I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
Steam Proton (which does the heavy lifting of running windows games on linux) includes DXVK/D9VK/VK3D3 which translates Windows DirectX games (don’t work on Linux) into Vulkan (which works on Linux)
not having Vulkan will result in falling back on the way older DirectX -> OpenGL translation which not many actually care about nowadays and hasn’t been opti.ized to run well in years (awful performance)
How do I know if my PC supports Vulkan?
depends on how old your graphics chip is
typically anything newer than 10 year old will support some level of Vulkan
My msi GF63 thin laptop doesn’t…
What graphics card do you have? I think you’d have to have a really old card for it to not support Vulkan. Or perhaps integrated graphics might not support it very well, I’m not too knowledgeable on integrated graphics currently.