I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

Their insistence on sueing the world of emulation ensures I’ll never buy another Nintendo console ever again. (And I’ve bought all of them so far). Their actions cause the opposite effect of what they want - they are creating pirates.

The cost is insane though. I think there’s a disconnect between what they want and what they can afford. I think it’s like a 10x adder per user license to go from regular office 356 to a copilot enabled account. I know my company wants it hosted in the cloud - but we aren’t going to pay the going rates. It’s insane.

Meh we’ll see. But I do wonder what happens when they get packaged up easier as a program.

I think local compute will kill these huge data centers for AI. It’s amazing what you can do with free tools like ollama or rag agents like n8n. Even on a business laptop with only 16GB of ram. If you’ve got a 4090 at home in your gaming pc and some big ram sticks - well, you’d be surprised at what some models can do (and how quickly they can respond).

You all know how the internet works - in a short time someone’s going to put together a free tool that’s as easy as “click this button to install” and it’ll do 80% of what ChatGPT can do. ie probably enough for the average user - for free.

So how are they going to recoup all these billions spent on data centers if peoples personal computers can mostly do the same thing? How do they monetize your information and sell you ads if it’s all done locally?Go download one and ask questions-sure it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good locally hosted.

I think the people spending these billions are starting to realize that…. Meanwhile I think this keeps video card prices high unfortunately…

Love mine and daily drive it. Not janky, zero issues. Everything works on Linux. Not sure what you’re referring to.

Can you get more bang for your buck? Yes, to start. But let’s compare after a couple of upgrades on mine vs whole laptop replacements with other brands.

And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

No, but it’s a set it and forget it thing. I pay zero attention to it and it just runs. Easy means it runs more if I had to check what to mine and switch and blah blah, well I’m lazy…. So for me - ya it’s better. ;)

I went to 11 and have gone back to 10. The only thing it does is mine crypto coins (I need a heater in that room anyway - whatever). Everything else works better in Linux.

11 was fine until they repeatedly kept breaking their updates. Next time I have to reload that os on that drive it’ll be hiveos. It won’t be as convenient as the auto switchers like nicehash and their alternatives. But ya, windows sux these days.

I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.

I like the feel of something different than windows.

My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”

Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.

This is good advice imo. Some further comments:

• Its easier to make a vm out of a bare metal or “real” install. It’s much harder to go the other way.
• you seem to have some fear about installing or reinstalling OSs. It’s much easier than redeploying vms. I’d banish those thoughts and jump in. Again the above advice is solid because you can mess up or change your mind, and you can always revert. Cloning a drive and redeploying that image to the original drive is simple.
• dual booting gets a lot of flak. Most of that comes from windows not playing nice with boot partitions when windows is installed on the same drive. Another source of issues is secure boot. If you have two internal drives, installing an os on each one works great. I like turning secure boot off and simply pressing F8 upon boot up if I want to switch. (But you totally can get it working with secure boot and adding other OSs to grub.

Those are not normal problems. Linux generally does work out of the box unless you’ve got weird or new hardware.

Mint usually does the trick ez peasy and that’s why it’s recommended so much. BUT, sometimes it craps on your hardware. I’d actually suggest trying a different distro before you make up your mind. Some are newer than mint and might work where mint doesn’t.

Might I suggest fedora workstation or popos? Fedora and the rpm fusion team make installing nvidia a breeze and it’s running pretty recent kernels and code. I’ve never run popos but it seems to be gaming focused and people generally like it.

If your having the same issues, then you probably do have some hardware incompatibilities. And if that’s the case, you have my condolences-you’d be better off just sticking with something that works - aka windows.

But please do believe me/us when I say you shouldn’t have to work that hard - mint is either too old, or you’ve got wonky hardware that is going to be a pain no matter what.

I think Myersguy nails it. One addition: Manjaro comes packaged with a gui software installer/updater, endeavoros does not. Endeavoros pushes you to use pacman and yay.

I’ve used both. I was happy with manjaro for a long time, until I wasn’t. Manjaro fools you into thinking updating is like mint - click a button, poof done. And that’s just not what you do on an arch system. Eventually one of those updates tanks things and you don’t know how to fix it. Endeavor does a better job at teaching you - for example showing you the arch wiki news prior to update, automatically installing pacdiff and meld, giving you tools to handle the cache and old files, etc. All of this is accomplished on the welcome screen with buttons that fire off terminal commands - so it’s not sexy, but helps.

Congrats! There’s probably a few things not perfect that you haven’t noticed yet-but ya, despite what the trolls say, Linux pretty much just works these days. Oftentimes better than windows.

Sometimes you’ll run into a program that is windows only and that’s a pain. The first thing I do is try to find a linux alternative-sometimes you can sometimes you can’t (stuff designed to interface with your hardware can be a pain sometimes - controllers, rgb lights, fan speeds, motherboard stuff). Bottles works great for running windows programs. And if all else fails a windows vm.

I agree. Newegg used to be great but not anymore. Amazon often has what you’re looking for and at the best price. Not everyone has a micro center or equivalent nearby.

I agree, post an alternative instead of just bitchin!

No, my pc doesn’t have an internal optical drive…. But doesn’t everyone have a usb portable drive?

It’s not a “Linux” keyboard per se. It’s the same keyboard - it’s just one has a superkey symbol instead of a windows key symbol printed on it. They screwed up on my order and sent me a keyboard with a windows key on it. It’s a non issue, and I didn’t say anything - I’m sure they would have sent me the other keyboard if I bitched.

I read through those comments - there’s actually more complaints than those. Those weren’t that bad.

They updated the fan curves recently, mine runs fine. Fans aren’t silent when humming along, but normal use they aren’t even spinning.

Sleep is always a bitch on Linux. It doesn’t have great sleep life. I just shut mine down at the end of the day, and close the lid during the day.

I believe they fixed the amd graphics issues. I should have noted that I have a core ultra chip. I wish I had gotten the amd chip - but guess what - no biggie, I can upgrade later!

There was a complaint about the windows key. I will admit that I ordered the Linux keyboard and it pissed me off that I got a keyboard with a windows key. But I didn’t make a stink, I just deal with it.

There was fingerprint reader complaints. Mine just worked. Dunno what that was about.

My vote is a firm “buy a framework” and get a fun color. People will be jealous.