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Can confirm as a recent switcher from 25 years of Windows to a Fedora Linux Desktop that all the flagship games I downloaded from my steam library just worked, which was the final hurdle before being able to switch to Linux full-time.

I initially had some issues with not being able to run Wayland due to Nvidia drivers, but that's now fixed with Explicit Sync support in their recent driver upgrades and am now using Wayland.

Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run everything I wanted to. The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Alacritty running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools like fzf, exa, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop.

Anyway happy to have abandoned the Surveillance and Spyware train that Windows has become, thankfully never have to go back thanks to the great support of Steam and cross-platform Desktop Apps running natively on Linux.



Are all those features really more important than core features of the OS? I switched a couple years ago because of Windows' flaws. The constant notifications and other distractions such as updates, not being able to jump into programs reliably via the windows key search, broken sleep. Windows laptops fail at just being laptops, first and foremost they are delivery platforms for whatever Microsoft pushes.

Now I cut out Intel and Nvidia I have an AMD machine with Debian, and for the first time I have a stable, dependable machine. I know how long the battery lasts and I can leave the house without a charger. And looking back, windows always had you on your toes, it is so instilled in us to work around its flaws.


It is underrated how much a productivity hit the constant changes in windows cause


Exa has been discontinued, probably worth switching to eza.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza


Didn't know lazydocker. Thanks! I learned something today.



The situation outside steam is sadly still pretty bad.

Imagine you buy most of your games on DRM free platforms and they hardly even install on any gaming focused distribution.


There are now third party launchers for proton, such as: https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher

As well as "game libraries": Lutris, Bottles, Heroic

Personally I use this alias to launch an exe via proton:

  alias proton='SteamGameId="${SteamGameId-1000}" PROTON_USE_WINESYNC=1 STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH="$PWD" STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=$HOME/proton /usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-cachyos/proton waitforexitandrun'
  # cd /gamepath
  # proton Game.exe


I wonder if there is a chance Valve could release a standalone proton wrapper for such situations. Then We could install and run these DRM free games or even games you legally purchased years ago and still own.


I find heroic quite nice for gog and egs games.




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