technology

1 - Yeah you can do this. It's slightly more complex to set up, and uses a bunch of extra hard drive space. Also sometimes Windows just decides to fuck it up. Also my experience with dual booting is that I never open the Windows partition and it ends up a year behind on security patches.

2 - You shouldn't install SteamOS. It's great that it exists though, because it's been pushing everyone towards better Linux support. Most games just plain work on Linux now.

3 - https://distrosea.com/ will let you run the installer for a bunch of distros remotely on someone else's computer. Most Linux distros just run the whole desktop in the installer, so you can experiment with that. Take five minutes to boot up Linux Mint on this and poke around; it'll make you feel kind of silly for waiting this long. Then use it to try the stuff other people recommend.

I always recommend Linux Mint (no bullshit, very well supported, Windows-like UI, easy setup, yes it runs all my games). But there are plenty of good options.

If you have games from steam, and you launch them via steam then your probably good to go when it comes to linux gaming. Most games work just fine thru proton. It'll be seamless for a lot of things. It's not specific to any OS. You can use proton on debian, arch, mint, etc.

I was also in the "tried Linux 20 years ago" camp. early 2024 I tried Mint on an ancient, dying laptop.

it has come a long way. I now have two dedicated Linux systems and am working on transitioning my last significant device, a gaming PC, to Linux.

all of my productivity stuff, utilities and high seas/streaming shit are on dedicated Linux systems. they are so reliable and fast it's bonkers.

I'm busy with a bunch of other RL shit right now, or I would be strategizing the backup and transition plan for my gaming system. it's mind blowing how awful windows feels after getting into a groove on Linux.

to mirror the rest of the thread since everyone here has pretty much answered everything: if you regularly play new multiplayer games you will not be able to do that without dual booting, and if you dual boot i highly recommend you use a separate drive for that if possible

SteamOS is not really something you want to use on a PC, it doesn't have a good installer and general hardware support. There are couple of distros focused on gaming and that provide a SteamOS-like interface, like for example Bazzite. I have not used any of these, so I'm not going to recommend any. You can game perfectly fine on any Linux distro though, so there is no need to use a gaming distro. They mainly just come preinstalled with a bunch of gaming stuff that you can also install elsewhere, much of which you might not need.

General recommendation for the first time user is to just pick something popular, reasonably stable (i.e. not bleeding edge like Arch), and something that seems well maintained. Unless you like being thrown in the deep end in a sort sink-or-swim type situation (which works for some), in which case wipe Windows and install Arch.

I use and like Debian. If you want to install that read the installation guide at least, it's a bit more involved to install and set up that some others, but really low maintenance afterwards.

Also make a backup before you do anything.

Dual boot is totally viable, but much less necessary than it used to be. I did it for a long time and finally stopped about a year ago.

If you choose to dual boot, I recommend partitioning the disk using the Linux installer first (leaving space for Windows), then installing Windows, then actually installing Linux. Also, Linux and Windows will fight over whether your hardware clock is in local time or UTC. The path of least resistance is to configure Linux to use local time (this is an additional step to setting your timezone). Finally, Windows has a feature called "fast start-up" which effectively hibernates the OS when you shut off the computer. This will make the NTFS (Windows) filesystem inaccessible on Linux. You should disable this feature.

protondb is a good resource for seeing if games work on linux and what issues you may run into. areweanticheatyet gives you more ideas on what games with anticheat enabled people have gotten running on linux. i also recommend installing proton-ge-custom. it rolls a few features from windows into steam games that are missing in proton (notably, some video codec support for videos inside games).

Dual boot is definitely an option, though it might not be necessary anymore, depends on the games you want to play.

Thanks to the Steam Deck, Linux support for gaming is better than ever, you can take a look at ProtonDB to see which games are supported and if there's any tweaks you need to do for them, you can do this for every game you'll want to play before making a decision.

Most games run fine from my experience and the type of games I like, rarely needing tweaks. So for me dual booting would just be a waste of my disk space and time having to reboot into each system when I want to go from working to playing or the opposite.

If you play a lot of multiplayer games with Anti-Cheat that isn't supported well for Linux, which is the most probable case for bad Linux support, then you can use dual booting. It's really easy to do just look up any of the top tutorials on Youtube for creating a dual boot system from scratch.

about point 2: steamos is still made just for the steam deck, despite technically working on pcs too.

if you want a similar experience, try bazzite. fedora is also nice.

At the moment Bazzite is better than SteamOS, but it doesn't support dual booting because windows has a way of changing things and ruining dual boot setups. I'm sure someone has figured out a way to do it, but it's not officially supported.

It's best to install it on a seperate drive, and then use the bios to switch boot drives.

Bazzite is very user friendly, very stable, has most things you want setup and running by default, and works great.

Here's an overview of the bazzite and int the install process: Installing bazzite on an atari vcs

1 - Is dual-boot a plausible thing? Like, having a Linux distro installed for everyday usage, and Windows for gaming only?

I recommend getting one drive for each OS, it's just going to save you a ton of headaches. Ive been running arch and windows this way for years now with almost 0 problems, i have an m2 1tb drive for linux which hosts the boot partition, which i think makes it faster to boot this way, and a cheap 500gb ssd for windows.

Don't do SteamOS for a computer you're planning to use for normal shit, it can do it but it's designed for the deck and console configurations. Any 'normal' distro has access to steam and the Proton compatibility layer that can make your games work.

for picking a distro you should think of a few tasks you regularly do and need to do on your computer and search the distro e.g. "Mint" "task not working", or "how to". the distro with understandable and active advice for your usecases is the best one.

You can also triple (or more) boot. If you can I would recommend using separate disks. just to avoid any issues , but perfectly doable with partitioning.

I would recommend :

Steam OS for your games. (Or one of the others in this thread)

Backup if Linux is not enough: Windows 11 ameliorated gaming playbook.

A stable debian distro for everything else. Like peppermint 0S. ( You can probably run steam from here as well , but if you want things separate)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWVte9WGxGE

Here is a good video on various ways to dual boot, you can definitely do in on one drive, but I would personally recommend having each os on a seperate drive if you have more than one

many games with kernel lvl anticheat will not work on Linux, but most others will you can check specific games on here

https://www.protondb.com/

Most here are recommending dual booting on 1 disk but I'll share my experience of dual booting on 2 separate disks. I tried it out after using 1 disk for a while and preferred it actually. I chose that method because I anticipated fully removing Windows down the road and didn't want to deal with partitioning.

My system booted to Linux by default, I had a script for when I wanted to boot into Windows. It told GRUB to ignore the default & boot windows on the next boot, then restarted the system.

Only issue was a conflict in time formats between windows and Linux causing the time to be wrong after switching but I was able to permanently fix that without too much fuss by changing a config.

If this helps… I just set up Linux Mint on my parents computer. They were unsure about it at first. Then I told them, with all sincerity, they will probably find this easier to use than Windows 11 just from the simplicity aspect.

A Gamer's Descent into Linux Lunacy (Switching to Linux) I find this video really good to show how gaming on Linux is. The video is almost 3 years old and somethings changed but it's a good video.