this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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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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[–] 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.