I was honestly kind of expecting the answer to be something like:

'Whatever you're already using and happy/comfortable with' - but that only really holds true if you're talking about managed things like Steam and Lutris that do the vast majority of the heavy lifting for you (e.g the Steam Runtime based off of Ubuntu that everything seems to run against).

There are some really annoying things about Ubuntu for totally new-to-Linux users. Most people have interacted with Windows machines or Macs, and Gnome 3 might be a little hard to adjust to for them; my recommendation there would be the Kubuntu or Xubuntu spins (defaulting to KDE Plasma and Xfce respectively) for a more 'familiar' default UI. (And of course you can add and change that from any starting point; no need to reinstall because you want to use something different.)

The situation with snaps is also frustrating once you start getting into things, but *most* new users shouldn't be raging at Canonical just yet. If you've learned enough to start hating snaps (and systemd... and Pulseaudio...) and start hunting for alternatives without them, congrats! You're not the target audience for this article any more. ;p

Once you dive into the rabbit hole of non-Steam ports, though, yeah - the Ubuntu repos are pretty good. PPAs fill the gap beyond that in the same way the AUR does for Arch (& derivatives). You may appreciate a lot of software being built as and offering .deb files to install, too.

Ubuntu's not necessarily the 'best' distro, the most open, etc., but it's definitely got a lock on 'good enough to get started with'.

Just... be prepared to want to switch in a couple years as you learn and grow. :)

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Used to use Twitter back when it was all geared around SMS; I remember texting one of their shortcodes back on a Nokia 5190 (ah, the T9 firmware upgrade was huge!).

But when Mastodon came around, it didn't take me long to spin up my own private instance, connect to some relays, and generally start playing around with it in parallel.

It wasn't long before I outright deleted my Twitter account entirely (same for an on-again, off-again relationship with Facebook that started back when you had to have a university e-mail to even be able to sign up).

Honestly, ditching FB & Twitter in favour of the Fediverse (Mastodon & other ActivityPub compatible servers) was one of the best decisions I've ever made for my own mental health. Yeah, you need to end up on a well moderated instance and sometimes you need to report the spam or trolls (or as an admin, ban them yourself), but the quality of discourse is just so much higher when people aren't compelled to perform for some algorithm to get 'visibility' and 'engagement'.

Would I run a brand or business solely on the Fediverse? Probably not - but then you're paying marketing spend to exist on those other platforms anyway; it's not the same kind of experience.

To be able to find small, close knit communities - makers, gamers, artists, musicians, photographers, etc. who can finally afford to drop the 'brand' pretense and be a lot more genuine, to not be abused by a platform's shadowy algorithms, is way more like the Internet I remember, of fan forums and webrings and without draconian advertising and pages that would make any dial up connection cry over their heft.

All that said, it's not for everyone. By the same sort of argument, maybe getting off social media entirely is a better solution for some people. For others, it may be too hard to let go of whatever social and support networks they've built.

But I remember the days of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN, and how all that has since either vanished or at least faded into obscurity. One day these platforms will do the same as we all move on to some other 'next big thing'. Maybe those support networks are worth saving from the inevitable, and now's a good a time as any to consider just how it can be done.

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I find it kind of strange here that EAC sounds like a hard requirement. *Plenty* of games have it as an option in the menu or on startup, and you can opt to turn it on or off when setting up a dedicated server.

I'd be fine with 'hey, we can't support EAC, but you can play on non-EAC servers just fine and we'll support the underlying game'. I already spin up private servers for my friend group(s) without EAC, because I trust them and we hold each other accountable; I have zero interest in the grief-fests that are public servers in games, but that's OK.

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The saddest part about all of this, to me, was that I don't think it was a technical failing, but a business one.

Sure, I definitely lumped this in with the 'yeah, it's "gaming on Linux" the same way that a PlayStation is "gaming on BSD" or even Android is Linux' - i.e., completely irrelevant except to us nerds who are interested in the inner workings of this sort of thing. But it says a lot when a company like Microsoft can come in and basically eat their lunch with Game Pass. Yes, it's not every game on there, and yes, it's not specifically meant for games in your library, more akin to a Netflix-style subscription where games rotate in and out, but they bolstered it with buying up a bunch of studios and then putting their stuff on 'permanently' - the huge swath of Bethesda and id stuff, potentially Activision/Blizzard if they get their way, etc., without having to re-buy each individual game at full price.

If you want to run a subscription game service, run a subscription service.

If you want to sell games at full price, sell at full price.

But don't double-dip - consumers are wise to that kind of greed, as evidenced here.

