Linux Mint

Since late December, I've had Linux Mint installed on my Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop (dual booting to Windows 11). Tonight, I ended that experiment, wiping both and returning to Windows 10.

Highlights

I really like Mint, especially with KDE Plasma installed. Nice UI, super responsive, pretty painless updates.

Almost every game I installed just worked, and ran great, with one major exception, and two partial exceptions.

Problems

Initially, I installed Cinnamon (a Mint customized GNOME desktop). The primary problem here was that I prefer 125% zoom to compensate for my poor eyesight, but fractional scaling (i.e. not 100% or 200% but 125%) has some issues. For example, Steam is super teeny-tiny, completely making things worse for my eyes. Also some games seemed to display confusing resolution numbers, though I couldn't tell if it was just a problem in theory, or in practice. Before long, I added in KDE Plasma and didn't look back.

Under KDE Plasma, with hybrid graphics (a mode where the laptop relies on the low-power integrated graphics whenever possible, but switches to high-power discrete graphics for games) the brightness controls didn't work. I was stuck at whatever the last setting was. Switching to low-power only would fix this, but required logging out and back in, and I'd have to manually switch before going into games.

Booting would often hang - usually a reboot would fix it, or a reboot where I'd choose the kernel version. Then I could usually reboot, go back to normal, and it would be fine.

Games

Games that worked great: Valheim, ARK, Conan, Deep Rock Galactic, Anno 1800 (except multiplayer), Northgard, Torchlight.

Major exception: Hogwart's Legacy just came out this year, and it's massive and resource intensive. It mostly worked under Linux, but with a few issues. Initially, it crashed on almost every "new area" loading screen. It also had places where it slowed to a crawl. Even when it was working, it had mediocre performance with "Low" quality settings. When I installed it in Windows, suddenly I was able to use "Medium" quality, and it ran much faster, with no crashes.

Two partial exceptions: StarCraft 2 - initially I tried Lutris and this kind of worked, but after exiting, I'd have to start the tricky process over. Then I tried Bottles, and I thought I had this working, but then time passed, and I went back and it was missing from the list of programs to run from Bottles. Finally I used a Steam + Proton trick you can use on Non-Steam games, and that worked, but I would still say that it had some very slight lag in the UI - playable, but not optimal.

Anno 1800: This mostly worked just as well in Linux as in Windows, though it did crash once, and we could not get multiplayer to work at all. When I played it in Windows, we were able to get multiplayer to work.

Summary

Overall, I'm very impressed by the current state of Linux for use in a gaming computer, but there was still some hassle that I've decided I don't want to deal with. If every game worked, even with some caveats, and I had brightness control, I might stick with it. However, dual booting is annoying, especially since almost every reboot from Windows back into Linux would hang and require additional reboots.