Asklemmy

Background: I used linux for work in a vm for 6 years, (coding). Most of my life I have been using windows at home, since Win 3.11. For the last year and a half I have been full time linux user, Gaming and all. It is hard to tell what the pros and cons will be for you personally. My reccomendation:

• have some(a lot) spare time
• make sure you don't need your laptop for anything critical while experimenting
• make sure you have a way back to a known working config e.g. windows installer on usb
• have your data backed up somewhere, not on the laptop.
• Just install a more polular distro and try it, go in deep google/ai chat yourself trough the issues
• then decide if you want to go back to windows

The question is mostly about what kind of gaming.

Most single player experiences are no longer a problem because of steam proton, but multiplayer anti cheat and other AAA DRM is sometimes a windows only thing.

Coding is just superior on linux. It's the platform built by coders to make their own life easier for 30 years.

You should dual boot, try it out for a few games and see how the dev process translates and get your feet wet.

Setting up a VM is probably a lot more effort than just installing it.

If you code, its nearly always better on Linux. Except you code especially for Windows only.

What are you coding? Despite what everyone is saying, if it's .NET you'll be better off in Windows. You can do C# development in Linux, but C# and .NET are Microsoft products, and Linux is the ugly stepchild.

For all other coding purposes, Linux is vastly and measurably superior. You have a nearly endless array of tooling options and a wide variety approaches to nearly any language. VSCode is popular, but so is EMACS and EMACS is useful for so much else - it's practically an OS, and there exist people who essentially boot directly into EMACS and never leave it. You have a half dozen different implementations of vi, NeoVIM being among the most popular and having an ecosystem of plugins that would make a sex toy store blush. You have The New Kids like Helix and Kakoune, which explore new modalities and change the way you edit text. You have vertical solutions - most programming languages have an IDE written in the language and optimized for coding in that language.

You can run most of these on Windows, but now Windows is the ugly stepchild: nearly all of this tooling was written on Linux, and works best on Linux, and doesn't require fussing and working in a modality that is just different enough from idiomatic Windows use to feel jarring.

Linux simply has more software, and while there's a bunch of rough programs, many tools are - IMHO - better than their commercial counterparts on Windows. And by and large, you won't have to pay for them.

I also believe (and this is more my opinion than anything demonstrable) that for software developers, Linux gives you a better understanding of how computers work. This is a valuable thing for developers, understanding how things function. Windows hides, obfuscates, and conflates so much of how the system functions; and there's often only one way of doing something so that you don't even consider, "what if?" What if we used a different init system? What if we did scheduled jobs differently? What if my window manager were different, my boot loader was different, I stored attributes for my program somewhere other than the Registry? While you could use KDE your whole life and never consider that things, you don't have to step down very far and suddenly be in a domain where you see all of what goes into a modern OS. Windows locks that door to the basement, and sure, people do jimmy it and get in there, but it's much harder; and Windows integrates so much of the OS that no matter how much ditzing you do, you're never going to replace the Windows window manager with a different one.

I can't emphasize enough just how important I feel understanding the fundamentals of how computers function is for software developers, even if you aren't doing systems programming. Windows obfuscates and hinders that grokking process.

For gaming I've had zero issues on bazzite, comes ready out of the box.

Its worth it to check https://www.protondb.com/ to see if the game you like works.

Personally for coding, I think Fedora Atomic is pretty up there because they make it easy to containerize everything. Universal blue has an atomic spin called Bluefin specifically designed for devs

Coding is absolutely miserable on Windows compared to Linux. I've been developing almost exclusively in Linux for the past twenty years. Nothing beats the command line for getting shit done; a split screen between a terminal and Sublime Text is my go-to setup.

If your gaming consists of popular multiplayer games you might have a bad time. Many games with intrusive anti cheat don't work. Check https://areweanticheatyet.com/ for compatibility.

Almost every other game should work without any issues, especially when you have them on Steam.

I recommend dual booting, not a VM. It is easy enough to choose which OS to boot into if you need to go back to Windows, while being enough friction that you don't immediately fallback to going into Windows every time you don't know how to do something in Linux.