In typical Google fashion, you get amazing engineers and minds working on the technical aspects - I'm sure the underlying tech here is nothing short of outstanding - but the beauty of Microsoft's approach, by contrast, is they understand the business side. Reaching out to game publishers, offering them deals to have their games on Game Pass for a set period of time. Sweetening the deal with little addons in their Perks menu (same as Amazon with Twitch Prime). In a world with so many big companies vying for your attention and money, taking a relatively hands off 'build it and they will come' approach like Google did with Stadia just isn't going to cut it.

I'd love to see them open source some of the workings of their stack once it's shut down, but I'm not holding my breath...

...and in the meantime, Valve keeps trucking away delivering real, solid improvements to the gaming experience on Linux with developers working on GPU drivers, in the kernel, on Wine / Proton, and, y'know... releasing the Steam Deck. That's worth spending my hard-earned money on. Stadia... wasn't.

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Neat! My partner and I have been playing our new Steam Decks a heck of a lot more than spinning up big, loud, hot gaming rigs this summer, and her PC is getting old enough now that the Deck isn't even really that much of a downgrade, so I'm very tempted to get a dock for her and just... let her have this as her everything-PC.

That said, I do genuinely want a DisplayPort out as an option, so I think I'll sit tight and wait for Valve here; we have some other generic USB-C 'docks' (really dongles) that came with e.g. a work laptop or a smartphone that work - having a full mouse + keyboard definitely made setting up all the stuff in KDE Plasma / 'Desktop mode' wayyy nicer.

The nice thing about using actual standards, of course, is that these 3rd party offerings can exist at all, and unmolested, to boot, and don't have strange non-compliant setups reusing the same connectors (looking at you, Nintendo). ;)

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Quoting: officerniceBased on Arch but updating like Debian :D 96 is ages old by now.

Genuinely hoping to figure out if there's a way to just... Treat it like any other normal Arch install and use pacman to actually keep the system up to date. And yes, I realise this means messing with the OS read/write flags and/or just blowing away SteamOS entirely in favour of vanilla Arch (well, Artix hopefully).

Yeah, it's a gaming 'console' but if it's also a PC, I want it to be actually kept up to date with security fixes like one. I'm sure I can't be the only one and someone's figured out how to slap the Valve Steam Deck UI atop other distros.

Once I get my Deck, anyway. ;P

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I wonder if the name is a reference to Scott Manley and his trademark closer, "Fly Safe"?

As someone with 350+ hours in Elite: Dangerous (and sad about recent developments, or I guess really lack thereof), this looks neat!

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I wonder how much Musk will really be able to change, without getting into (more) hot water with pretty much every western government outside of the US.

Things like Hate Speech laws that exist here in Canada, *definitely* in Germany and the EU. "We're a private company, now" doesn't shield you from that. Those are big advertising markets he could find himself locked out of if he antagonizes them by letting Twitter degenerate into a free-for-all, because let's be honest, here: the 'free speech' being championed, even if it doesn't purport to be, on the surface, invariably becomes a vehicle for hate of anyone 'other'.

Not that I agree with the way Twitter's handled it up to now (again, ditched for Mastodon years ago), but there's definitely the paradox of tolerance to watch out for. There is a reason most non-US democracies have moved to protect their minority groups in law.

But hey, Musk just *loves* getting in trouble with the law, repeatedly, it seems, so yeah - the irony of everyone talking about 'echo chambers' is that's exactly what Twitter is destined to become, after everyone sensible bails for greener (read: effectively moderated) pastures.

After seeing LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities *already* deal with being harassed off of platforms simply for existing in a mostly white, male, 'techbro dude' space, my only hope is that we get the word out about better alternatives for everyone before that space gets even more toxic.

Nevermind the various politicians on there - you have an office with a mailing address and phone number, and probably e-mail - you don't *need* to be publicly on social media exposing yourself to distracting vitriol from people who aren't even your constituents. I love tech, but mental (and physical!) health is more important.

Of course, many politicians just *love* hearing themselves speak, so sadly I don't expect that to change, either. ;)

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Deleted my Twitter & Facebook accounts many years ago at this point (I even had a Facebook account back when you had to sign up with a college/university e-mail) and glad I did.

Reminder that 'Mastodon' is not a single site, it's a software stack using a W3C protocol (ActivityPub, so the flagship/example mastodon.social site isn't any more 'Mastodon' than Yahoo Mail or GMail is all of 'E-mail' (though lots of people don't make that distinction in the latter case either).

There's a community browser for those that meet certain criteria up at https://joinmastodon.org/communities, or if you're so inclined, you can host your own - standalone, with Docker, or leverage something like YunoHost.

