 I see there's some sort of "how's Linux now" discourse going around Mastodon and so I'll give my brief summary: To be blunt, Linux is just the least-shit option to run on your PC nowadays lol. If you want a good start, try Kubuntu https://kubuntu.org/, I get along great with it. Familiar interface, without all the shovelled shit Microsoft constantly try to force on you. Same KDE Plasma interface Valve use for Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. 26 comments
Valve Proton has made gaming close to solved too. Most single-player games work great, but anti-cheat remains problematic. Almost everything I play is really smooth. Hilariously, my Windows 11 install runs games worse somehow *confused*. And I've done basically no tinkering to my Linux install, I use almost all defaults... @gamingonlinux yeah... i've noticed that as well, some windows games run better under proton than natively on windows.... @gamingonlinux I started an experiment of being Linux-only late last year as a result of how far Proton has come, and I haven't needed to boot up Windows at all since (though I have done to play around with libvirt and such). The only thing that I miss doing is modding for A Hat in Time, since while I *can* get into its UE3 with protontricks tweaks, the performance was not great the last I tried. Might give it a go again now I'm all AMD. @gamingonlinux Same experience here. I just ignore platform requirements these days; just a quick check on ProtonDB is all. @gamingonlinux Videos can be problematic too, because a lot of recent games use H264 and similar codecs Valve can't ship.
[DATA EXPUNGED]
@insidertreat Ubuntu / Kubuntu are absolutely fine. People like to make this far too complicated.  @gamingonlinux what's *really* confusing is many Windows games run better via Proton on Steamdeck than their native linux ports do Until you think about how much time/effort/money is invested in optimising the Windows version for the larger customer base 🤷♂️ @witewulf when you know why, it's not confusing, a lot of Linux "ports" were made by a third-party, plenty were click-to-export with no effort put in, Proton has people dedicated to making everything perform well  And those 3rd party people will not regularly update. COUGH Aspire COUGH They'd wait like a month to release their version on the CIV6 update, and it was always buggy. Game ran better through Proton @gamingonlinux I love the subtle irony of some of the problematic anticheats not even working on Windows 11 with its system integrity protection features (which it aggressively nags you to enable if they aren't) @gamingonlinux is there anything special that needs to be installed? Or Ubuntu desktop with steam installation will suffice? @gamingonlinux I was following a complicated tutorial on Reddit to install an older game using Lutris last night. Turns out the game’s provided Linux Appimage runs just fine out of the box now. Zero config! @gamingonlinux Flathub has indeed changed a lot of things for application installation on Linux, the sandboxing works great. (sometimes a little too great tho... Flatseal is an essential app to install, some apps have problems with permissions that Flatseal helps a lot to solve)  @gamingonlinux This one of the reasons i would suggest Linux Mint, the software manager allows you to download Flatpaks without touching the terminal, and the best part is that you don't have to input your password (Although it's a great security practice and should not be skipped) for it since it passes through the user and not through administration and the dependencies won't wreck your system. @gamingonlinux Maybe. But sometimes I struggle with accesing my own files (Sandbox) and the really ugly file path that is used inside the app. @gamingonlinux  @gamingonlinux Assuming that is isn't already a feature I don't know about - the missing feature I'd like to see Flatpak add is a version rollback feature. Would be handy at those times when a new flatpak update fubrs the application, and one wants to go back to the previous working flatpak version. It's happened to me a few times, and I end up waiting for fix.  @gamingonlinux I'd also throw a recommendation for Linux Mint. Seems to be the general consensus on the best distro for beginners. Saw Flatpak in your thread and should let you know Linux Mint has Flatpak and Flathub set up by default, no set-up needed on the user's part.  @gamingonlinux #linux is actually a good option for your PC. not just the "least shit" one ... @gamingonlinux I would suggest Linux Mint instead, Kubuntu still has the questionable decisions and centralized future of Ubuntu 
[DATA EXPUNGED]
 @gamingonlinux I'd actually go with Tuxedo OS. It's basically Linux Mint with KDE. Including flatpaks instead of snaps, newer KDE Plasma versions, and with newer kernel and Mesa versions than Kubuntu. @gamingonlinux I'm writing an article on how to install Linux Mint and Tuxedo OS from start to finish. And yes, it will include dual-booting! |
Gregory's Server
Even if you last tried Linux say 2-3 years ago properly, it's quite a different world. Thinking on the rise of Flathub / Flatpak, getting apps is *so much* easier now across nearly any Linux distribution: https://flathub.org/en
That's one thing I thought we were missing some time ago, that is close to solved now.