- Joined
- Sep 16, 2019
Linux Mint works well with old hardware but it and some stable distros have issues with newer hardware. I had to upgrade my kernel from 5.15 to 6.5 on Mint 21.2 to get my 7800xt working. While troubleshooting other issues with it on Mint, I did find a lot of issues with older AMD cards using Radeon drivers vs AMDGPU drivers by default on Linux. I did have good results with the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Mint 21.1, but this was on 10- series GPUs. Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite experience on Windows 10 with Nvidia drivers giving me random crashes, stuttering, and poor performance.1.5-2 years ago that was a 6 year old budget GPU which would struggle to hit 40-50 FPS in low settings in modern games on windows, so I'm not surprised. However if you installed amd-gpu drivers and mesa you should have had no problems using it normally, without using nomodeset in grub and been able to play anything it could handle normally. (linux mint probably would've configured it correctly by default in 2021-22, though I'm not sure)
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In all honesty, I wouldn't call Linux a better experience than Windows, just different. I had a ton of problems with Windows 10, and Windows 11 looking even worse made me make the jump to Linux. Now I have a new set of problems exclusive to Linux. I like how Linux does things more than Windows for the most part, and I'm able to get the vast majority of what I want done on Linux without issues. But I had to toubleshoot ROCM issues for AI, I need to change Proton settings and launch options for most modern games, and there are a few games that just won't run despite Valve putting pressure on these companies for Steam Deck support. Linux distros have improved a lot over the last couple years, and Linux gaming is completely doable if you're willing to miss a couple games and you're willing to troubleshoot. Even than, that list keeps shrinking. I've seen games like World of Warships go from barely working to working perfectly with minor tweaks over a couple months. Windows will still give you a more seamless gaming experience, but new developments are making that gap smaller.