chic_luke

You forgot cache distance. That would also critically hinder performance

I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don't have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn't done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn't anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn't support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn't seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I'm going to buy a game and hope it's going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it's Steam from me.

As in tradition - mindset. Getting on Linux requires a certain mindset, and this gets more and more true the weirder and more involved whatever it is that you are planning to do gets.

+1 for everything you mentioned - I'll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.

Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.

Thanks you!! This looks fun, I didn't know this was a thing

Thank you! I'll check it out :)

There's also audio dramas. Niche but good. They're a narration like books, but they are made for the audio medium.

The problem I've found with audio books is that they were made to be read - and it shows. It requires a lot of focus to listen to an audio book even if it was done well, and it feels "clunky" and "janky" in a way. I can't white put my finger on what's wrong with it but it feels wrong to me. Audio dramas are generally easier to listen to, sometimes they use epistolary formats to make them easier to separate into episodes, and they have a lot more attention on things like the background music and conveying parts of the narration through audio itself, rather than "writing" (so just reading something aloud). I find them fascinating, because they're really fun to listen to and they seem like the compromise between a book and a movie.

"The Magnus Archives" is great.

I agree. I'm tired of always blaming the end users for everything

Yeah :( I love my 2017-2018 phone to death (it's a Pixel 2 XL, and in the ~€400 phone market they are still trying to beat its camera quality 6 years later - and since it's a Pixel it's still more fluid than several phones I try in store, like €400-500 Samsungs, that display evident stutters that mine does not), but it has started with the random crashes and "dying" (boot loops followed by not turning on anymore) for a few minutes / hours before coming back to its senses occasionally

(edit: as a preamble - I recommend against using Mint as a new user, since it leverages outdated technologies. Fedora uses newer tech that has a lot of rough edges from the past already smoothed out. But the following comment still applies.)

I'm a heavy Linux user who has dropped Windows but I agree. It's fundamentally based on luck: a combination between your hardware configuration, the games you play and the software you use. Linux gaming is gaining popularity because for a lot of people it mostly just works, minus a couple papercuts that are tolerable, especially when you factor them against all the jank you left behind from Windows.

But if you get unlucky enough… as another person said, it's death by a thousand papercuts. Or, like The Linux Experiment put it, a permanent state of 99% there. Things working, almost fine, but never quite perfect, and enough things being rough around the edges that it does put you off. I am going to be completely honest: the fact that Microsoft has been seemingly self-sabotaging the user experience they offer and murdering the UX with their bare hands with Windows 11 is helping bridge the gap a lot.

Personally I have gotten quite lucky. I don't use any NVidia hardware - and this alone already wipes away 60-70% of the common issues that people complain about. There is a lot of weirdness that doesn't even look like it depends on the GPU (like buggy standby behaviour) that depends on the GPU and that is not reproducible - NVidia setups are a toss up that could go anywhere from "just fine" to "a total disaster". Not only that, but Linux support means that if any of the dozens of components on your computer doesn't quite support Linux, there is so much seemingly unrelated stuff that breaks that you wouldn't believe. I had a friend who was incredibly unlucky on Linux and had mysterious sudden system crashes and some very exotic errors that I had given up debugging. We finally got down to, literally, trying to unplug device after device for an extended window of time out of desperation - and we found out the culprit was a small USB audio card that he used for headphones. A small USB audio card that was misbehaving and had a poor quality Linux driver caused a lot of issues that never would I have traced back to an audio card. I have also used a laptop that had a lot of mysterious issues like erratic sleep/wake behaviour and system hangs / freezes that were caused by the Wi-Fi card. Would you ever think that your Wi-Fi card is causing your computer to randomly crash seemingly out of nowhere? Exactly. This is why I think the "luck" factor is huge for your success on Linux. Sadly, hardware manufacturers mostly target Windows. Linux works well with simple setups with hand-picked components from a handful of brands that are known to work as intended. But the more complicated your gaming setup is, the worse it gets. Hell, multi monitor setups with different resolutions and refresh rates can already be a challenge, whereas Windows has a good handling of them now. If you mix GPUs and have a GeForce and a Radeon in your system, just forget about it. You will get a lot of erratic behaviour unless you exclusively run AMD.

