This weekend, I was tasked with fixing my girlfriends, nephews mid-level gaming PC that had died when a power cut hit, during an update. When restarted, it went into a boot loop, where it would go through the POST and attempted to boot to C:/, it could see that the C:/ was damaged and would attempt to repair it for a few seconds, before rebooting again and starting a loop that went on forever.
Booting my Kali USB on it, to do some diagnostics on it, I could see that his original C:/ with his windows 7 install was basically completely screwed. No data was salvageable from it - I'm guessing the heads had smashed into the surface of the disk when the power cut happened. But he had a secondary data-drive on it, which appeared undamaged.
It originally had Windows 7 on it, but the hardware specs support running Windows 10 AND 11. The nephew said he would like windows on there, if possible. The PC didn’t have a DVD drive, so against my personal preferences and ethics, I downloaded a windows 10 installation .iso. Burnt it to USB.
I checked it booted on my laptop, which it did. Ok great.
I called the nephew, to see if he had anything he wanted to backup on his data drive, he said "No", so I went ahead to install Windows 10 on the PC.
But when I tried to boot the gaming PC from the windows installation media - it completely failed to boot. It appeared in the boot options screen. But when I tried to boot to it, I just got a black screen and a flashing cursor. I went back into the UEFI/BIOS settings, ensured everything was set up correctly, to allow the windows 10 installer to boot. It still wouldn’t boot and run the Windows 10 installer. Bizarre! So I called him and explained the situation and asked if he’d like me to install Linux on there instead.
Initially he was concerned about being able to play his games in Steam. But I explained that Steam was available for Linux and that even though not all of the Games will run natively in Linux, many Windows games will run via steam-play.
So I said I’d try installing a Linux distribution on there and if it works, I’ll install steam and he can come over to log in and try it out. If it works and he likes it, great! If not, I'll spend more time trying to work out why Windows wasn't installing.
Naturally, he said he'd come over right away.
So after checking the graphics card, I decided to download and install from a PopOS .iso, with the Nvidia drivers pre-installed. Less than 20 minutes later, I had POP fully installed and updated on his old data drive. And I had Steam, Spotify and Discord installed, ready for him to log-in to.
Whilst waiting for him, I also installed Alien-arena - just to ensure that the graphics card was working properly with the drivers - it turns out it worked perfectly. AA is not the most graphically intensive game in the world, but as far as the ones in the default repos go, it's probably one of the slightly more GPU intensive ones.
About 10 minutes later, my girlfriends nephew walked in and was immediately blown away by how PopOS looked compared to Windows. After giving him a 20 minute tutorial and tour of the the PopOS system, he was completely hooked. He also loved how much more responsive Pop was, compared to his old Windows install.
So I got him to reboot the PC and log-in to his new OS.
Then I got him to sign into his Steam, Spotify and Discord accounts and we loaded up his Steam library to see what games would actually run natively in Linux. It turned out that almost exactly half of them were available natively for Linux. Which he was initially disappointed about, because some of his favourite games were listed as Windows only.
But then I enabled Steam play and suddenly ALL of his games were listed as playable on Linux. Which surpassed even my expectations. So we tried a few of the smaller Windows-only games in his library. "Among us" and "Five Nights at Freddy's" were two of them. I forgot the other two he tried. We deliberately chose smaller games, because we didn't want to wait all afternoon for huge 100Gb+ games to download and install!
And all of them worked flawlessly. The frame-rates were great, the animation was smooth and the gameplay was equally smooth, which he was absolutely overjoyed about. And I was pretty amazed at myself, to be fair.
I explained that some of his bigger, AAA games might not work perfectly out of the box and showed him the section where he could enter steam-play settings for games, if they misbehaved. I showed him how to search for those settings too. Then we searched up some of his bigger games, to see if there were any compatibility-related issues and for the most part, most of them worked OOTB, with no modifications required! So yes, this weekend was certainly very eye-opening.
After all of that, I gave him a lift home, with his newly fixed PC. And hopefully, we have another happy, new Linux user.
And as mentioned in the title - Wow, gaming on Linux has really improved! It's come a really long way in the last few years.
