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This thing has trouble running anything made past like 2012 and the newer emulators out there totally bust it. I tried recently running citra and it could barely hit 30%. Would switching over to linux lighten the load on the cpu and free it up so I could run more demanding games?
Also how is linux for emulation and gaming in general?
I have some complications for you. So your specific cpu (at least according to intel's spec sheet) can be overclocked to 3.2 GHz although I would double check by running the following if/when you do try linux:
lscpu |egrep "Model name|MHz"If you do decide to overclock it I would highly recommend installing a cpu handler so you dont have to worry about overheating. Also the hotter your cpu is the worse its performance is going to be so be aware of that as well.
As others have said, Linux can't make your cpu faster but it is generally more efficient about background tasks compared to windows. So it wont be faster for a single process but since there will be less ~~proprietary spyware~~ background processes it should be slightly faster overall. Additionally adding more ram (bumping it up to 16) would help a lot as modern applications are extremely ram hungry nowadays ~~due to lazy and/or overworked programmers who don't pay attention to performance~~ for unknown reasons. But 8gb is generally fine for most use cases.
For gaming emulation on linux I would recommend retroarch.
The best way I have found to move to linux is try in a VM --> try out the live environment --> install so you can dual boot --> delete windows partition. Also dont be afraid to move back to windows if it doesnt work out for you. Linux is probably the best its ever been but it might not be ready for every user yet (but also I can say that in the near future it undoubtedly will).
There are some distros that target older hardware like antiX (which I have tried out in the past and it is quite good), but dont worry too much about one distro over the other, they are pretty much the same. I would recommend trying out more popular ones like linux mint or debian just because there will be more support for them over other ones. Using a desktop environment that uses less resources should help as well, usually people will point to xfce and lxde. There are a lot of linux users here and on other lemmy instances so if you do need help there should be plenty of people to answer questions.