I quite like Besiege, but I’d probably have to go with From the Depths.

I found BotW pretty fun and refreshing! It was a nice change of pace from traditional Zelda.

Hard drives are still useful for storing lots of data at a cheaper cost than SSDs!

Someone clearly doesn’t play Cities: Skylines with mods

Hey, quite a few people bought Game Pass for a month to try out Cities: Skylines 2, because it was quite a lot cheaper than the game itself (and considering the poor state the game was released in, probably not much more than a month of replay value anyway)

Wait what’s the point of backporting to GTK2 then? And why should I as an end user care? Will it make the UI nicer?

What even is GTK2 and GTK3?

At least they’re all in regular GUIs instead of 1 GUI, 1 command prompt, and random configuration files hidden somewhere.

Nope, last Christmas I struggled to get Linux Mint to play a Steam game using Proton. Booting would lead to a crash, adding some flags would lead to the game being incredibly laggy. Mint had an option for proprietary drivers, but the game would crash regardless of the flags. In the end, turns out Mint was downloading the wrong drivers, and I had to manually download the correct ones from Nvidia’a website to finally get the game to work with average performance.

It took multiple hours of troubleshooting during my one Christmas vacation of the year. Meanwhile my brother, who had an identical laptop playing the same game on Windows, ran it flawlessly with great performance.

Because they care about your experience and want to ensure you’re getting the most out of your computer by suggesting helpful productivity apps?

Why not leave the defaults as-is? They’re probably set like that for a reason.

Epic is developing Hyperspace for Mac, as well as “standalone” (access Hyperspace in a web browser). Plus many hospitals use Citrix virtualization, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux is theoretically possible (though unlikely due to jankiness).

How would they be able to do that if they were already out of the country? Or is it something that “everyone” should set up?

They specifically said they didn’t want that though.

Sounds way too confusing, and goes against the whole idea that “Linux is easier than Windows because it has an App Store” and “you don’t have to use the command line”.

I agree, I haven’t experienced the stereotypical “WiFi doesn’t work” (except for a college network), but I have had issues with screen brightness not working (though seems to be fixed in newer versions), and issues with the Nvidia graphics card that I can’t just swap out with an AMD because it’s a laptop and I don’t want to buy a whole new one.

You’re right, my laptop does have a Nvidia card, but I thought one of the main benefits of Linux was being able to run on any hardware, or that’s at least what people have been saying since Windows 11 had certain requirements. I bought my laptop because it was only $250 (in 2017) but still had a 1080p screen and a graphics card, and I was a broke college student who couldn’t afford to be picky. If I could, why not pay a little extra for Windows as well?

Proton’s amazing and it’s made gaming on Linux significantly more feasible, but I struggled on the same laptop getting it to work, and needed to copy in flags and use old versions. It often works without a hitch but it’s still another thing to go wrong. Thankfully there are a lot more native Linux games due to Unity though.

Edit: Mint did give me an easy option to switch to proprietary drivers, but they were the wrong version and crashed when I tried to game. I ended up having to find them and download them manually.

Not quite, running 75% of games requires turning on Proton, and while it’s incredible they can run at all, many have minor issues and/or require setup to work well. Plus dealing with graphics card drivers that are extremely laggy by default unless you find and install the correct version of the proprietary ones.

I’m assuming they’re referring to Proton/Wine, which is pretty great that exists, but the fact you need it in the first place, plus random incompatibilities and needing to add flags for some games, makes it less than ideal compared to Windows where everything just works™.

I had quite the opposite experience. Middle of last year, reinstalled Mint on an HP Elitebook 8570w (everybody online seemed to recommend it over upgrading in-place like a normal operating system), and wanted to play games. Steam installed fine, but Mudrunner had to be configured to use Proton. Fair enough, but it crashed on startup. Okay, I’ll try an older version. Still crashes no matter what version I try (and I was on shitty vacation WiFi so downloading was extra slow mind you). Okay, I’ll try some random USE_WINE3D flag I found on the internet. No longer crashes, but the performance is piss slow. “Oh right”, I remembered, “I have to select the proprietary Nvidia drivers”. Fortunately Mint has a setting to easily select them, unfortunately after installing them the game crashes no matter what I do. Give up and go back to open source with 5fps. Try again later, and realize that apparently Mint installed the wrong Nvidia drivers, and I have to manually download them and install via the command line. Some more tweaking Proton versions and flags, and the game is finally running at a solid 20fps.

Compare that to my brother I was playing with. Identical 8570w laptop, identical Quadro K1000m CPU, identical Mudrunner game. The game worked out of the box and ran faster on his computer than it ever did on mine. I don’t remember the exact FPS but it was at least 30, probably closer to 45.

And before someone comments on “Nvidia”, I thought one of the benefits of Linux was supposed to be the ability to run on anything. Even the cheap laptop I got in 2017 because it was $250 but came with a 1080p screen and a graphics card. Paying more for the “correct” hardware would defeat the entire point of saving money with an open source operating system.