Honestly Arch-based is a good choice, but straight up Arch for a newbie? Nah.

I’m running EndeavorOS with KDE and it’s been solid for gaming. A few bugs, but mostly minor, like it picked the wrong default NIC driver (but still worked) and SMB shares wouldn’t auto mount recently until an update a week or two ago.

My main PC for non-gaming runs Manjaro. I know there are haters about it, but it’s been a solid distro for general use, and I’ve encountered no issues to speak of.

It’s a deeply complex game dating back thousands of years. It’s extremely compelling, difficult to learn, and you could spend a lifetime mastering it. I can understand why the church fears it. Who has time for a sermon when you could be studying Tsumego and learning Joseki?

steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Try this config. I posted about it above. It’s worked well for me to the point I’m no longer even comfortable playing GW2 on a keyboard, I’m able to react much more quickly to everything with the gamepad setup. Most important thing is always use action camera for combat and general exploration unless you specifically need the mouse for something.

Here you go: steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Paste that steam link in a browser while Steam is open and it will pull up the controller config.

Control mappings have face buttons and R1/R2 as attacks, L1/L2 as button layer modifiers, Joystick mouse and more. F-keys are on the d-pad, and most mouse related functions are active while holding L1. Pressing L2+R2 heals. Back button is your "interact. L1 + R3 switches between “action” camera and regular mouse mode for aiming. Action camera is better for combat, and is the mode I use like 90% of the time. Dodge is on R3. L3 swaps weapons. There’s also key combos for all the mounts, special action abilities (N key, on L2+back)… basically, everything you could possibly want to do in-game, there’s a controller way to do it. You may need to remap some of the mount buttons, I forget if I did custom mappings for some of those, as I have a lot of mounts (everything except roller beetle and gryffon).

Hope it works for you. I think it’s a great config, but my perspective may be skewed since I’m highly accustomed to it from muscle memory and using it for years (with Xpadder even, before steam controller mapping was a thing). I’ve used this config for every single class in the game and dialed it in so I can play literally any class without issues, including ones that have a number of aiming skills like engineer and elementalist. Actually, elementalist is a blast for this, dpad was perfect for switching elements compared to fumbling with F-keys.

I dunno about this one. Waiting to see what the crowd thinks as far as reviews. Secrets of the Obscure was as mediocre as they come and I have doubts now.

I’ve been playing it on a gamepad since 2012. I’ll see if I can get my Steam config link for you later.

I’ve seen the movie multiple times. Despite my comment, it’s a decent enough movie. But the entire situation that led to Cruise’s character not dying initially (where he’s taken prisoner instead of executed) was kind of absurd, and then for him to actually be allowed to meet with the emperor at the end, after essentially engaging in a rebellion and convincing Katsumoto of the same instead of committing sepukku (and then him doing it anyway???)… The whole thing would have been considered shameful, and just stretches belief generally. And Algren (Cruise) was basically the pivot point for the whole thing.

When I refer to the “white savior” thing, he didn’t save an individual, he saved “Japan’s honor.” It’s kind of bad in that regard.

Oh, and he wins the heart of the widow who’s husband he killed in that first battle. Woo.

Yeah, was a blast. Shame Crackdown 3 didn’t recapture the magic.

Dude, these same folks flipped their shit when the default main character in Crackdown was black, way back in 2007. These idiots don’t quit. I mean, we’re talking about a game where you’re a genetically engineered super-cop and had multiple choices of character race but their fragile egos were shattered because the default choice wasn’t the white guy.

It’s pathetic.

Mind you, I’m sure they were all fine and nodding their heads when Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.

Generally underscore _ works best for this, and should be viable for both OSes.

Too little too late. They lost what goodwill they might have had with me. I dealt with that for months until I decided to flip it. I won’t be using Ubuntu in the future unless for some awful reason I specifically need an Ubuntu server (and in that case I’d still push for Almalinux or another alternative).

That delay happens on first launch every boot. Also the automatic updates happening basically whenever is nonsense. It should tell me an update is needed, not just kick it off whenever it feels like. That kind of crap is why I use Linux and not Windows, and now why I don’t use Ubuntu.

Nah, ingrown toenails just happen. Might be a genetic thing or something. As a kid I had to get like five surgeries for it on my right big toe and then when it wouldn’t stop happening they eventually killed the root at that side of the toenail with some kind of acid to prevent it from happening again. I still occasionally get ingrown nails on the big toe of the other foot that didn’t need the surgery.

Well. in the modern day, there’s Ubuntu 22.04 and up with their insistence on snaps for many otherwise native apps. For example, Firefox as a snap and taking anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes to launch when you first open it.

I used Ubuntu for years, pretty much from 16.04 all the way up to 22.04 but that was a line for me and I ditched it for Manjaro. The experience has been much better overall.

Snaps should be for applications that may not receive updates on current systems or have a hard dependency on old libraries for some reason. Things like Spek come to mind. To use if for something like Firefox, and not only use it, but insist on it to the point you can’t install the native version without ridiculous workarounds… it’s absurd. And on top of this, it’s especially dumb because flatpak already existed prior to snap, but as usual Canonical had to be special instead of working with community standards.

Amazon based search results integrated in the Unity dash beg to differ. Canonical has a history of being shitty.

These are fantastic. I need more.

These are things for any OS though. I mean, on XFCE I spend time setting up my preferred shortcuts, software, tools, etc.

On Mac, install rectangle, shortcuts, debloat. There’s no perfect default for everyone.

The Steam deck is a special case because it’s literally a gaming handheld (though the term handheld for that thing is admittedly loose).

And there’s still some things even with the deck. Did you set up emudeck? Heroic launcher? Configure it for desktop mode?

I don’t see any of that. Cortana is disabled via settings toggle, no AI stuff, start menu web search is disabled. Updates are set to automatic download only and are only run upon shutdown if I choose “update and shutdown” instead of just doing shutdown.

I dunno, there are legitimate things to complain about with Windows, but none of this really fits.

In my case I power on, Steam launches, and I run a game. When done, I press the power button and it shuts down. That’s it.

I don’t need a push, a Linux machine is my daily driver (and has been for something like 8+ years now), and I’ve worked in IT doing virtualization/automation/data management and compliance for several years. I spend a lot of time in the terminal.

To me the Windows gaming PC is essentially a console, no different than a PS5 or a Switch is to someone else. It’s been up and running as such since before Proton was fully viable and for its use case I don’t see a need to change it until it’s due for a rebuild/replacement/upgrade.

That was just one example. And I’d you review that page you linked, they don’t all disagree, there were more than a few reporting issues with it. It’s gold rated, but not platinum.

I’m glad you’re enjoying the experience, but either way the point I was making is that my gaming PC is just an appliance. It works and I have enough other things to do that I don’t feel like reinstalling the OS and a butt-ton of games.

When I need to do a rebuild/upgrade in the future I’ll likely revisit Linux with it, but until then I don’t see the point. I only turn it on a few hours a week to game and otherwise it’s off. And when it is on, I just want to game, not potentially spend time fiddling or troubleshooting if something isn’t as expected.