I thought I'd chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it's going do some bits I can't on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.
What a disaster! I've spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.
Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don't exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you're on Wi-Fi. Mint's had this since what 2006? But that's cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.
People have the cheek to complain about Linux's Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn't already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.
Plug in my sound card OK it's a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens...hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there's more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.
OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. "Can't find device, ensure it's plugged in". Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad..GG cool cool.
I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it's such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it's smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.
All of these issues are because I don't have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you'll excuse me I'm going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals
I've fully given up on vr in Linux after spending a whole day trying to get it to work. I have Nobara and modern AMD hardware, tried SteamVR and FOSS VR (envision) (which was awful to set up on the "gaming OS"). I booted into my windows partition, clicked a button to update AMD Adrenalin (and several years of windows updates) and VR simply worked.
I love Linux but it definitely has its own issues. My boss (who got me into Linux) vented some of his frustrations with Linux while installing Android studio: "linux makes up a few percentage of the userbase but 90% of the OS's. It's far too splintered." I have to agree, and it's why i will likely always have a windows partition. Because things just work, and if they don't I have a wealth of information on the internet because there is only one OS people can have this problem with.
I think the valve and the steam deck is doing the linux community a massive solid and somewhat unifying the Linux gaming community.
VR seems to be one of the last things that does not work. My Index is laggy af on Ubuntu and Fedora but completely fine on windows.
I use ALVR with Steam VR and a Quest 2 on Arch. Not as smooth as native but it works pretty well. Had Blade and Sorcery running at comparable performance to Win10