Migrating from windows 7 to linux, help, tips and advice?^¸
 

Hi! The windows 7 end of support is approaching fast and i have no desire to migrate to windows 10 for both security and practical reasons.

The scary part is, i have a staggering amount of game in my steam account and i am really affraid i will no longer be able to play to most of them.

I looked on the internet and beside wine it appear that there are some propriatry software like cedega with better compatibility capabilities but i really dont know if they are worth it.

i am looking for help and tips for a potential migration from other gamers.
thanks,

If you have a steam account, then you can download the games from the internet again.
You can also check the Program folder, where Steam should be installed.

A. Which games in steam ? Steam games generally have icons that show which platform they can run on,or those which are cross-platform anyway. If you see tux (little penguin) icon, it'll play on Linux.
B. I don't play games on Linux, I have a dedicated Win10 partition for that. But Steam has released it's own linux based OS and I have read great things about it. It's still beta though.
C. Many mainstream Linux Distributions (ubuntu and derivatives for example) have steam client available in their repository.

You should use Windows 10 x 64 for playing games

Seven years??? And that is just OFFICIAL support.

You have to ask yourself what is more important: gaming or your OS? I chose the latter.

If it is gaming, either bite the bullet and go with W10, use it in a separate partition, offline at a separate station, or use Linux overall. If you go with the latter you will not be able to play a lot of your games, especially if they are FPS games. Some FPSs are supported in Linux but many aren't. I have about 110 games in my Steam account. Only about 50 of these are supported on Linux Steam which is quite a lot, and that's only because most of those are pixel-graphics games.

The Steam client is available for many distros. However, the most supported distro for gaming overall is Ubuntu: I use Debian and occasionally a game which is 'Linux compatible' just doesn't work.

Bear in mind that W7 is still supported till 2020. If I were you, and gaming was as important as it seems to you, I would wait it out till then and then make my decision. Don't worry, a lot of people are going to be in the same boat as you when that happens.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

I know 2020 is relatively far, but i try to plan my stuff ahead.

I have been thinking about going dual boot but i just dont like it beccause its not efficient, i really dont want to have to reboot every time i want to play a game.

I will go that road if i have no choice, but i would rather have a fully fonctionnal Linux Desktop with gaming capabilities, that why i was asking about cedega/crossover.

If you have enough resources in your machine, or perhaps a spare machine you could throw at this issue, how about a creating a Linux VM and then testing whether the Steam games that you really care about are accessible in it? Then you will have some hard data to help you make your decision.

+1 to this. OP needs to get his/her hand dirty.

Yeah the problem is i wont be completely sure that the new game will be compatible.

I have been wondering, perhaps having 2 computers and a KVM Switch might do the trick? I could keep the gaming PC on Windows 10 and have a dedicated Desktop computer.
If i want to game i could just flip the switch and use the second pc.

Opinions??

If it gives any pointers, I revived three laptops (all bought between 2007-2010) when they were not able to run the increasingly resource hungry windows OS. Somebody handed me a live KDE of Mandriva in 2009 and , I got fascinated by the performance while it was still running out of a CD. So I made them dual boot eventually.

All my laptops were able to graduate to Win7 and one even made it to Win10, but by then I would log into windows only to edit any documents or make any presentations (Office 2007 was a great piece of software, and Openoffice/Libreoffice still had a long way to go ). I had to let go of my games, of course. Back then I owned only CD/DVD games and lets face it, frequent overheating (and shutting down) was a killjoy when you are zooming around in NFSMW or jumping through galaxies in ME2. Steam was there, but did not have anything for linux.

I built this desktop in 2017. It was meant to serve my gaming needs on windows as well as 4-5 concurrently running KVMs (and parallel music streaming/internet radio) without breaking a sweat. Sure, it's multi-booted, sure it means every time Win10 pushes a major update I have to use a live USB(fall creators, anniversary). But that is something I can take care of, by spending an extra hour or two.

If spending 2 extra minutes to boot into Windows is not an option, yay for KVM.

Point is, it's your choice. :)