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Linux beginner (and gamer) here. Im currently on Mint and Windows 11 (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by 9to5@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

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Im currently running a dual boot with Linux Mint and Windows 11 (recently switched from Windows 10).

Long term, I want to move fully to Linux, but heres the catch Im considering running a Linux–Linux dual boot instead basically using Mint alongside something like Fedora. The main purpose of this machine is gaming.

So far, Ive tested around 40 games on Mint. About 37 worked basically out of the box. For two of them, a friend helped me get things running, and the last one only worked after I swtiched to older NVIDIA drivers. Overall pretty happy with the results

Im also planning to move to an AMD GPU in the future, since Ive heard they tend to be less hassle on Linux than NVIDIA cards.

My plan is to give each Linux distro its own 1-terabyte SSD. So the question is: is this overall a bad idea? I like Mint,but I also want to try out other distros for a longer time period, and I really like the flexibility that dual booting gives me.

Would Mint and Fedora be a good pairing for mostly gaming and a bit of browsing, or would you recommend something other than Fedora? Its going good so far on Mint. One of the reasons why Im considering a Linux dualboot is cause I could run Mint with older drivers and Fedora with cutting edge drivers and that way hopefully max performance in my gaming. (That was at least my idea as a novice)

Lets have a bit of a discussion. All and any input is welcome. Yes I was the person that asked about dualbooting windows and linux in the past

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[–] PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

My plan is to give each Linux distro its own 1-terabyte SSD. So the question is: is this overall a bad idea?

Yes. It will work, but it will waste a lot of space. Individual distros are not going to require more than 200-300 GB*, and that's if you're really trying to pile everything on there. Your personal files (photos / videos / music / games) are what will take up the bulk of the space. This plan could be improved substantially by splitting one drive down the middle, installing a distro on each 500GB half (put the EFI System Partition there too), then using the other drive for a 1TB /home which is shared by both distros. This would also allow you to replace either (or both) distro while keeping your personal files and settings in place. By having your personal files on their own separate drive, you also have the option of unplugging the drive when you're fucking around with partitions and formatting filesystems, as an extra precaution to make sure you don't wipe your personal files (back-ups would be better, but it is still a nice option).

Since 500GB (each) would still leave a lot of headroom for most distros, consider partitioning swap space out of the first drive as well. At least as much as you have available RAM. Shrinking each root partition by 64GB to create 128GB of swap won't cause you to run out of space. You need at least as much swap as you have RAM to enable hibernation, but hibernation should never be used as long as two OSes are manipulating the same filesystems. Less than that just prevents the OS from killing arbitrary processes when it runs out of memory. You won't need this until one day you try running a PDF through ImageMagick and find out you actually do.

Also, Windows likes to partition TINY ESPs (100MB in my W11 virtual machine)! If you are dual-booting at all, and especially if you are dual-booting multiple Linux distros, I recommend giving the ESP some more space (like 1-2GB) so it has plenty of room for multiple kernels and / or bootloaders on it.

I am skeptical about old drivers fixing anything. It sounds like a coincidence. Not impossible, but probably the side-effect of a bug which has been fixed in one way or another. I would at the very least try other versions of WINE or Proton before to see if they work with the current driver before giving in and installing an entire extra OS to toggle back and forth between driver versions. I mean if it works, don't let me stop you, but there has to be a lower-mantainence, lower-overhead solution. It can be nice to have a second distro lying around for experimentation or rescue though. I've done this before. Knowing that something does work correctly on some other distro can be a great help in troubleshooting why it isn't working correctly on your preferred distro. Being able to cross-reference software versions, configuration, etc. This is how I learned there are in fact two separate drivers for the Sony DS4 controller in the mainline Linux kernel.

For reference, running Gentoo with 2000 packages installed and debug symbols enabled for the entire system (i.e. what if we made the Godot binary over 1GB in size) just ticks above 500GB, and 180GB of that is disposable cache (mostly source code and cloned git repositories fetched when building software). This is not counting the 4.2TB of personal files I store on a blursed bcachefs array.

[–] 9to5@hexbear.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can just say that I had a game that wouldnt work with new nvidia drivers but It worked with older drivers. (Im not talking about super old drivers ~ same year or something (Total Warhammer 3) I tried various proton versions 10,9,8 and experimental + the native Linux version and it would crash within seconds of starting a game. And I did try it dozens of times Works very well with the old drivers. Mind you afaik this isnt the fault of Mint but something that the devs bungled in the last update for linux and mac users but still. Thats all I can say on the topic (only thing I changed are the drivers)

The main reason why im considering to dual boot 2 different Linux distros is cause I wanna use 2 different Linux distros so I can test them against each other and see which I prefer over a longer time period. I might decide to keep both .... I might decide to switch to one of the 2 at some point.

[–] PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well it sounds like you tried the lower hanging fruit already. If you have it narrowed down to the driver then the options are basically waiting for Nvidia to fix it (could happen), or waiting for third parties to notice they're broken in this one case and creating a work-around.

Setting the whole "nvidia, boo" rant aside, the situation is complicated by the fact that you have the kernel doing one thing, the Nvidia driver doing another, and then Nvidia's bespoke implementations of OpenGL and Vulkan doing their own thing on top of it. It isn't just the driver, the whole graphics stack is essentially kind of siloed. When I used to have Nvidia hardware (a 970) it generally worked pretty well, but edge cases like this don't benefit from the kind of transparency which exists in implementations like Mesa3D.

Like I said, if having a second OS around works, don't let me stop you. If it works today, it is definitely faster than waiting around for somebody to maybe fix it one day. I'd amend my advice about sharing a /home partition up above though. Games using Vulkan (including ALL Windows games running through dxvk) pre-compile their shaders and store them in a cache to avoid intermittent stutters during gameplay. These shaders must be compiled for a specific piece of hardware and a specific driver version. If you are switching back and forth between driver versions on each distro, this shader cache will frequently become invalidated (depends on if the game / runtime retains versioned shader caches, or just deletes the old ones when the driver version changes). If you notice it is constantly recompiling shaders every time you launch a game, this might be why. I think it is still certainly worth sharing a home partition though.