Eyedust

I set up my old ASUS dinosaur with NixOS a couple years back. It has an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU (it’s a 2012-2013 model ROG laptop that my ex abandoned). I don’t know how other Linux distros would play, just due to the stuff I hear about the battles between dedicated and internal graphics, but NixOS let’s me just declare the GPU I want running 100% of the time, so that was an easy fix for me.

It’s so old it has to use Nouveau drivers. It doesn’t game all that well (at least not with Steam), even though it was a monster laptop back in it’s day. I tried to play Moonring through Steam, which is just an indie, pixel-graphic roguelike and it was choppy af. Tales of Maj’eyal wouldn’t run at all. However, the Nix packages for Pixel Dungeon and it’s derivatives ran fine. I haven’t taken the time to troubleshoot Steam yet, though.

You could backup your stuff, throw a few distro ISOs you’re interested in alongside a Windows ISO on Ventoy, and just give it a whirl. Worse comes to worse it just doesn’t work and you already have Windows ready to reinstall. Alternatively, it could work with some issues you’d have to troubleshoot, or best case it could just work.

openSUSE is still on my distro bucket list. When I’m ready to hop I usually just start pushing my luck messing with things until my current setup fails. Then I pretend to be upset and inconvenienced while secretly excited to try something new.

I have actually done this a few years back. The trick is to add in the Kubuntu backport repository to get later versions (at least back when I did it).

I called it Kupobop and changed the OS symbol to a tiny moogle from Final Fantasy.

Then my Arch friend annoyed me into trying Arch, so naturally I now use Fedora.