.Keys: • What Linux distro you use the most and why?
Linux Mint, because I got annoyed by something that Canonical did with Ubuntu in the past, but didn't want to part too far away from Ubuntu as it seems possibly the most suitable desktop Linux OS for a gamer (because of official Steam support etc.). It actually seems Mint is even more geared to desktop gamers than Ubuntu, as Canonical is trying to make Ubuntu also more "touch tablet friendly" with big icons etc., and also catering for server use so Ubuntu always comes by default with all kinds of cloud-integration shit that only annoys home desktop users and gamers. cloud-init this, cloud-init that...
Mint is primarily for desktop users, and that's it, and I like that. Mint developers seem very pragmatic to me, not trying to push me to some of their preferred technology (like Canonical pushes snapd with Ubuntu), but trying to do the right and the most sane thing with their decisions.
So Mint, to me, is Ubuntu without all the annoying Ubuntu stuff, and wrong decisions made by Canonical (for Ubuntu). Mint has reverted some of the questionable decisions made by Ubuntu, e.g. how the Chromium browser was delivered in Ubuntu.
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2492 The makers of Ubuntu, Canonical, are more and more starting to look like "Microsoft of Linux", with some similar practices, so I rather distance myself a bit from them. Then again IBM (Red Hat) doesn't look much better, with how they killed off CentOS 8 etc.
Almost all Ubuntu tips and tricks online apply also to Mint, so it is easy to find information for it online. The same .dep installers work etc. The last thing I remember being different was e.g. release upgrade, which is a totally whole different process in Mint than in Ubuntu, but that kinda makes sense because they still are two different distros, even if Mint is based on Ubuntu...
I use the XFCE desktop environment with Mint as it seems to do everything I want from a desktop environment, and is a relatively low-resource option. Why use a heavier DE that takes more resources for no good reason, other than maybe more eye candy etc.? At least I didn't see any advantage in using a heavier desktop environment like Cinnamon or MATE or KDE or whatever over XFCE when I tried them, so XFCE it is.
.Keys: • If you use Linux alongside Windows or other OSs, do you use Virtual Boxes or Dual Boot? Why?
Both, on different PCs.
On my (main) home gaming PC, I dual-boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint. Windows 7 is there mainly for some (older) Windows games that may have issues running on Windows 10 on my other PC, and/or Linux. Most of the time I use Linux on that PC, especially when going online (I am going to put the Windows 7 partition offline soon anyway, with no internet connectivity. for security reasons).
On my work laptop which is running Windows 10, I am running Linux Mint (and also Manjaro and FreeBSD, because why not?) as a virtual machine with Virtual Box. This is because I don't want to alter my work PC too much by setting up dual-boot, and I don't feel like dividing its 500GB SSD to two separate OSes anyway.
I run Linux Mint there in a virtual machine so that I can freely and securely install some (Linux) software there, experiment freely with stuff within Linux, and so that I can do my Linux stuff there like if I need to use curl or try some bash scripting etc.
.Keys: • What are the advantages and disadvantages of using two OSs in the same PC?
To get the benefits of both on the same PC:
Windows for running Windows-only applications that don't have a good equivalent in Linux, or don't necessarily work 100% in WINE. Many Windows games, for example.
Linux for all advanced stuff like bash scripting or running a server or whatever, less silly restrictions in Linux, like in Windows you don't get Bitlocker on Windows 10 Home.
.Keys: • What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ONLY Linux (any distro / comparison of distros, if you want to explain)?
Advantage against dual-boot:
- Hard drive space is not wasted across two separate OSes.
- It is simpler to just clean install your PC from the scratch if you have only one OS installed, as you don't have to try to figure out how it might affect the whole system, like the dual-boot system.
.Keys: • Does WINE really works well with Windows exclusive games?
In my limited experience, with mostly older games, sometimes it works great, sometimes ok, sometimes doesn't work well or at all. However, so far I've been mostly pleasantly surprised how well it works, and in some cases it has been even the best environment to play the game (e.g. for Icewind Dale 2, for some reason it works the smoothest for me in Linux Wine, better than in Windows 10 or Windows 7).
I suggest you have both "basic" WINE, and something like Lutris, both installed in Linux. I usually first try if the Windows game starts working fine with basic WINE, and if not, I can also try it in Lutris. I can have both installed side by side, if I want.
For instance, the GOG version of Diablo didn't work right with basic WINE (the menu screen is black, showing no graphics, music plays in the background though...). I know you can fix it manually somehow, but it was much easier to just install it through Lutris, after which it worked perfectly.
.Keys: • Is it true that Linux have compatibility issues with some hardware (GPU, specially)? What's your experience with this?
I have no experience with new GPUs, but with older NVidia and AMD GPUs, Linux has worked great for me,
I prefer AMD more in Linux because it offers official open source drivers, which probably guarantee future Linux versions will keep supporting older AMD GPUs longer.
With NVidia, officially NVidia offers only their proprietary drivers (which have worked fine for me overall, even if they don't remember the screen brightness setting across reboot for some reason), but NVidia will stop supporting my older NVidia GPU in future Linux releases. There are still the unofficial open source NVidia drivers I can keep using, but they are somewhat slower for games etc.