Wiindows for Gaming, Ubuntu for Everything Else. Help?

[MikeCyber]

Vista is so slow, I'm playing everything on Ubuntu with Wine 1.4 now.

[sir.sargento]

Think I may just be kicking a dead horse and repeating everything said already but there is no reason to use any OS over another really. You should just use what you feel like. I used to do the same thing as you but when I realized I really wanted to use linux for everything I just deleted window and installed Arch/Ubuntu. Haven't looked back for a couple years and have become much more proficient at getting games to work under wine and just with linux in general.

Hope this helps.
Tony

[jerry417]

Dang I came here looking for the answer now I know.No gaming for Ubuntu

[Cheesemill]

Most of the games that I play are Steam games that use the Valve Source engine (HL2, Portal, L4D2, etc).

When Steam is released for Linux (not long now) all of my dual-booting woes will be left behind

[doorknob60]

Ok doorknob, what is seamless mode? How much is enough ram?

I set up Win8 preview with 1g of my 4g ram and 512 of my 1g video ram. I installed a game that uses .Net, DirectX and XNA. I started the game and it was unplayably slow, textures would not display. Maybe if I had 64 bit and 8+g of ram?

Games won't play in a VM very well, you would have to do it the other way around, install Windows as your main OS, and Linux in a VM. Seamless mode kinda combines both desktops into one, it's hard to explain, but it's really cool

Here is a picture: http://i.techrepublic.com.com/blogs/seamless.png
Here's a guide how to set it up (it's just two clicks if you already have the proper drivers set up): http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtual...stems-desktop/

4 GB of RAM should be enough probably, though if some games are RAM heavy you might want to shut down or suspend the VM before playing, but that's a lot more convenient than rebooting. Also, I would recommend not using Unity with seamless mode, I mean you probably could, but I bet it would be a little awkward. I use Xfce (Xubuntu) in Seamless mode at my job (all the PCs have Windows 7) and it works great, just as smooth as running native apps. I don't do any gaming on that computer, but even with only 2 GB of RAM, it's enough.

[holastickboy]

I recently did an article about the honest state of Linux gaming, with particular attention to gaming with WINE. I found it was a mixed bag, but for what I actually play at the moment, I can play it on Ubuntu (though there is some degradation in performance, but it's acceptable).

The important thing to remember is that it's getting much better. Looking forward to Linux steam!

[martialartist81]

Games won't play in a VM very well, you would have to do it the other way around, install Windows as your main OS, and Linux in a VM. Seamless mode kinda combines both desktops into one, it's hard to explain, but it's really cool

Couldn't have said better myself. Honestly, make Win7 your main partition, use QemuManager or VirtualBox (I use VB at home, but Qemu at work, don't ask why, that's a whole new bag of worms) to fire up your Ubuntu vm whenever you need it. VB and Qemu both do a damn good job of firing up a vm quickly. I have 8GB of RAM on my PC, so I'm able to easily allocate 4GB to my VM, could make it less or more if necessary. I used to dual-boot for years, dating back to Ubuntu 7.10, and since I use Windows for all my gaming needs (until full native Steam support comes to Ubuntu), I kept having the same dilemma. So now, I just do exactly what doorknob has stated, fire up and run a vm in the background, pull it up when needed, hide it when gaming.

[g_s_patra]

Erase your hard-disk, & install Ubuntu forever - everything is fine here.

[holastickboy]

I've been gaming exclusively through Ubuntu for almost 3 weeks now. Its been fairly smooth sailing, and a great deal of what I play works well on wine if needed. Gaming on wine is definitely a performance decrease on some of my games, but all of them are still smooth.

I have quite a few native Linux games as well, and they are absolutely fine. I think people have varying experiences really.

[martialartist81]

I've been gaming exclusively through Ubuntu for almost 3 weeks now. Its been fairly smooth sailing, and a great deal of what I play works well on wine if needed. Gaming on wine is definitely a performance decrease on some of my games, but all of them are still smooth.

I have quite a few native Linux games as well, and they are absolutely fine. I think people have varying experiences really.

Part of the tricky portion of gaming on Linux is your PC build. Some stuff works great together (RAM+GPU combo) sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the build you use (WINE build that is) isn't fantastic with one game, but works brilliantly with others. Its all about being will to do a little homework. Dig around long enough and often times you'll find someone out there who's got a specific game working well. Then its just a matter of trying to mirror that and hope for the best. With the wild variations you can have (custom built PC's for example) it's pretty rare to find two identical systems (unless you built it to be identical).

So moral of the story: do some homework, dig it, try some different stuff, and see what you can muster together. PlayOnLinux and WINE, along with other sites dedicated to getting your games playing well in Linux are completely and utterly invaluable.