The last time I tried Steam on Linux, Valve had only just released the Linux client and ported some of their own games (Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, Half Life, Half Life 2, Portal etc) to run natively in Linux. They hadn't actually released Proton, or Steam-Play, to enable windows only games to be played. Colour me extremely impressed!
Booting my Kali USB on it, to do some diagnostics on it, I could see that his original C:/ with his windows 7 install was basically completely screwed. No data was salvageable from it - I'm guessing the heads had smashed into the surface of the disk when the power cut happened. But he had a secondary data-drive on it, which appeared undamaged.
It originally had Windows 7 on it, but the hardware specs support running Windows 10 AND 11. The nephew said he would like windows on there, if possible. The PC didn’t have a DVD drive, so against my personal preferences and ethics, I downloaded a windows 10 installation .iso. Burnt it to USB.
I checked it booted on my laptop, which it did. Ok great.
I called the nephew, to see if he had anything he wanted to backup on his data drive, he said "No", so I went ahead to install Windows 10 on the PC.
But when I tried to boot the gaming PC from the windows installation media - it completely failed to boot. It appeared in the boot options screen. But when I tried to boot to it, I just got a black screen and a flashing cursor. I went back into the UEFI/BIOS settings, ensured everything was set up correctly, to allow the windows 10 installer to boot. It still wouldn’t boot and run the Windows 10 installer. Bizarre! So I called him and explained the situation and asked if he’d like me to install Linux on there instead.
Initially he was concerned about being able to play his games in Steam. But I explained that Steam was available for Linux and that even though not all of the Games will run natively in Linux, many Windows games will run via steam-play.
So I said I’d try installing a Linux distribution on there and if it works, I’ll install steam and he can come over to log in and try it out. If it works and he likes it, great! If not, I'll spend more time trying to work out why Windows wasn't installing.
Naturally, he said he'd come over right away.
So after checking the graphics card, I decided to download and install from a PopOS .iso, with the Nvidia drivers pre-installed. Less than 20 minutes later, I had POP fully installed and updated on his old data drive. And I had Steam, Spotify and Discord installed, ready for him to log-in to.
Whilst waiting for him, I also installed Alien-arena - just to ensure that the graphics card was working properly with the drivers - it turns out it worked perfectly. AA is not the most graphically intensive game in the world, but as far as the ones in the default repos go, it's probably one of the slightly more GPU intensive ones.
About 10 minutes later, my girlfriends nephew walked in and was immediately blown away by how PopOS looked compared to Windows. After giving him a 20 minute tutorial and tour of the the PopOS system, he was completely hooked. He also loved how much more responsive Pop was, compared to his old Windows install.
So I got him to reboot the PC and log-in to his new OS.
Then I got him to sign into his Steam, Spotify and Discord accounts and we loaded up his Steam library to see what games would actually run natively in Linux. It turned out that almost exactly half of them were available natively for Linux. Which he was initially disappointed about, because some of his favourite games were listed as Windows only.
But then I enabled Steam play and suddenly ALL of his games were listed as playable on Linux. Which surpassed even my expectations. So we tried a few of the smaller Windows-only games in his library. "Among us" and "Five Nights at Freddy's" were two of them. I forgot the other two he tried. We deliberately chose smaller games, because we didn't want to wait all afternoon for huge 100Gb+ games to download and install!
And all of them worked flawlessly. The frame-rates were great, the animation was smooth and the gameplay was equally smooth, which he was absolutely overjoyed about. And I was pretty amazed at myself, to be fair.
I explained that some of his bigger, AAA games might not work perfectly out of the box and showed him the section where he could enter steam-play settings for games, if they misbehaved. I showed him how to search for those settings too. Then we searched up some of his bigger games, to see if there were any compatibility-related issues and for the most part, most of them worked OOTB, with no modifications required! So yes, this weekend was certainly very eye-opening.
After all of that, I gave him a lift home, with his newly fixed PC. And hopefully, we have another happy, new Linux user.
And as mentioned in the title - Wow, gaming on Linux has really improved! It's come a really long way in the last few years.
The last time I tried Steam on Linux, Valve had only just released the Linux client and ported some of their own games (Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, Half Life, Half Life 2, Portal etc) to run natively in Linux. They hadn't actually released Proton, or Steam-Play, to enable windows only games to be played. Colour me extremely impressed!
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