

Third option? Solus? Minix? What is the third option!!???! Why don’t I know about the mysterious third option?!!!?
Linux. Runit. SwayWM. Colemak-CAWS. Espresso. Cycling. The list goes on; stop using so many god-damn periods!
Third option? Solus? Minix? What is the third option!!???! Why don’t I know about the mysterious third option?!!!?
In regard to question one: it depends. Pretty much everything without a shitty, Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat (my autocorrect corrected to antichrist — for good reason!) will run either by default on steam or with something known as Proton. But you still may run into occasional difficulties.
For example, if you play Counter Strike 2: up until January this year, playing on Linux meant ≈20% less performance (CS2 is unoptimized for Linux and Vulkan unfortunately); this number has changed since the last few updates and since the new Nvidia driver, so I need to re-run the benchmarks. Your going to occasionally experience things like that, where performance isn’t on par. In the case of CS2, the devs love Linux, so they will optimize for it in the future. It’s just going to take a while.
Another example: I had to use Proton on a game that supposedly was native to Linux. Native implementations may sometimes suck; the good news though, is that you can easily use Proton, both inside and outside of steam. Seriously, I freaking love Valve for Proton, it’s a fantastic tool.
This is all to say, that while gaming is absolutely possible nowadays, you will occasionally need add some flag, or familiarize yourself with proton, etc.
The exception, of course, being Kernel antichrists. Goddamn them. I can’t play LoL anymore because of it. Well, I hate Riot so much now anyway, I’m not sure I’d want to anymore.
Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I’m happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable…
Bad history, but it’s like my second favorite genre man… and most (uhhh) of the new ones are fine 😬
I’m oddly happy that, despite what some might call extravagant ideas, you stand by LGBTQ. Goes against the stereotype, and I can only support that. As a side note: the only “extravagant idea” (who am I to say; you can’t disprove a negative — in other words, I mean no disrespect) I’ve ever gotten interested in was Philip K. Dick. You may find his VALIS series interesting; it’s the most persuasive argument for omniscient non-human intelligence I’ve come across, and quite well written at that.
Nice setup! Couple questions:
Thanks! Again, this looks super cool!
This is a much, much better article. I’m surprised at the NYPost’s shoddy quality (though I don’t know much about them); the headline especially feels misleading. Thanks for sharing a better source.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I’ve had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.
Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that’s why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I’ve tried, but I do regret that it’s Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that’s the only device I use it on 🤷.
Void is an arch-killer for me; it’s faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren’t for the booting issue (it’s been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.
Well, those are my two cents. Good day y’all!
+1 it was a tun of fun for me and rust is great
I love Nobara, but it regularly breaks between updates (though everything is usually fixed within 3 hours).
+1 for Quod Libet
I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you’re leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).
Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI… If you’re a “power-user” I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver.
There’s also Void Linux, which hasn’t ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It’s actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it’s quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.
I can’t say much about immutable distros, as the only one I’ve used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).
Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!
+1 — I tried getting the gosh darn API key for hours with no success. Share your secrets (original commenter)!
It crushes me, CRUSHES ME, that the wretched Fedora beats my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed in popularity! Why, oh why!??!
Seriously though, why do people prefer Fedora? I used it for 2 years and was very, very happy after switching my daily driver to Tumbleweed. It felt faster, had better repos, defaults, stability, etc. — aaaaaand it’s rolling release, which is so much easier (ironically) from a stability perspective (every, EVERY, Fedora release something would break for me, gosh-darn-it). I just don’t get it; am I the only one experiencing this?
I remember this from “The C Programming Language // ANSI Edition” — a.k.a. K&R! A great guide to C btw; I still consider it the single most informative and useful thing that happened to me in the realm of computer science.
I was short on time but wanted to recommend a book that drastically changed my life and improved my mental health. I have no moral issues recommending it; one can always look up a summary, or easily read it free of cost using shadow libraries (not that I recommend that).
However, I will humor you, and include a short summary here:
Hope this helps.
Too much to cover in a comment! Here’s a good book on the subject: https://www.dyslexicadvantage.org/
Edit: wait, that may be the wrong link. Here’s the book I meant: https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexic-Advantage-Unlocking-Hidden-Potential/dp/0452297923 (sorry for using an Amazon link)
A note in left-handedness:
In primary school, I first learned to write with a pencil and then with a fountainpen, as you describe (I grew up in Europe). This has made no difference to my experience with writing whatsoever, because our <insert strong swear word> language/cursive/alphabet is designed for right-handed people. I could talk for hours on the subject, but it would involve much swearing — I will spare you the pain. Just know that we should be writing top-to-bottom instead of left to write, and should re-design our alphabet, cursive, fountain pen nibs, and how we teach lefties to write.
Damn, that just goes to show how indoctrinated I am. Didn’t even occur to me that there’s two mainstream OSs outside of Linux out there.