Reddit Linux are just a bunch of gaming chuds. and I say that as a gamer.
They’ll take time to understand the landscape and there’s nothing wrong with that, yes reddit is dogshit but you won’t convince anyone by just telling them. They just have to look around for themselves.
All your concerns are valid and Linux handles all these well except:
If you play competitive games with kernel anti cheat it will simply not work on Linux courtesy of the game developers.
Linux is fully capable of running the game and the anti cheat but the game developers restrict it. Notable games are cod, fortnite, apex legends.
A notable competitive game that works on Linux is cs2 although you won’t be able to run 3rd party anti cheat like FACEIT as far as I know.
You can use the proton site to tell you how many of your games on your steam library are playable on Linux.
I’m on my 8th month or so using Linux to game and I’ve had no issues, most popular games will work. Most niche games use very simple tech like SDL and will just work.
Wine essentially creates a fake windows environment and handles a lot of internal API calls by kind of redirecting them to existing Linux services, so a lot of windows stuff will just work.
As for security. You realize most of the Internet runs on Linux ? Practically the majority of the internet is hosted on Linux machines.
As for a distrto there is no optimal choice you can make.
You can pick Ubuntu, Debian or Mint and find yourself disappointed in how restricting the power user experience is.
You can pick arch or cachy for the latest wine improvements but find yourself lost in how to handle the OS in case something goes wrong.
I personally think cachy (rolling release) is the best for gaming but you could encounter issues (skill issues really) that might frustrate you. These issues would lead to growth and improvement in your understanding of Linux but if all you want to do is game and you don’t care about understanding computers then it might not be for you.
I use wine for FFXIV. proton kinda works but not for my case. Certain mods use a bleeding edge version of dotnet and this version is not present in proton.
How do you move it ?
Core 2 Duo is also a terrible name from Intel in the first place. I did place my repebble order, hopefully it will serve me well.
Apparently SteamOS doesn’t have plans for large scale desktop support. I’ve been using cachyos for the last 4 months while playing games on my NTFS Windows steam libraries and it has been fine. On Nvidia even.
and then absolutely everyone I talk to will do usual ‘oh it’s not that bad , you’re over reacting’ with the additional “I don’t use it but I still have it installed”
because explicitly declaring types can be redundant, if the compiler knows a lot of the times you should also know
also because some types are extremely cursed: see std views/ranges
WSL, if not then msys2/git bash at bare minimum
Poweshell 7 is okay if you have access to it but regular day to day shell scripting is like as 10x more verbose with powershell than bash
I just use WSL at work, extremely fortunate to be able to despite IT locking down everything as much as possible
I specifically said this advice because dual booting windows with Linux is a terrible idea.
Although you are right, if you USB read/write is slow it will be a sluggish experience.
You should just test run it from a bootable usb.
Install steam. Mount your NTFS drive which contains your windows games. If you have sims on steam use steam. If not take a look at lutris before doing any of the above.
Your experiment ends when you’ve tested all games you want to play.
Now: You cannot use NTFS (windows) drive for games, although you did it in the experiment long extended usage is discouraged.
So you will need to find a way to transfer your games to a different formatted drive. (ext4, btrfs for example)
If you don’t need that advice you will eventually run into frustrating issues.
The whole arch advantage (imo) is that you have a full understanding of what’s in your machine and how it works.
As a beginner you won’t understand and that’s okay, but you should try different things (or don’t and just focus on what works for you) as long as the end result is you doing: pacman -Qe and going “hmm that makes sense”, and imo the undesired result is going “hmm what do these all do, why do I have 2000+ packages”
I love C and C++ and I talk to someone else who does (comp sci grad) but he’s hugely biased against rust and says shit like “rust is cringe it has training wheels, just be good at C”
it’s like a weird tech anti-intellectualism
isn’t there a mint version with plasma?
my unsolicited 2c is to checkout mint
le false equivalence totally validates my endorsement for the worst president elected in US history
pretty much everyone I know who plays osrs is extremely addicted, anecdotes of course but I’ve never seen anyone have a normal relationship with this game
Arch in like 2019 maybe.
I still like Arch, I tried all sorts of distros in VMs, most feel clunky to me.
Tiling manager, GUI file explorer, minimal status bar and I’m set.
For my laptop this is swaywm, swaybar, nautilus.
I also use drun-like programs