Sounds like something an AI would post. Quick, what color are your eyes?

I’ve had issues with Ventoy on multiple computers with multiple isos. +1 for convenience, -1 for not working 3/4 of the time (for me, I’m sure there are numerous factors).

I’ve been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem’s Solaris. It’d be really cool to poke around in a system that didn’t grow off of BSD or Linux.

Any distro can do what you need. Others have suggested Pop, Mint, Debian, Endeavour, and more. I’d agree with basically all of them. Really it comes down to what you prefer most.

Personally I’d lean more toward Debian as it’s a basic distro with very little extra bloat, loads of documentation, incredibly stable, etc. I always prefer a spartan, basic system I can add pieces to as I please, rather than a bunch of preloaded defaults that may or may not be to my taste. Again though, that’s just me.

Endeavour is great, but if you aren’t used to Arch, and how to maintain it, things can get sort of messy after a while (definitely need to make a good habbit of cleaning your package managers cache, as well as read up on what’s called a “pacdiff”. In general, Arch and its derivatives require research). It’s worth trying if you’re interested in rolling distros though.

Another might be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. From what I hear, it’s a bit more stable and curated than Arch so it may be a better option if you’re inexperience with a rolling release. I’ve never personally tried it, but have heard lots of good things from causal and power users alike.

I think it’s a little more complex today than it was in the days of Win7.

First, the performance/compatibility gap is much smaller than it used to be. Ie, back in those days, Wine was much more of a crapshoot. Now, compatibility is a lot better, and there are a number of straightforward troubleshooting tools like Winetricks. Proton is also huge, being an in-built feature in the largest gaming platform on PC.

Second, the Steamdeck has exposed numerous more casual PC gamers to Linux than probably there ever has been in the past. Granted, the PC handheld market isn’t massive, but it’s also not small. People want to play AAA pc games in the form factor of a Switch, and it just so happens that the most popular, well polished and best supported product in that market ships with Linux.

Third, todays focus on privacy and freedom is much more of a hot button issue than it was back in the day. I’m not at all trying to imply that there weren’t priviacy concious folk back then, but face it, in 2011, your car didn’t track your location and sell that data to marketing companies. Your phone didn’t capture your fingerprints, and your operating system didn’t track your online shopping habbits and show you ads in the start menu, or take constant screen-captures of your work at all times. People are more concious of their privacy now than they ever were (even people who aren’t super into tech are at the very least familiar with ad blockers and VPNs). I genuinely believe this will be one of the bigger factors if there is an uptick. People will learn about this alternative OS with no ads, no trackers, plus it’s free, and that will at least get them curious. You’re right, some will try but abandon it, some won’t care at all, but I think the number of people who just want out of what MS is locking them into is growing.

Debian. Same base, no extra bs. Rock solid and reliable. Outdated packages are a non-issue for a casual user. Gaming needs a bit of configuration but it perfectly doable. Installation is apparently difficult but… I don’t know where that comes from. It may not be Calameres-smooth but it’s perfectly understandable even to a novice.

This is true. However, even as a young person I remember the times where a game being released meant it was done, and if it was butchered, that was that. There was no second chance for the studio because the community absolutely wouldn’t trust them.

Now, that’s standard. Every AAA game is just assumed to basically be barely functional until 6+ months post launch. People have to say “why would you buy a game day one?” as if it’s a ridiculous notion to want to purchase a product that has been released onto a market. That sucks. It sucks that something that used to be a fun hobby is now a seedy grey market full of vitriole.

Man I’ve got really conflicted feelings about this game. I do think it’s great, and will probably be picking up Phantom Liberty next sale, but I never know whether to appreciate the devs for sticking with it and making sure their work lived up to expectations, or to be frustrated that I basically had to wait a year for a full product after buying for $80 CAD on day one (my own mistake, I foolishly thought CD Project was immune to such blunders). I guess it’s a bit of both. I do really appreciate all the hard work, I just wish that wasn’t on top of a bunch of frustration and disappointment.

Ground Branch on PC has some of the best I’ve ever seen. NPCs will, for example, if shot in the neck, clutch their throat and dynamically transition into a ragdoll as their animations become more sloppy until they go completely limp. It’s actually kind of unsettling how brutal it is.

What’s sad is that this game is a low budget passion project made by former Rainbow Six devs (the OG R6 games), not a AAA game backed by a massive corperation.

I mind.

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have your info spread across thosands of accounts that you yourself even implied you don’t keep track of?

What sony pulled, and coporate moves like it, are at least in part a result of people saying “meh, what’s one more account, I’ve already got thousands.”

