Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.
The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.
Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first)
Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.
or VM
Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.
Is not strictly necessary to install Windows first, it just makes it easier, because Linux will setup the bootloader for you. Windows in the others hand tends to nuke everything that was installed prior, so you would at least need to repair the bootloader. To be completely safe you can just disconnect the Linux drive, while Windows is installing. Definitely a path, if you want to go for Linux only for now.
VM is a good method once it is set up, but needs more initial tinkering with the passthrough, depending on your hardware. I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work. Otherwise the game shouldn’t even know it’s in a vm.
Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.
Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?
There’s a technical difference. On a single drive, GRUB (or any other modern bootloader) can handle multiple OSs that coexist on the same boot chain. Windows doesn’t like this of course. On different drives it is the UEFI that chooses which drive boot sector to boot from, regardless of which bootloader it has. Here, Windows doesn’t get a say, and it is less likely to break.
Historically, the first case was called dual booting but the second is not called that. If the same result is achieved, maybe the distinction doesn’t matter anymore. However, in the olden days, there was only one disk allowed to have a master boot partition, the Device 0 in an IDE bus. Consumer PCs were limited to two IDE busses, with a device 0 and device 1 each, only one hard drive could have an MBR on the primary IDE. Now a days it is much easier to have multi-disk boot capabilities in hardware thanks to EFI system partitions (since mid 2000s), but it used to be necessary to fiddle with an MBR even if the OSs were on different disks.
It is an important distinction because dual booting, as a concept, almost always exists in relation with Windows. If you have two, three or more Linux OSs running on the same disk drive, it is not called dual booting, it is just booting and choosing your distro, as bootloaders like GRUB are multi-booting by default.
So, yeah, maybe it is dual-booting as well, but it is not what the original term used to mean. It is just Windows wasting space in a quarantined disk, which I still prefer.
Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.
The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.
Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.
Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.
I can’t comment on aoe2 specifically but Halo Infinite (through steam) and Minecraft both use my Microsoft account just fine on Linux Mint.
Is not strictly necessary to install Windows first, it just makes it easier, because Linux will setup the bootloader for you. Windows in the others hand tends to nuke everything that was installed prior, so you would at least need to repair the bootloader. To be completely safe you can just disconnect the Linux drive, while Windows is installing. Definitely a path, if you want to go for Linux only for now.
VM is a good method once it is set up, but needs more initial tinkering with the passthrough, depending on your hardware. I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work. Otherwise the game shouldn’t even know it’s in a vm.
Not something that matters to me anyway. I don’t own any such games currently, and don’t intend to change that.
But thanks for the tips re the bootloader!
Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.
Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?
There’s a technical difference. On a single drive, GRUB (or any other modern bootloader) can handle multiple OSs that coexist on the same boot chain. Windows doesn’t like this of course. On different drives it is the UEFI that chooses which drive boot sector to boot from, regardless of which bootloader it has. Here, Windows doesn’t get a say, and it is less likely to break.
Historically, the first case was called dual booting but the second is not called that. If the same result is achieved, maybe the distinction doesn’t matter anymore. However, in the olden days, there was only one disk allowed to have a master boot partition, the Device 0 in an IDE bus. Consumer PCs were limited to two IDE busses, with a device 0 and device 1 each, only one hard drive could have an MBR on the primary IDE. Now a days it is much easier to have multi-disk boot capabilities in hardware thanks to EFI system partitions (since mid 2000s), but it used to be necessary to fiddle with an MBR even if the OSs were on different disks.
It is an important distinction because dual booting, as a concept, almost always exists in relation with Windows. If you have two, three or more Linux OSs running on the same disk drive, it is not called dual booting, it is just booting and choosing your distro, as bootloaders like GRUB are multi-booting by default.
So, yeah, maybe it is dual-booting as well, but it is not what the original term used to mean. It is just Windows wasting space in a quarantined disk, which I still prefer.
That’s also “dual booting”. The phrase never referred specifically to having two OSes on the same drive, just on the same machine.