cinnamon is like the perfect middle ground. it's not as painful to use as gnome, not as buggy as kde, but it still has a ton of customization.

I like Arch because I love minimalist stuff and love having the latest software available. However, I always had small niggles where my Linux experience would fail me and end up spending time trying to fix it. In the end I booted more into Windows to just avoid it. I wiped and installed Mint at the weekend as I wanted to spend less time tinkering and just using it instead. I'm happy with the decision so far.

Went with cachy, works well.

I have no idea how people keep recommending that distro to beginners and regular end users only based on what the experience is like right after installing it.

It was such a pain daily driving it for couple of months even for experienced user. updates breaking stuff every now and then, packages reverting versions oddly, causing conflicts in plasma packages, when using SteamDeck mode it would auto-install updates on boot without asking and bootlooping for no reason until I disconnect it from the network, plymouth theme changing randomly. Usually to troubleshoot I had to go to their Discord to see what broke this time. I mean, fine, but this is an unstable tinkerer purely community-driven distro, not meant for those who just want easy time dealing with their PCs. Besides, none of that shit happens on just regular plain Arch btw, once setup properly it updates just fine.

EDIT: maybe it's any better in Nobara 41?

The two major third party kernel level anti cheat have publically stated they have supported some level of their anti-cheat working on linux since 2021.

Easy Anti Cheat:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/epic-games-announce-full-easy-anti-cheat-for-linux-including-wine-a-proton/

BattlEye:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/supporting-linux-proton-and-the-steam-deck-with-battleye-is-just-an-email-away/

All the devs/management has to do is actually use/enable this feature that is part of what they're already paying for.

They're paying to liscense/use the AC in designed for windows games, these ACs have supported linux via Proton and WINE for almost 4 years now, the game devs just don't enable this compatability.

As you can see from the articles, with EAC and BattlEye... the process truly seems to be as simple a sending an email or checking a few boxes in a dev toolkit, and EAC/BattlEye does all the hard work, the game devs just need to do some testing and submit logs/error reports, and EAC/BattlEye iron out the rest.

...

Many proprietary or less broadly used anti cheat solutions also work on linux.

Valve Anti Cheat

nProtect Game Guard

PunkBuster

TreyArch Anti Cheat

EQU8

FairFight

... all of these AC systems have at least one, usually multiple, very to moderately prominent games which use them, and are fully supported on linux.

...

There is a ton of prevalent misinformation amongst gamers and devs and management as well, that common anti cheat systems are impossible to support on linux.

This is completely false.

What is happening is game developers either don't care, or don't bother to put in a modicum of effort to make their games work with third party systems with features they are already paying for, that do exist, that already support linux... or they are to incompetent to figure out how to make their games fully compatible with said AC SDKs they are already paying for / using / developed in house.

How many times have game developers in the last 5 years released a giant, buggy, unfinished mess?

How many times do we have to learn that making games that are far, far too client side authoritative actually need to have a whole lot of stuff be sandboxed, sanitized, and more server authoritative?

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Scroll through this and you'll find examples of almost every major different AC system working on linux in some games, and not working in some other games.

But most people act like its just completely impossible, across the board.

It obviously isn't.

Many game devs or PR people or AC devs will publically state things that roughly equate to 'it isn't possible for our AC system and X game to work together on linux.'

This is again, obviously false, for almost every kind of AC system that exists, there exist fairly popular games that have gotten that AC system fully working.

...

Beyond that, people will say things like 'all linux users are hackers' or something to that effect.

Again, this is obviously false.

A cursory look at websites that sell hacks for various games will show you they are all targeted at windows users.

These are actually substantially less likely to work on linux, as Proton and WINE and other translation layers are probably not going to be able to emulate the insane hacky exploits that work on a baremetal windows system.

...

Oh, right. Last point: Many of the most popular sites and communities that sell hacks to windows users ... well they defeat kernel level anti cheat systems.

So we arrive at a situation where game devs and gamers blame linux users for cheats linux users can't use, and because of this, they clamor for and build increasingly invasive AC ... that doesn't even work to stop windows cheaters, but it does make legit linux users unable to play.

... The point of a complex system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

The problem is more that some games don't work, but if that game is one you really want to play, that adds a very strong reason not to use it.

A lot of Linux users, especially the vocal ones, are very happy to just ignore the games they can't play. Not everyone would agree with that.

Tbf anti-cheat at kernel level should be avoided at all cost anyhow. Its a major security risk. Break it and your entire system is compromised.that's the type of anti-cheat that doesn't work under linux.