The Steam Deck is an example of how well a properly supported Linux system could work. It's custom hardware with parts picked with Linux support as the utmost priority. The Steam Deck experience is, in fact, much smoother than the average Linux desktop experience, with a hell of a lot less rough edges that show up.

I still encourage you to run Linux, but also understand that it's still growing, and this means that hardware and commercial software vendors are yet to support it properly still. It's going to be a d20 throw between "perfect", "horribly broken" and "mostly working well but with some rough patches you can work around".

Yeah. That's the same reason why I use Sync.

We get a lot of flak for it but… listen. I'm a Linux user. I don't even use Windows or Mac anymore at all. I try to use as much free software as possible. But I am also incredibly off put by the sheer jank that some FOSS solutions have.

What causes this situation is that Jeroba had to start from scratch and FOSS from the start, but Boost and Sync are based on the code base of two of the most popular Reddit clients, which have also been profitable enough to allow the respective devs to work on these apps as a part-time job, not a hobby project.

And… it freaking shows. All the polish has been ported over to these apps. Countless hours of work, and Sync is just as much of a joy to use as it has ever been - it even seems faster than when it was on Reddit.

I am going to say something that is a bit on the unpopular side here: while I get the fact that some people are irked at a developer profiting from a free project like Lemmy with a paid client, my response to that is - you don't have to use it. Nobody forces you to use Sync or Boost. The fact that Sync or Boost exist does not limit your freedom in any way. And the second thing is that it's right for someone who has poured a lot of time into a product to sell it and have a reward for it. I already know all the arguments: "How about making the source code free and the binaries paid?" - same as what happens to every Android app that tried this: F-Droid publishes the free binary, nobody will pay for the app, they will hide under the "but but my F-Droid build is completely free from Google trackers" excuse - but will conveniently forget to donate to the project… most people don't donate. Hell, most people who argue that a project should survive on donations don't donate.

The ad privacy stuff is something that should be sorted - but it's well within their rights to use AdMob. It's not a hobby project - it's a job. And again… I'd use the FOSS clients, but there simply isn't anything good that isn't full of jank and incredibly unpleasant to use.

As a last point: the Fediverse and Lemmy are already super niche and unpopular. Part of the problem is that they suffer from a flaw that Linux used to suffer before the more mainstream adoption it's beginning to enjoy: what are, simply put, low-quality UI/UX. You would be surprised how little people are going to put up with shitty UX if there is an alternative. Even the FOSS types. When the UX is janky and bad, you've already lost plenty of people. Linux is, again, a great example: many people are only migrating to it now, because their previous attempts had been a total fluke due to shitty UX - between ugly user interfaces, general X11 jank and tearing, overall instability etc. they just couldn't get used to it. Now, their experience is vastly different. I'd rather people join the Fediverse through proprietary clients with good UX for now rather than use mainstream social media - while the community behind FOSS clients polishes them out, and makes them viable alternatives. Maybe not quite as beautiful, but not as janky.

"But you should stick to your values and help improve it!!" - true, but when you are involved in FOSS… you kinda have to pick your battles. My area of interest here is desktop Linux and more open / repairable hardware that has better Linux support, which I buy voting with my wallet even if it's the worse deal in a pure price to performance metrics. I'm starting to find the time to learn to and make contributions to the Linux desktop projects I use, I've taken up maintenance of a popular package repository and successfully identified and reported several kernel bugs that were then fixed recently and working my way up from there. This is "my" battle. "Improving free as in freedom Lemmy clients" is not my fight, but I encourage those who keep ragging on Sync / Boost users and don't yet have a "battle" they picked in FOSS to put their money where their mouth is, and consider contributing to this ecosystem themselves! Everybody will benefit, you will even get a nice entry in your resume for that, and you will polish out the jank and thereby make FOSS clients easier to recommend and much more attractive.