But not a Gaming on Linux one……. Because Spreadshirt doesnt ship to Australia……..

G’Day fellow tuxers……

Its been one year to the day since an Aussie drongo installed Linux for the first time……. Yeah I know it feels like ive been terrorising these forums for longer than that…...

So my experience over the past year with Linux….. It has been really damn good….. Ive stuck with EndeavourOS and KDE Plasma the entire year…… I have never felt like distro hopping…..


Current desktop…...

I have had zero hardware issues……. Even with my Nvidia graphics card……. Everything has just worked mostly out of the box…… My Epson printer worked fine after installing the printer driver for it…..And that was simple enough….. And I think that was the only driver I had to install after installing the OS…...

Installing software through the terminal has been really simple as well….. Pacman and Yay are quite user friendly considering they are terminal based….. Just have to make sure I triple check my typing…..

Most of my issues have involved my second monitor……. Though most have been resolved during the year….. Like the second monitor being a blank black screen sometimes……. That got fixed in a KDE Plasma update…….

LibreOffice has had problems with my second monitor as well through the year…… At what appears to be random periods of time that can last a month or two it will stop opening on my main monitor and will only open on my secondary monitor…… Which is really annoying when I dont have that monitor turned on….. And then in what seems like random will go back to opening on my main monitor…… It doesnt seem to coincide with any LibreOffice updates either so it might be another dependency update that is causing it….. But I dont know which……

Another intermittent issue I have had is when it comes to shutting down the computer…… Sometimes I get a line of text “A stop job is running for User Manager for UID 1000” and a timer counts to 90 seconds and then it finishes shutting down…… It will do it once and then it wont do it again for several weeks……. And then all of a sudden the message will be back…… Doing a quick DuckDuckGo search found no real solution…… Just a lot of head scratching in forums....... My solution so far has been to log out and then shutdown....... Have not seen that message in around six months since doing that......

And that is about it when it comes to general issues ive had…… Its been a rather smooth ride into Linux town on the Tux Train……. w00t! w00t!…...

Now onto what we are on Gaming On Linux for…… GAMES……

Anyone who follows the Weekend Players Club knows that I play a lot of games...... And gaming has been great on Linux…… As a single player only gamer…… I have had very few problems…… The only game I could not get to work through Steams Proton layer was "Chainsaw Warrior" which has been removed from sale..... And looking at the community page it appears that it doesnt work on windows either any more without jumping through hoops like a trained kangaroo….. So im not going to hold that against Proton…...

Ive only had to do very limited “tinkering” to get games to work….. Such as Blood Fresh Supply….. Which suffered from massive frame rate drops when moving the mouse….. Quick search on ProtonDB and I found I needed to swap the SDL2.dll file from another KEX game….. I used Quake Remastered…… And once I swapped the SDL2.dll the game ran fine…….

Everything else has been a simple install and play……. But again I DONT play multiplayer games…… And that is where most of the issues are it seems…… Especially with anti-cheat systems…..

Onto Emulation which takes up the majority of my gaming time….. And it is even better on Linux than on Windows…… RetroArch, Dolphin Emu, PCSX2, ScummVM and Xemu all work just fine…..

RetroArch took a bit to setup as the version in Pacman had some configuration issues that needed to be fixed manually before RetroArch would work properly……. But after a quick duckduckgo search and a helpful youtube video later it was all working fine in around 15 minutes…..

PCSX2 decided to stop working one day….. I assume a dependency got updated and it didnt like it…… PCSX2 had not been updated for awhile…. So I went with a newer and more frequently updated package and it has been working fine ever since…….

Dolphin Emu, ScummVM and Xemu have been very simple install and play with zero issues…..

So all in all emulation has been awesome on Linux…… Which is to be expected these days….. Emulation on Linux is in a wonderful place right now…..

My parents who are in their 70’s have also been using Linux for the past year (EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma)…… And they have had zero problems using it over that time…… So if my parents can use Linux….. Then really…… Anyone can…….

Overall I have really enjoyed my time on Linux so far…… Which means im afraid ive got some bad news for you……… And that is that im going to be sticking around….. Terrorising GOL…… For many years to come……. Which is good news for me….. As I have really enjoyed my time here on GOL over the past year……

Well thats all from me….. Just wanted to share some of my thoughts and experiences I have had during my first year of using Linux…...