace Linux full time. Plus, you won’t be getting issues with Windows overwriting your EFI partition, so you cannot boot into Linux.
The only thing I would be careful about is choosing distro with up-to-date software, especially if you are using newer hardware. Ideally rolling distro.
I agree. I tried dual-booting several times before finally committing to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Just too inconvenient to have two slightly-worse computers instead of one normal computer.
OP, my suggestion would be to double-check on something like ProtonDB and/or WineHQ to make sure that you can run all the games you want on Linux. And if you have an NVIDIA GPU, make sure you know how to handle that going in! I was caught off-guard by it and it gave me some hassle.
On most main distros, nvidia isn’t really an issue anymore. Unless you want to try Wayland or something more exotic, it shouldn’t be a problem.
I mean, it wasn’t an insurmountable issue for me, but like I said, it caught me off-guard a little. Better to go in knowing that it might cause some hiccups.
Will do, can’t wait to make the plunge. Time to go distro shopping, I’ll make sure to settle on a rolling distro.
Good luck, once you get into Linux, you will wonder how you could live without it.