Hi all,

I'm building a new PC in the next 6 months or so and I would love to be able to run Ubuntu and Ubuntu ONLY on my soon-to-be new machine.

I have used Ubuntu in the past but it's been a few years and games support for Linux has increased tremendously since then.

My questions:

1. It used to be that nVidia GPUs were the way to go in Linux due to AMD drivers being terrible in Linux. Is that still the case?

2. I've read that Playonlinux can help me run my GOG library in a convenient way - how does that work exactly?

3. Any other pitfalls/changes in the past 2-3 years on the gaming in Linux front that I should know about?

Gonna bump this, as I dabbled with Linux a while back and a thinking of diving in again, and would be interested in the answers to these questions as well.

1. Nvidia with the binary blob still gives the best performance, AMD, However, has the better FOSS drivers of the two.

2. PlayonLinux automates installing Win32 games to run with WINE and has a fairly simple gui.

3. Mainly, try to avoid non native ports using wrappers like the Witcher 2 (eON) or ports that are just broken/inferior when there is no good reason to be (The Book of Unwritten Tales, for example).

linux it's now on the rise, the new market for steam, gog and others.
i'd say use Linux Mint it's a flavor of Ubuntu, all drivers work and you are offered the possibility to install video drivers

Can anyone give me a reason to NOT go with a Linux-only set up on my new machine?

A percentage of your catalog might be utterly broken in Wine and have no native solution. I'd keep Windows around if you can for the games you want to play that have a garbage rating on the Wine AppDB.

Some of your current games might not work. Some future games might not be released on linux, and might not work in wine.

I dual boot with windows 8.1, although I rarely boot into windows. I do have games that I can't play in Linux. If you already have the windows key, it probably doesn't hurt to throw a few GB's of hard drive space at Windows.

I did a bit of a write-up awhile back on setting up a reasonably efficient dual-boot.

You can read it here.

I suggest Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. Much more friendly and with out of the box features.

A dual boot is handy for those games that entirely refuse to run on WINE, for me this is the biggest reason why I haven't switched to Linux as my full time OS.

That might well change in the future. One of the big disadvantages that the nVidia FOSS drivers had was that they were unable to reclock the GPU. The consequence of that was that the GPUs were always in low power mode and as a result would be underclocked by as much as 2/3. I believe there's been some success recently with reclcocking the chipset which should, hopefully, even things out a bit more.

That being said, I tend to stick with AMD GPUs lately as I grew tired of all the nVidia specific problems I was having when I was wanting to play games on Windows and I still dual boot when need be. I'd suggest Linux Mint 16 over 17 as 17 seems to still have a substantial number of gotchas that they need to resolve. But, 17 with its glitches is still preferable to Ubuntu.

Right now there's a Cinnamon, MATE and KDE release for 17 for folks that want the latest LTS release of Mint.

No, most of them seem to be related to Java in some way, but I also had a difficult time getting it to install in the first place. Not sure why, it wasn't a problem with 15 or 16.

The release just doesn't seem to be as stable as previous releases. But, it's still a good release, it's just not as good as previous releases were for some reason.

Haven't read about that, I'll keep it in check though. Since the next few releases will still be based on the Ubuntu LTS release I'm going to wait for that and see how things go.

I will definitely check out the guide.

I used to dual-boot in the 10.04 days - I still would but my current computer (laptop with dedicated ATI GPU) didn't get along with Ubuntu in many ways, particularly where the GPU was concerned.

I've been checking my games catalogue for compatibility issues and there are a couple of games in my GOG that wouldn't work but they aren't games I liked very much any way. I do have one or two on CD/DVD that might be troublesome but nothing I can't live without. My entire Steam library (not much, about 10 games) will either play natively or does just fine in wine.

But I don't have a Windows key to use actually. And it's kind of painful to pay $90-100 for an OS that I don't really like (Win 8) - I have 7 on my laptop (which I like) but I'm sure it's OEM; a new 7 license looks like it will cost me more!

At my price point ($700-750 USD), the price of Windows is non-trivial. I don't hate Windows or anything, but I would rather spend the money on a better GPU.

Masochism.
Or bad taste.

(Yeah, it's two reasons, pick up your favourite.)

Yeah, I get the paying for windows thing. I picked up my windows 8 license when they had the $39 introductory rate. Linux has been my primary OS since 2006, and I vowed that Win2K would be the last version of windows i ever purchased, but $39 for a retail version was too good a deal to pass up.