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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

Now that Steam has Proton, my only remaining need for windows has evaporated. Good riddance.

I wish it was the same for me. Nucleus coop is windows only and so many mods work only there,so I still need windows for gaming. I'm with you though ,I wish I could completely swap

We recently replaced my wife's aging Windows PC with a Mac Mini, which eliminated the last Windows machine in our household. It feels good to be free of it, and our Macs handle World of Warcraft – the only game either of us play – without any problems.

What Linux distro would you recommend to be able to run Proton to play windows games but also for day to day light (mostly browser) use, SteamOS?

Debian works fine with Proton for me. I think it is not very picky.

If you want a more curated experience that takes a lot of the rough edges off Linux: https://bazzite.gg

Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on

You can't perform all the usual tasks with it; it's a limited, immutable Arch derivative.

Edit: Not arch but fedora.

you might be thinking of the new KDE distro. bazzite is fedora silverblue based. iirc there's access to flatpak homebrew, as well as rpm-ostree (basically rpm) among others

You are right :)

For regular people that just want gaming and a web browser it's fine. It would drive people like us nuts, but they aren't gonna care.

It can load into a desktop environment by default and you can install Flatpacks, and it comes setup for gaming out of the box. That's enough for 90% of people.

I just run Debian Trixie with almost no problems. I build the kernels I use off the upstream release cycle (so, 6.17-rc6 right now). I build with LLVM Full LTO, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I want to find bugs in it :)

For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.

SteamOS is arch based so some variant of that makes a lot of sense if you're not going for steamos directly

Kubuntu works fine for me. Got cyberpunk to run on it very well, i havent had a game not work so far, but i don't play online shooters.

Kubuntu is Debian but i don't think that has caused any issues.

Since i got the deck i don't really use the PC for gaming much though.

This is all purely my anecdotal opinion.

My parents specifically need MS Office. LibreOffice won't do the job for them, because they deal with a lot of documents sent to them by other people, and also they're used to the interface.

Doesn't microsoft have office in the browser now? I'd think that would be a way around it. But I don't know, the last time I actually used MS office was over ten years ago...

Proton's good-ish. But if you want to play a lot of AAA games it's a non-starter especially if they have invasive kernel anti-cheat.

Thankfully I don't want and will never want any games that infect my systems with "anti-cheat" malware so I see the lack of support for it as a feature.

Okay, but realize a lot of people do. Until there's parity there it will be a 2nd class platform.

consoles are already a 2nd class platform and that works for a lot of people. I suppose a new 2nd class platform will make consoles a third class platform

playing any game with an invasive kernel anti-cheat is a non-starter on its own.

no game is worth that.

Clearly many people disagree with you given the popularity of games with invasive anti-cheat.

I think many people install those games without knowing (or caring) what they're doing to their computer. That doesn't make it a good decision.

I tend to play indie games, but I've never had anti-cheat problems. Everything happily runs on 6.17-rc5 right now.

Why would you willingly install games with invasive kernel anti-cheat? That's unacceptable both on Linux or Windows.

What would you suggest to my kids that game with their friends and want to play Rocket League or Fortnite?

A console?

Saying “no.”

I only let my children play SuperTuxKart, and read them OSS licenses when i tuck them in at night.

Because people want to play fun games with their friends and sometimes playing games with kernel anti-cheat is a requirement?

Microsoft needs to provide their own anti-cheat hooks and block any kernel-level mods entirely.

AAA games are overproduced crap that compensate with aggressive marketing.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

>Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

And we're working hard[0] to identify you based on yours.

Will wonders never cease?

[0] https://archive.ph/v0puA

To quote myself because it's getting tiresome

I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050913

Not to mention that AAA or any games with anti cheat are in the minority of all games.

Think Steam proton will support GTA VI? I doubt it since it still doesn't support GTA V online

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