New Computer (and its woes)
After a long time coming, I finally took the plunge and bought a new computer, mostly for the occasion of graduating from college. So after a bunch of looking around, I went and bought this computer. In any case, I received it after a couple of days of intense waiting, and now I’ve got it and am very pleased with it (and the 23″ monitor I got with it).
However, after spending a day on it, I felt the need to get started with Linux. However, Vista isn’t that bad when you have a quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. My problem is as follows:
- I need to be able to play games
- I want my games to run well
- I need a Linux environment
- Ideally, I’d run Linux natively
This leaves me with the obvious option of dual-booting, but I’d really rather not. I find it so… traumatic, if you will, to have to reboot my computer every time I want to change what I’m doing. And since I tend to fire up Team Fortress 2 rather frequently, I’m afraid I’d sit in Vista most of the time because of it, and only go to Linux when I need to. And that’s exactly the opposite of what I’d want. So what to do?
I don’t know what I’m going to do. In addition, while I’ve always had fun with Gentoo, the new installation I started has been proving challenging. The basic system was easy, but the framebuffered console and a desktop (with Compiz-Fusion) has proven difficult. This is in large part, I believe, because of the now-scattered documentation due to the data loss of our beloved Gentoo Wiki. And then I pop in an… an… Ubuntu (sorry, it just feels dirty to me) CD, and everything works. But it’s not quite right. It’s not perfect, and I don’t have portage, and I can’t use my shiny new computer to compile things all the time! (that was part of the reason I wanted such power 
).
So I’m left with a dilemma. And because of my tendency to get paralyzed by indecision, I’ll probably stick with Vista for a while, until I figure out my solution, which will still probably involve dual-booting, since Wine doesn’t seem to be up to the task. If anyone’s got a similar situation/setup/solution, I’d love to hear about it. I love my Linux, but I also love my games.
Hello,
I’m in a similar situation, and i reasoned that one OS allowes me to do my work, assignments and such in an environment i like, the other OS allows me to play tf2 on occasion. So I dual-boot, but i tend to have OpenSolaris booted most of the time.
Wine is supposed to handle tf2, but I never got it to work either
I’m not too sure about this decision, but would a VM work?
Or use your old computer as a gaming platform! Or is it not powerful enough?
@Andreas I think the particular phase of my life right now (just out of college, looking for work, etc.) kinda puts the whole game thing on a slightly higher tier. What with wanting to unwind and relax and enjoy myself.
But that may shift to your perspective over time, and for my own sake (i.e. the person I’d like to be), I hope it does. 
@Dion I actually investigated using a VM, and went as far as to install an XP VM in Linux, but alas, Direct X doesn’t seem to work. Well, it seems to work, but all reports say that it doesn’t *actually* work. At least not in VirtualBox, my virtualization software of choice. Actually, you just made me think about this a bit… perhaps I should look at VMware as well.
Oh, how I know that situation! I love to use Linux, but always these stupid games…
It’s so sad that most of the games just don’t run because of DirectX.
I currently run Windows 7 (RC1) on my computers and THIS one feels really nice, so at least I can use my computers
Though a clean Gentoo desktop would feel…so-much-better :/
Regards
I’m in the same boat too now. Gotta do the game thing and except for Urban Terror I do windows. I do all my work in Linux and gaming in Vista and it just means I gotta reboot alot. Sucks but just how it is. If only windows could be like my linux desktop. Oh well. If you don’t have the time to put into Gentoo try Arch for a bit, a lot like Gentoo but with precompiled binaries, and a good wiki.
@Sendomar But wait, doesn’t Urban Terror run on Linux, too?