I’ve switched instances since this comment, so I didn’t see it until now, when I’ve just happened to log back in. Really glad to hear things have generally been smooth, that’s a shame about the new device policy, though. I’ve never been a fan of Debian for use on workstations. At least with Flatpak, you can still have updated software nowadays.

Only issue I had was that the PC freezes if it enters sleep mode.

Sleep issues are sadly common since sleep is weirdly complicated and motherboards are often bad at properly implementing things in a standard way. They often just implement it well enough that it works on Windows, then forget about it. If you’re lucky, a future motherboard or kernel update might fix it.

The vast majority of systems won’t have a problem, but when you do, it is a real pain in the ass.

Fitgirl repacks are broken and have been for a while. Dodi repacks work fine.

And people who adopt cats shouldnt be adding to the problem. Outdoor cats have a much lower life expectancy than an indoor one, if you let your cat outdoors youre actively putting them in more danger and you shouldnt have them.

As long as you spend time providing your cat proper enrichment to express their hunting instincts, an indoor cat will be just as happy as an outdoor cat.

There is no situation where it is impossible to avoid. I’m glad your cat has had a good life, but in general, outdoor cats are still far more likely to die young to diseases, accidents, and wildlife.

Yeah, house cats killing birds in regions they aren’t native to. Your comment still has notthing to do with that.

None of the shelters or adoption agencies near me will even let you get a cat if you don’t say it will be kept indoors on the papers. Cats can easily be given the same level of enrichment indoors by playing with them.

Keeping your cat indoors is only cruel when you don’t care enough about them to play and provide enrichment to make them happy, in which case you shouldn’t have a cat.

Buying a nice nice and sharpening stones making cooking so much more enioyable

You could just look at my profile to see that I’m not. I’m also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn’t change that I’ve never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.

I’ve genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge

How is that an obvious databreach? It was just bot spam, something every single public site has had issues with.

This guide is pretty good, but I’ll also explains the basics here.

You pay a provider for access to Usenet files, which you locate through an indexer, and download through a client such as nzbget.

Picking a provider is the most complicated part. The guide explains how to choose one and r/Usenet has a page in their wiki for good provider deals. I use NewsDemon and they’ve been fine.

Indexers are pretty much the same as torrent indexers, they can be free or paid, public or private. NZBGeek has been great for me, and AnimeTosho is nice if you want to download anime.

The download clients work similarly to torrent clients with the addition of configuring the connection to your provider. Whichever provider you choose will have instructions for connecting to it.

Downloads aren’t peer-to-peer like torrents, so a VPN isnt as necessary, just make sure you pick a provider that doesnt keep logs. It also doesnt hurt to use one if you already pay for one and its not too slow.

One you’ve picked your provider and indexer, setting everything up is super easy.

Use Usenet instead, way faster downloads. Also lots of clients can stream torrents, so as long the torrent its being seeded well enough you can watch right away.

Worst case just go to one of the 100s of sites with free streams of basically every popular show and movie.

They absolutely didn’t work. I didn’t try removing the compatibility files afaik, but switching versions should basically have had the same result as that did trigger an first-time setup each time. The Ubisoft installer wasn’t part of that install for as far as I could see, or failed for each proton version without any visible signs.

Understood, my bad for assuming! It sounds like you had some really bad luck, as I couldn’t find users with the same issues on ProtonDB.

The problem here is mostly that the information offered on various locations differs and it is a question of trial and error to find out what works and what not, especially if you’re still figuring out the gaming ecosystem.

I definitely agree that this is a big issue. ProtonDB is generally the best source, and besides that a lot of the best resources are unfortunately in difficult to search Discords. I would love to see a more organized resource for this kinda stuff. This issue extends beyond gaming on Linux, too. Looking up any Linux issues results in a ton of super outdated or just bad info.

It was Linux Mint, on an Nvidia Prime-based laptop.

Linux Mint is a great distro, but one that I personally recommend against for gaming. People recommending distros that aren’t great for some use cases is also a problem with Linux gaming. Mint’s stability means using outdated Nvidia drivers, something that I would absolutely try to avoid.

I already saw somebody else mentioning Bazzite, so my next attempt will be to try that distribution.

