I have been using Arch Linux with i3wm for around 5 years for work, on my ThinkPad. I am fairly comfortable with pacman and setting up a distro. I have previously tried Mint, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Elementary, and MX Linux, all for the same use case (Work: where I need a browser, Slack, and a MongoDB GUI).
However, I have been using Windows on my desktop that I use for gaming and the Adobe suite (photoshop and illustrator mainly). With the increasing enshittification of Win11, I want to migrate full time to a Linux system on desktop as well. I prefer a more stable experience on this machine so I chose Pop OS (other suggestions are welcome. I like Plasma). I need some help getting started (I did some preliminary trials on a VM where I was able to run a small game off GOG, but the part I need help with needs some trickery wrt different disks).
PC specs:
- Ryzen 3 3300X
- 16 GB DDR4
- 1 NVMe boot drive, 1 SATA SSD for games, 1 HDD
- RX 570 8 GB
My copies of Photoshop and some of my games are pirated. I’m planning to run a Tiny10 VM for the Adobe stuff but the games will need to run on bare metal linux, off the NTFS formatted game drive. Edit : Most importantly, Content Manager and mods for Assetto Corsa need to work (not pirated), with my Thrustmaster T128
I would be grateful for a guide for this.
I just dual boot for games and programs that don’t run on Linux. If you have the free time, there are tons of tools you can use, but dual booting seems to be the best way to maintain my sanity and keep my shit working. If you use Cassowary you may be able to use Windows applications as if they’re running on Linux through a VM, but I have mixed experiences with application-level RDP on Linux.
RE: Photoshop and such, keep in mind that you can’t (without massive amounts of fiddling) share your GPU with your VM. Games won’t run well, and even things like Photoshop will be slow and laggy. If you want to be able to play games on a Windows VM, you’d better install a separate, secondary VM you can dedicate towards it. With desktop chips with integrated GPUs you can typically forward the GPU to the VM and use the integrated graphics in Linux, but your CPU doesn’t have an iGPU like that.
Re: distro: choose whatever works for you. Endeavour is a popular “Arch but with an installer” these days if you want bleeding edge stuff. If you like Plasma, I wouldn’t go Pop_OS!, though. Something like Kubuntu might be better suited for your preferences.
As for your games and tools, check protondb and winedb for compatibility. Assetto Corsa, for instance, seems to work fine on Linux in single player mode, but people report issues in multiplayer.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I am not too bothered with PS and the rest working natively or with gpu acc (I don’t do advanced work) but I’ll save this for later