You can opt to keep registrations closed on your own instance, and just have your own private vanity site, do it invite-only for friends, etc., and then you and any fellow admins can fairly easily moderate as you see fit, including the fun instance-wide federation stuff - a particularly bad actor / spammy instance harassing you or your users? Add its domain to the filter, and then your server simply won't accept any of their traffic.

Or, if Mastodon specifically isn't your thing, with it being an open protocol, there's other implementations you can choose from, with of course varying levels of compatibility. You can also opt to run the Mastodon backend, but swap the front-end out for a different feel.

Unlike corporate social media being at the whims of shareholders, or the board, or private investors, advertisers, etc., we can have our own, independent communities, and choose who we associate with (or not). That is empowering by design, at the root of it all, way more than even the richest people on the planet can hope for with purchases like these.

Now, when do we figure out how to help get Matrix/Element up as a viable Discord replacement, next? ;)

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As weird as this may sound: distro hopping is good. (Provided you're not talking about mission critical production infrastructure, etc.)

You can gain experience with other packaging formats, other ways of doing things, and that broadens your understanding of how different distros come to the decisions that they do. It also gives you the opportunity to upgrade your technical know-how when faced with an unfamiliar setup - 'Oh, this server's running something RPM-based; I know that since I run Fedora at home / used to run Fedora years ago / etc.'

I started out with really old versions of SuSE and Red Hat back in the mid-to-late 1990s, got hooked on Gentoo for a while, used various Ubuntu flavours for years (mostly Kubuntu and Xubuntu), got frustrated with everyone moving to systemd and the way I had to manually pull + compile stuff like OBS from source because of nVidia's licensing at the time (the packaged versions didn't expose NVENC - you had to grab the source build script, add the flag to the configure part, and build the .deb yourself every time. Thankfully that's fixed now AFAIK and 'just works'.) and went back to Gentoo for a long long time because USE flags are amazing when you know you're compiling a lot of bleeding edge stuff, many times direct from git repos.

I recently switched to Artix, which is 'Arch-without-systemd' (stuck to OpenRC from my Gentoo days, personally, but you have choices!), which right now for me is working great for where I'm at. While Gentoo's prebuilt packages are... lacking, if they exist at all, forcing you to usually constantly compile everything from source, Arch-derivatives have the combo of 'actually relatively up to date packages' plus the AUR (and yes, AUR works with Artix, as long as the PKGBUILD doesn't force rely on systemd directly; usually something like elogind is enough).

I have a relatively new (at least in terms of Linux driver support) gaming laptop - one of the all-AMD 'Advantage' ones; an Asus ROG thing that's genuinely really nice... but I knew looking at the state of drivers that I'd want to perpetually be on the latest -rc kernels, KDE Plasma, and Mesa built from git. Yes, it was a pain to get set up and still has a fair amount of bugs and gremlins, mostly around PRIME, reverse-PRIME, and running it in clamshell/closed lid mode with an external display through the USB-C/DP port. But so, so many times, watching changelogs + recompiling the latest kernel + Mesa + Plasma / Wayland bits would fix something and whittle that bug count down.

I'd follow development blogs excitedly, because it looked like some of the devs have the same laptop I do (because hey, screw nVidia and not having a decent gaming dGPU in your laptop, so you have like... a tiny handful of all-AMD choices with decent performance to end up on right now), were hitting the same issues I was, but crucially, knew how to fix or work around them. As soon as their patches would hit upstream, I'd run yay and pull them to my system within a couple hours. Maybe a couple days (or weeks) later, the official packaging would catch up, and I could switch from my custom compiled version back to the 'proper' package one, easing up my support burden. That, I find, is the real beauty of the combo of a rolling release distro with real solid 'compile your own' support.

All that said, Linux distros (and UNIX in general) are not a one-size-fits-all approach, and should never strive to be. I wouldn't run this on a mission critical server (that's what my FreeBSD box is for). I wouldn't give this to my parents to run. Heck, even my partner's PC still runs Ubuntu, because she's more likely to understand how to update it through the GUI when I'm not around to SSH in and run them myself for her.

People on the outside like to call this 'fragmentation' and spin it as 'why Linux will never "win" on the desktop'. Nevermind that Linux has already won in the mobile, embedded, server, etc. spaces, honestly this isn't 'fragmentation', this is choice, and choice is one of the things that most other OSes simply don't give you. For many many people, that's fine - they'll keep running their Windows machines and Macs and deal with whatever new paradigm they have to learn when major updates happen. For us, we can't accept that - we want to tinker, to look under the hood, to say 'I really wish it did things this way instead', and in many cases, find a group of people who also wished for that... and then made it happen.

I don't want to be a 'winner'; it's not even a competition. We've already won where it counts - we've found the tools that work for us, and that's what counts.

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