Deconceptualist

Just tried it on Ubuntu LTS (as a flatpak) and my first impression wasn’t great.

The sign-in experience was nice with a QR code and verification code. But then the first thing on the video browse list was as ad, and the first video I played started with the same ad. There’s no icon you can click to go fullscreen, but I have a wireless keyboard and eventually figured out F11 is a shortcut (F and Enter do nothing). But then about 3 minutes into the video, the whole app window went gray. Nothing clickable, just 100% gray. I was able to exit fullscreen and close out the app, but it was pretty obviously a Ui crash of some sort.

This was just the first impression so I’ll keep it installed and see if it improves with updates. Or maybe try it on Deck or my Endeavor machine.

Another confirmation that Endeavour is great with Steam. However I did have to follow the Arch wiki to install the correct Mesa drivers on my new PC (Radeon RX 7800 XT), as without those the GPU performance was crap.

Ugh I still run Ubuntu LTS on my living room HTPC, and generally it’s fine. But on the occasion I need to fix something, I swear every seemingly relevant forum post is from 2015 or earlier. It’s maddening.

If you want to give KDE a shot, you don’t need to buy a Deck. Just grab a live installer image from a Linux distro you like, tons of them let you boot and try it out from RAM without actually installing to your hard disk.

I’m pretty UI agnostic (many years with Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, Unity, a few with xfce, and a bit with Cinnamon). I almost picked Gnome on a recent update to my primary home machine for its clean Mac-ish feel, but SteamOS convinced me that modern KDE is actually rather nice.

Steam page says Denuvo :(

Also $70 for the base game, ouch.

A surprising number of plastic/rubber components used in cheap electronics accessories will offgas. You notice an odd smell, that’s literally petrochemicals entering your nostrils by the millions. Some of them can mimic biomolecules like hormones. I’m not saying they’re necessarily all harmful but there needs to be a lot more research.

For SR3, just do it, it’s a really well-made game and runs great and you don’t need any prior knowledge except to know that it’s kind of a GTA parody. I don’t think SR1 was even ported to PC, and SR2 is pretty buggy and unstable on modern machines (though fun aside from that). SR4 supposed to be pretty great (same engine as 3 I think) but I haven’t played it.

FH4 has a healthy playerbase and I’m pretty confident it’ll still be worth playing over the next year. However beyond that as the community slowly dwindles it will eventually become less fun with fewer people doing Forzathons or seasonal co-ops or using the auctions, even if the servers are still running.

KSP has what players call “the Kraken” where the game engine sometimes bugs out and causes your vehicle to spin out of control and/or explode for no apparent reason. It happens more with really big vessels and complex missions. But yeah it’s not bug-free and you’ll want to quicksave often so you don’t lose hours of work.

If you like the cheesy story, Saints Row the Third is wacky awesome fun. It’s not 100 hours so you’d have to replay it, but you could do that co-op with a couple of friends. There’s nothing quite like bailing out of your fighter jet wearing a hotdog costume and then blowing up half a city block with your rocket launcher on the way down.

Vampire Survivors is a good candidate too, regularly introducing new characters and weapon combos and weird secrets for pretty non-stop dopamine. Maybe you could get 100 hours with the expansions but that seems like a stretch.

Honorable mention to Forza Horizon 4, it’s everything Burnout Paradise wished it could be and had a smile on my face nearly the entire time. Although there were a few spots where I set the difficulty too high and/or didn’t tune up my car and lost races, so that was less fun, but kind of my own fault. Well over 100 hours on this one, but the base game has only come down to $12 and won’t be sold after today!

Kerbal Space Program’, do I need to say more ?

I love KSP, but no way, it’s full of challenges that require deliberate planning, patience, persistence and more. e.g. Your first Mun landing, or making a vehicle that can successfully return from Eve. Those are not adrenaline-fueled non-stop thrills, but rather careful exercises in engineering and discipline occasionally punctuated with excitement.

No, the last game that got me hooked for hundreds of hours is modded Cyberpunk 2077, but I don’t know if it can be found for 10 bucks.

Nope, historical low is still like $25.

Oh damn, you’re right. I just tried it with Steam Play turned off and it wouldn’t even launch.

I swear it was already playable via Proton though. I even installed it on Steam Deck just for shits & giggles a couple months ago and it worked, albeit not a great experience on a 7" screen. Still, any improvements are good.

That’s kinda sad, but at least they’re playable somehow I guess.

I didn’t realize that, thanks

Total War: Shogun 2 is now playable? It runs natively on Linux and doesn’t even need Proton. I guess this is good news if someone has a Windows only copy on DVD or something.

Windows 7 Ultimate for me. I still kept it as a boot option on my main PC until about a year ago because I thought I still needed it for a couple windows apps and games.

I tried Win8 at one point and hated the changes. I also tried Win10 and one of those “forced bloody updates” bricked my machine so I said ‘fuck that’ for good.

I’ve dabbled in Linux for 20 years, and run Ubuntu on my living room HTPC for at least a dozen. My main PC runs EndeavourOS now and even gaming has been pretty great.

I mean if you’re down to NetBSD as your pick you’ve probably already made some big concessions so plugging into Ethernet isn’t a huge leap at that point.

Most likely yes, as many others have said. Of course you’ll likely have to pick a very lightweight DE.

As a fallback there is always NetBSD.

It was intentional 🙂

I switched fully to Linux on my main gaming PC about 18 months ago. Honestly Proton has become so good that I really haven’t had to dual-boot Windows or run a VM or anything. I even bought a licence for CrossOver when I first switched but ended up not needing it.

For the few games that really won’t run (after trying what I find in ProtonDB and PCGW) I really do either A) wait for fixes, or B) just leave them behind. With a library of like 2500 games it’s not hard to find something else to play.

These are the only games I recall not working at all for me:

• Beyond Good & Evil (GOG) - Might be fixed now
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Steam) - Might be fixed now
• Dauntless (EGS) - Broken due to Easy Anti-Cheat

Happy birthday! I actually just started playing Journey for the first time yesterday, less than an hour I’d say (on Steam). The visuals and fluidity of controls are nice, nothing spectacular by today’s standards but I’m sure they were great back in the PS3 era. The beginning felt a little slow trudging through the sand until I understood how the scarf upgrades work. But then when I encountered another player it really started to click and go more smoothly. I like how the game encourages cooperation by pinging and refilling each other’s scarf energy, though I feel like progress might go slow again if I get stuck going solo next session. The puzzles are very simple but I was feeling sick so having a ‘cozy’ game was actually pretty nice.