We as a community aren’t an immaculate entity. Companies don’t just make these moves out of nowhere, they analyze what we’re willing to do so they can take advantage of those things to make money. That’s not some sleazy secret scheme, thats basic market research. If we collectively show we do actually care about this stuff and won’t supoort their business when they do it, it might not happen so often.

Bounced on my boys joystick to this for hours

Remember when telemetry/data collection across the internet was often optional and pretty minor?

The more shit we absentmindedly agree to because it’s not really a big deal in the short term, the worse it gets in the long term.

If I play a game on Steam, then Playstation, EA, Ubisoft, etc should all fuck off. I already gave those companies my money, it’s insulting that that isn’t enough anymore.

Edit: great point I just saw someone else mention, the fact that Sony has allowed over 100 million users’ data to be exposed due to various breaches by bad actors over the past 15 years. At least one of those times, the data was revealed to be nowhere near as secure as it should have been.

The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.

Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.

What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.

I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.

Worth mentioning that Helldivers is hugely and openly influenced by Starship troopers, which although not as big as something like D&D, is still pretty well known in pop-culture to this day, at least in the sci-fi circles.

My biggest thing when switching to Linux was understanding why I didn’t have permission to alter half of my file structure. I was trying to takeownership of my /usr directory as a user and had to have multiple people explain why that was a bad idea (and why simply making any changes as a super user via terminal was more than adequate for the results I wanted).

My mindset was a result of so many user files being spread across dozens of branches of the Windows file structure. Some very close to the root of the drive, some a few directories deeper. I didn’t really understand the benefit of having all my stuff in /home (and am now a full convert. Just thinking about navigating a Windows drive makes my skin crawl now).

Have it on GOG and play via heroic. I get 80+ FPS at high settings @1440p (balanced FSR), AMD R7 5800x, RX 7600XT. This is on Arch.

I had to use winetricks to install some DLLs to the prefix in order for the game to work properly with mods, but beyond that I’ve had no issues.

Some Android phones can already be dual booted with (in theory) any other UEFI compatible OS. There’s a whole guide on the PostmarketOS about setting up a dual boot environment.

I briefly tested PostmarketOS on a OnePlus 6T. The core functions seemed fine but overall it lacked functionality, so my plan was to dual boot with LineageOS (a degoogled android project) for the bits that really just want a true android environment to function properly, and PmOS for everything else I could manage. In the end I just wasn’t up for the process of setting up a dual boot, and went with just LineageOS. Been really happy with it so far, and will probably revisit dual booting when PmOS is more feature complete.

Edit, I suppose this doesn’t touch on the idea of running two separate OS’s on separate chips, and it does require a reboot to get the functionality of one OS or another, but besides that hiccup you’d get mostly the same functionality out of less complex hardware.

Well I’ll be, I humbly stand corrected. I will don the dunce cap for this one

How to actually get games running:

Download steam, make an account, log in. Go to the settings, find “Steam Play” and enable for unsupported titles. This enables Proton, which is a customized version of Wine, a Windows-Linux translation layer, plus some extra tweaks specifically for gaming. This lets you play the vast majority of all Windows games on Steam on your Linux machine.

Check out protondb to find out how compatible your chosen game is. You’ll see a rating, as well as user experiences on how well it worked, what issues they experienced, and the tweaks they made to mitigate them (take note that there is a section on each games page that is specific to the Steamdeck, Valves handheld. Not all info in this section is relevant to general PC users, so make sure you follow the more generic section).

If you look around and find a specific game that isn’t on Steam, Heroic Launcher and Lutris are your friends.

Heroic is a very nicely polished launcher for Epic Games, Amazon and GOG. It allows you to pool all three into a single library. You can use tools like winetweaks directly in the launcher, pick different Wine/proton versions per-game, etc. I’d use this as a secondary option to Steam.

Lutris also allows you to pool your games from multiple storefronts into one (Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, GOG, and manually installed). Lutris can be a little complex compared to Steam and Heroic. It’s very powerful, but somewhat spartan and can also be a bit buggy in some specific instances. It’s very well suited for older games that aren’t on major storefronts, emulators, or old CD games, mainly thanks to its option to set games up via standard windows installers or add existing games by pointing lutris to their installation path.

TL;DR, Start with steam, try some cheaper/free games. A great starting point would be Valves own games, as they’re cheap and heaps of fun (Portal, Half-Life, etc). They also usually have a Linux native version so you don’t need proton (although, counterintuitively, I find Linux Native games often don’t work as well as Windows games+proton). After you get your toes wet, go for some other storefronts and library apps. Have fun and good luck, don’t be afraid to ask for help.