I can't disagree. But a couple of friends and I like to play a few casual bot rounds on Friday nights.

How easy was it to do the signed boot?

@bizzle @wesker I would have to keep turning Secure Boot on and off to play it.So I don't.

I was dual booting for a while until I realized I hadn’t been into the Windows one in months because it was a pain in the ass for various reasons. So I just got rid of it.

A very old familiar story over the past couple decades or so.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss

Yup.

It shall continue being good to see other people get this, taking their power back, ceasing being their games dealer's bitch.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss; there’s plenty of other games to buy with my money.

Same.

I have a backlog of games years long, the fact that I can't put Battlefield or Valorant on that list doesn't diminish my ability to play amazing games 24/7 if I wanted.

Expedtion 33, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight, Silksong, Hades 2, ARC Raiders, Helldivers 2, Path of Exile 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etcetcetc.

I have over 200 games in my Steam library and every single one works on Linux. I'll worry about the 5 kernel anti-cheat games once I get to the end of my list...

While talking about the PC desktop in a gaming magazine.

they put linux mint (cinnamon edition) on computers. people more or less used it normally, i'd say most people barely bothered that it's not windows. essential software that we needed to use was pre-installed (with neatly visible icons on the desktop to click on), and web browser was installed too. that covers basically all use-cases.

one colleague asked how to do screenshots. i showed her.

Let us know, I'm very curious. At our school (cal poly pomona), our comp sci professors were upset Ubuntu got put on their lab computers and they were upset because IT didn't give warning and some didn't know how to use it.

If you're curious about migrations, there will be several talks at this years FOSSDEM from people sharing their experiences migrating whole organizations /municipalities to FOSS.

the department where i am. don't wanna say which one because privacy concerns.

But I can't be bothered to play windows games

My theory is that all this is the fault of the cookie law. Before that, the design philosophy was that you could not break the flow of a visitor by pop-ups etc., because they would go somewhere else before even looking at your content.

When all the big websites suddenly implemented increasingly annoying cooking consent dialogs, the flow was already broken everywhere. And so now the floodgates had opened for all kinds "subscribe to our newsletter", "get a welcome 10% rebate" etc., because users no longer has the expectation of an unbroken flow.

And, my god was that law stupid. What we needed was carefully balanced non-negotiable limits on what websites were allowed to do in terms of tracking users; what we got was every website implementing a site-dependent UI for functionality already present in every web browser ("turn off cookies"). The rules got different when GDPR arrived later, both for the better and for the worse. But the flow-breaking pop-ups we will probably never get rid of now that the public has learned to live with them.

End of rant.

Yeah. I also use Bottles for GOG / itch games that don't have a native linux version. And I'm pretty happy with how it works. Things install smoothly and easily, and it has a very nice menu for the games I've installed. Here's what it looks like:

However, there have been some hiccups along the way that might have caused less patient people to give up. In particular, it took me awhile to work out that although I could tell bottle to launch a windows .exe from anywhere on my computer, it would only actually work properly if I first move the exe into the virtual drive - which deep inside a confusing directory structure. (The "troubleshooting" menu option goes directly into talking about this issue; but even finding that menu option isn't totally straight forward, especially if you're just launching the exe from a file browser or something.)

Anyway, the upshot is that I like bottles; because it is easy to use but also very transparent about how it works and what it is doing, which I like. But I wouldn't say it's the best option for everyone.

I run battle.net through Steam. Works just fine.

I also had no(*) trouble installing Battle.net in Heroic Launcher, FWIW. Steam probably shouldn't be much different.

(*) ok, well, not any more trouble than Battle.net usually is on Linux. The point is after prodding at it for awhile it eventually finished installing and updating and started up properly and has worked fine ever since.

Hell, I've got a game I legally purchased on CD back in the Win XP days I'd like to play, and the farthest I got is installed but fails to run.

In heroic, you can add the game and while adding it, click "run installer first" and then install the EXE and copy whatever cracks needed. I needed to do that with a few games that are literally not available anymore on stores.

Lutris had been so janky for me the past 10 years and many of the installer scripts literally don't install any dependencies anyways that I switched to heroic last year and I no longer have games that work completely fine and then next launch they don't work.

do steam games run on linux already or something?

Oversimplification coming, but...

Most (modern) games can actually just run on Linux already, because Linux is where the best cross platform developer tools are.

Today, if a developer wants to publish their game to Windows, Mac, Android, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and XBox - the odds are strong that the developer is actually (possibly unwittingly) writing a Linux native game and then using an engine to port the Linux version to the other platforms.

The reasons for this are complicated, but mainly boil down to Linux being the simplest target to reliably build developer tools for - because every part of Linux is open and public.

Like do you only have to do that for non steam games?

If a game is purchased through Steam, Steam launcher knows enough to choose the best available version of the game for the operating system - whether the best version is the Windows executable running under wine/proton, or a native Linux executable.

Some have native Linux versions, while the rest can be "translated" (not strictly emulation, but the concept is close enough) via Proton, a translation layer that Valve introduced with the Steam Deck, which is itself running (arch btw) Linux. I'm not sure what the split is in the catalog, but the steam deck verified list serves as an indication for Linux (for Arch, at least) compatibility in general.

This is true for both Steam and non-Steam games - the developer or publisher might offer a native Linux version, but packaging is always a mixed bag. This proton trick allows you to run the Windows version with the same compatibility it would have on the steam deck, no matter where it came from.

I've had a couple of people suggest they were going to dualboot and I often suggest against it. Logging in and out is more of a deterrent than people realize.

The only instance where I think it would be effective is if you work with MS software, in that case you can get away with having a work OS and a home OS.

Depends on the person I guess. I set myself up to dual boot. Last time I booted into windows was well over a month ago, and it was during the initial move over to Linux. I still keep a dual boot, but I'm much more inclined to use the new Linux setup rather than Windows (10, I use 11 for work laptop and I am not at all tempted to install it even for a second boot).