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Comment by BoxedEmpathy | Hacker News Reader

I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop.

I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game. I kept this up for a couple months but honestly at some point I just gave up. Now I'm playing games on Windows again.

To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of Linux gaming. I just unfortunately am too busy these days to spend the time to get it to work.

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I can recommend CachyOS as a linux distribution for gaming that has worked for me across multiple computers without any fiddling. It's the one that's led to me ditching windows entirely after a few failed attempts over the years.

Although, everyone probably says that about whatever distro they happen to use lol.

I think I’d avoid the Cosmic version of POP!OS for a while for gaming. I mean it works but you do have to get fiddling again unlike the previous not cosmic version.

Most egregious problem is that steam games start in a strange window rather than full screen and you have to press a weird key combo to fix it.

Nvidia based Acer nitro FWIW your mileage may vary

I was only able to install the latest CachyOS image by modifying the boot arguments in grub of the live installer, after reading the lengthy log file it pooped out after the first install fail.

I have no idea why people recommend this to people who aren't actually deep into tech and linux already.

Agreed. Recommendations to use Arch-based distros especially. My personal recommendation, which has ended up sticking for a few Linux-curious gamer friends, has always been Bazzite.

Yeah, that's why I added the qualifier at the end. But I legit flashed a USB with the ISO, booted, installed the OS, installed steam, installed a game, ran it, and had 0 issues or customisations required.

I wonder if other Linux distros had the same issue.

I haven't had it in the past with PopOS or Fedora, but it could be that the nvidia drivers back then weren't an issue. I could try with another distro if you're curious, that laptop is mostly a sacrificial machine for testing out distros and other stuff.

Depends a lot on your hardware. I've got a ~2020 gaming pc and I just installed bazzite on it, moved my desktop to the TV and only use it with an xbox controller. Never opened the terminal or configured anything, all my games just work.

> I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game

I know you framed this as a negative, but this is something I yearn for; It's the one of the best games, imo. I often wish I ran into more issues, but for the most part, things _just work_^TM.

You clearly don't work in a legacy codebase

Yeah some hardware combinations are just broken. IF ur lucky everything will just work, if not you can likely fix it with enough skill. That's better than nothing, but understandably frustrating if you accidentally pick a bad combination of devices.

Unfortunately the install process is always going to be at least a little bit technical. I wish it wasn't, but idk how you'd do that without making the os like an emmu chip that you can swap out, instead of a thing you write on your drive.

I was in the same boat. You should try running an AI agent to solve your problems. Works like a charm. Most of the times. The times it doesn't, it wasn't worth it anyway.

And I'll try again when I have more time.

Most folks are in this category. But most, including me, wont try anytime soon unless some very positive news come up. We have lives to live, kids to raise, work to do and so on.

Gaming moved for a lot of us from 'now I have 5 hours or whole weekend to gaming if I want to' to mere blips here and there, which need to be as frictionless as poasible.

Which is great - it means we are doing something actually meaningful and more worthy in our lives. But it also means I will never have enough time for such fiddling. I am fine with it, as much as I can be, but lets be honest to ourselves here.

Which brings up a point I've been wondering over the years.

Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.

A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.

I've seen the sentiment come up a lot, and I've talked about it with a buddy a lot.

For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.

I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.

You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.

That's a fair point. The equivalent in my day was when the PDP-11 with punched paper tape for offline storage could run BASIC (and lots else), but as soon as most kids saw it couldn't drive Asteroids, their attention waned after the first few weeks. I was church mouse poor, and didn't have the cash for the coinop arcades, much less for a microcomputer back then. I took what I could get.

So the bar to clear to get to gaming is much lower now, and it makes sense fewer kids get to the point where they must tinker to get at those games.

Do not let anybody lead you astray. If you want to just game without any bullshit install Bazzite.

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