I don't code, but from the gaming standpoint, things are pretty decent on Linux these days. I've been on Linux full time on my laptop for well over a year now, and 6+ months on my main desktop now and find very few reasons to boot into Windows. I think I booted into Windows last weekend for the first time in at least 2 months because I had to upgrade the FW on a device that only had a Windows tool. Otherwise I do have a windows VM on a server that I use relatively frequently, because the state of 3D CAD software on Linux is horrible.

If you are running windows non home edition enable the Hyper-V features and fire up a VM.

I was think about WSL but that may not work in this case.

I would backup everything you need from your current laptop including game save files then just install Linux.

As everyone will say everywhere, if you play a game with anti cheat it won’t work so then you shouldn’t change it. You can search this on protondb.

I love Linux gaming but some lack of certain games really bums me out.

One of my buds is a programmer and runs linux and windows on his machine. At this point he's pretty adroit at fixing any issues on linux, but he has faced limitations before.

Regarding work, being on linux apparently was a big plus when he got hired, and works exclusively on linux due to its stability.

Regarding gaming, many games we play apparently run better on linux (inc. ArmA Reforger and some others, I forget), but some will just not run at all (anything with a kernel anticheat), and his mic sounds like utter shit on discord due to missing drivers or something.

I do remember there was a site where you could check how well a game ran on linux, but I forget. You might be able to check if the games you got run on steam deck, since they are linux based.

For gaming as long as it's doesn't shipped with malware AC you can play it just fine, idk for coding I never written a single line of code ever since I switched to Linux 2 years ago but I heard from most professional coder said Linux is perfect for coding (maybe not if you code softwares for windows).

I used to run Mint and Win7 parallel in uni (gosh, a decade ago?) since we were working with ruby - at the time basically impossible to run and dev under windows.
In matters of development there are almost only advantages, depending on your target platform of course. Bash is great, tools and packages are usually easier to setup than on windows.
For gaming my only linux experience is the Steamdeck. I've ran a bunch of non-steam games and Proton (the bridge for windows games under Linux) does all the heavy lifting for you. I only had issues with the Riot launcher, which tended to break when detecting a new update.

I installed linux mint to a secondary hard drive, then I installed steam onto that Linux install. I play wars two, so I added Guild Wars two as a non-steam game to steam.

I didn’t want to re-buy Guild wars two with steam because I’d lose all of my progress. Once I added it as a non-steam game I just right clicked on the game within steam and changed the compatibility to the newest proton. (I didn’t choose a hot fix version of proton) It runs just fine.

This is what I would suggest that you do , is install it to a secondary drive to see if that variation of Linux will work for you.

I have a very similar use case to you, and when I built my PC I just never installed Windows on it. Linux is a great development environment (imo strictly superior to Windows but ymmv), and gaming is almost flawless with Proton. Only problems with that has been from the immature RX 9070 XT drivers, so not too bad.

Depending on what you program with I’d highly recommend exclusively using a Linux VM for it. Then you can fully switch once you’re comfortable working out the kinks.

The downside is, you will be spending a lot of time customizing your Linux and fixing problems. This can be very rewarding and a great learning experience but it also takes time and effort. If you want to spend less time with your computer and more time talking to people offline or enjoying nature, installing Linux can be a bad idea.

If you are not going to install a non-beginner system like Arch or Gentoo then you should try a virtual machine first. Otherwise, it may come in handy if you want to choose a system with a desktop environment that suits you, because changing after installing a system for a novice user can be hard without avoiding problems.

In fact, on a virtual machine like Virtual Box you won't experience the problems you will encounter on real hardware (driver problem, etc.). It's better to test liveiso with Ventoy instead.

You can always do a dual boot. I've had a dual boot Linux Mint and Win 11 for maybe 18 months and I'm finally getting around to purging Windows out for good. The Mint installer sets it all up shockingly easily. I ended up so rarely using Windows that at this point I would rather have the space back.

Admittedly, I do very little coding or gaming, so YMMV, but I'm also basically trashing PS Elements and MS Office Home because I know GIMP and LibreOffice do the job anyway. It was that $250 that kept me holding on for this long.