Steam is a massive worldwide market, and the Steam Deck isn’t offered everywhere. Chinese users for example have to import it, so not many are used there.

It’s EAC, which is kernel level on Windows but not on Linux. I guess they wanted to go full kernel-level anti-cheat.

From what I understand there was also a bug involved that caused build failures without the sdk.

Yeah I agree with you here. A lot of Trackmania players are annoyed by Trackmania’s $20 a year subscription and have called to make it F2P with cosmetic microtransactions, but I’m pretty happy that hasn’t happened. There isn’t even any DLC. It is really nice to see not have to see ads to pay more money for stuff.

Hm, maybe A?

Age of Empires

Anno

Assassin’s Creed

Aloft

Against the Storm

Across the Obelisk

Hm, E would be a good option as well

Elden Ring

Elder Scrolls

Europa Universalis

Endless (Space, Legend)

As a side note, would “Sid Meier’s Civilization V” count as “s” or “c”?

If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS

I’m pretty sure Linux still uses Unix-style permissions in NTFS, which causes issues when Windows tries to use its own permission system on the same partition.

I feel like there’s also the point that on Mac OS a lot of stuff “just works” because everything else just doesn’t work at all. I have a number of things that just aren’t going to work at all on Mac. Linux is obviously much more permissive, which leads to a lot more kinda working stuff that just wouldn’t work at all on Mac.

The compositors are the ones doing a lot of the protocol development. They want to have WIP versions so they can see what issues crop up, they’ve been making versions all doing. Now, I agree that it is slowing things down, but it’s more of just an additional thing that needs to get done, not so much a chicken and egg problem.

Wine and Proton have actually put a ton of work into Wayland support, it’s very far along. I wouldn’t be surprised for Proton to have a native Wayland version soon.

Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.

If an app has only ever supported X11, then it probably doesn’t care about those limitations (the apps that do care probably already have a Wayland version). And if an app doesn’t care about the extra stuff Wayland has to offer, then there’s not really a reason to add the extra support burden of Wayland. As long as they work fine in XWayland, I think a lot of apps won’t switch over until X11 support starts dropping from their toolkit, and they’ll just go straight to Wayland-only.

The last commit was two days ago and the last update was two months ago (at least for me on Android).

No shame in having to switch back after giving it a try and running into a lot of issues. Having to reboot a lot is definitely unusual, there’s probably something wrong with your setup, but who knows where the issue is or how long it would take you to fix. Hopefully you can give it another try in a few years and those issues have been resolved.

While this is still a massive problem, it does require a public fork at some point. So if you have a private repo that has never had a public fork, you should be safe.

From my own looking into this it looks like more of a suggestion than a request (for now at least), just a “this might be a good idea, we should look into it”.

The deleting most emails is very interesting. In my personal email, I’ve been saved quite a few times by finding emails multiple years old. But I can definitely see how things would be quite different in a work email, and I may consider trying that myself.

Noveau is terrible for gaming. If you want any kind of reasonable gaming experience you’ll need the propietary Nvidia driver (for now).

The issue is one of licensing, not technology. There’s all kinds of patents in the space, and using free codecs could still infringe them. DirectX doesn’t have the same patent protection. I believe in theory you could make a fully open source Linux native version of DirectX.

For more info from someone who knows more than me, see here.

Well, sometimes Windows games depend on propietary codecs, and until Valve can get the devs to make adjustments so the codecs aren’t needed, the games aren’t going to work properly in regular Proton.

If GE received a Cease and Desist, that would be frustrating, but linux gaming would go on. If Proton got a Cease and Desist, that could be catastrophic to linux gaming. Valve could even theoretically get banned from working on linux gaming (like the Yuzu devs got banned from working on emulation). It’s just not worth the risk for compatibility/performance for a smaller proportion of games.

I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).

One thing here, the open source Nvidia drivers still have a lot of performance issues. It’s only fairly recently that NVIDIA has opened their drivers up enough to allow any kind of reasonable performance from open source drivers, and getting them up to par is still a work in progress. So stick with the propietary drivers for now, but keep an eye on the new open source driver, NVK.

(As far as distro recs go, I recently started using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and am really liking it, but I don’t have enough experience with it yet to make an informed recommendation)