We swapped out Windows for Linux on our TV-connected video game PC, and have had pretty good luck. Windows 10 was getting really obtrusive with its ads for stuf

We swapped out Windows for Linux on our TV-connected video game PC, and have had pretty good luck. Windows 10 was getting really obtrusive with its ads for stuff like Office 365, as well as frequently making games stutter because it decided that it needed to start an update in the background right then. I’m sure some of the Windows issues could have been fixed by someone more familiar with Windows, but I mostly saw Proton as a way out. Xubuntu installed easily for me, and Proton has done a good job for all the titles I’ve tried. But the games themselves are a bit more of a hassle than Windows. I had to dig around in Steam to enable Proton for every game. My wife and I recently played Divinity in split screen (Linux native) and occasionally ran into audio issues if the game had been running for a shameful number of hours. Divinity 2 (Windows version), doesn’t work out of the box, though ProtonDB forums had a straight forward fix. So far, I think Divinity 2 in Proton might be at least as stable as the Linux version of the original. But... it’s a bit of a gamble. I mean, I bought D2 on sale so it’s not a huge loss if a game doesn’t work out, but also you want to play the game. So, there’s always a little voice asking “will it work?” that you don’t have with Windows. We have two Steam controllers, which probably makes things a little easier for us. For whatever reason, we grew to like the Steam controllers and have stuck with them. I would guess that the Bluetooth controllers would be harder. I haven’t gotten the hang of making bluetooth work anywhere really, and I could imagine the interplay of bluetooth, steam, and proton all to be a bit problematic. On balance, I’ll probably not move our game machine back to Windows barring some title I really want to play early in the release cycle. The hassles of Linux feel like things I can figure out, whereas the hassles of Windows feel like I’m fighting the established order imposed by a product manager at Microsoft.