I do love Bazzite, it is easily the distro I recommend most to users trying Linux for gaming. The only warning I have is that if you use hardware that needs kernel drivers that aren’t upstream, and they aren’t packaged by Bazzite, you will probably run into trouble. I wanted to use a steering wheel that needed a custom driver and just had to give up on getting it working. The only solutions seemed to require a ton of knowledge about ublue and all the containerization technology they use. It’s not my main distro, so I really didn’t feel like dedicating the time to learning all that.

However, that’s the only issue I’ve ever run into with Bazzite, and otherwise it is super user-friendly and Just Works™.

Thats all fair, I’m not trying to say their a better option for you or developers in general, just that they do offer features and benefits targeted at developers. I disagree with the idea that theyre only made for users with very simple needs.

Ive never run into any issues trying to build random projects or run random tools is distrobox, but I also haven’t used it as a main development tool. I prefer Nix for that.

Those tools are definitely great too, they just don’t offer the same purity because they dont handle external dependencies. Guaranteeing a reproducible build environment is something I find very valuable.

I think most users just don’t really know much about atomic distros. A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to really understand the benefits and mention downsides that don’t really exist in most of them. I think eventually (and by that I mean in a VERY long time) atomic distros will become the standard. AerynOS is an upcoming one that seems to have a really amazing blend of it’s atomic features without disrupting the user experience people expect from more typical distros. It won’t replace Nix for me, but I hope it’ll convince a lot of people to try it out.

I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all. NixOS, VanillaOS, and Bluefin are three of the first atomic distro’s I think of and they’re all heavily aimed at developers. All of them offer features to help separate development environments, which improve reproducibility of packages and environments. I prefer the Nix approach to containers, but each one definitely offers benefits for software development.

I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”.

Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.

These distros are good for people who want to treat their desktop like a phone, but flatpak kinda lets you do that on any distro. Atomic distros are great for those who want to use tools to separate development environments for purity and tinker with the ability to easily rollback.

Atomic distros dont stop you from breaking them, they just make it easy to undo breakage

Steam is supposed to handle installing the Ubisoft launcher during the first-time setup, it sounds like for whatever reason it failed to do that. It’s very likely that verifying the game files would’ve fixed the issue easily, as it re-runs the first time setup. If that didn’t work, deleting the compatibility files would probably have been the next step. I’d be very surprised if one of these didn’t fix it.

The rest of the troubleshooting steps you took until the GPU stuff were unnecessary, as they were basically Windows troubleshooting steps, not Linux ones. It’s completely expected to have to relearn how to troubleshoot stuff on a different OS and I’d really recommend asking in a Linux gaming community when you run into issues like that, until you’ve gotten the troubleshooting steps down.

Install Ubi launcher using method ‘add installer as game, set compatibility layer, install and change executable for application executable’ … Install Lutris and install Ubi launcher through that

Wine/Proton games are run in their own individual “prefixes”, which are essentially individual Windows instances. Both of these steps just installed Ubisoft launcher in a different instance. This would be a fine fix on Windows, but this is a different OS. The correct fix isn’t necessarily harder either, just different.

Install Protontricks through Flatpack instead of system package, as the Flatpack version is slightly newer. Accept that this will result in a much larger installation due to not using system-provided libraries.

“much larger” is relative, software is pretty small in general, especially compared to any modern games. It’s really not much space, and the flatpak runtimes will be reused for other flatpaks you install.

As much as I want to like it, this experience makes me feel that Linux is not fully ready for the masses yet.

I don’t even entirely disagree, but also don’t think the issues you faced completely demonstrate that. The Ubisoft installation issue was most likely a Steam client bug. First-time installations failing is 100% something that has happened on Windows, that’s why verifying game files is often the first recommended step when troubleshooting a game. Most distros that get recommended now have features to easily install Nvidia drivers. My personal recommendation for gaming, Bazzite, has an Nvidia ISO, which would’ve had them set up from the beginning.

Do you mind sharing what distro you were using? It sounds like whatever it is has bad instructions for setting up Nvidia drivers, I’d like to avoid recommending it.

Edit: Just read this back and wanted to add that I wasn’t trying to be rude or condescending at any point, or blaming you for the issues. I don’t think gaming on Linux is difficult, but I think people do need to do a better job preparing new users when they recommend it. It isn’t, and never will or even should be, the exact same as Windows. You have to learn the differences to be able to troubleshoot effectively, which just takes some time. Nobody knows how to troubleshoot correctly the first time they use Windows either.

It looks like this works by following accessibility standards. I’m not sure if an accessibility standard for input fields on Linux, but if it does it should be possible.