Sophocles

Pegasus is my go-to but it takes a bit of tweaking and learning. It’s kinda like the arch of frontends; very versatile, lightweight and customizable, but also a bit of a learning curve. Steam games get added automatically, but with other emulaed or wine games you’ll need a scraper like Skyscraper or you can edit the metadata files yourself. You can also point to bash scripts to do essentially anything you want on the OS side. Launch anything, any emulator, any game, any bash script, wine, whatever your heart desires.

There are also tons of themes in every style, my top pics are Retro Mega Next for browsing and Library for a grid layout. It is also natively built for use with controller so it is easy to use. It’s also cross platform, I currently use it on Fedora, used to use it on Windows and have also used it on Android and Steam Deck. And if you want to go even deeper than that, it runs on QML, and you can customize any and every sigle part of the launcher and frontend with the QML files or even make your own theme. The rabbit hole is deep and very fun to explore and it’s such a flexible frontend

People forget about the indie scene on roblox too. The front page stuff is slop but there are great hidden gems on roblox like Microwave Dinner and Super Blox 64

I’ve kept my little logitech mouse around for a while too. I first got it in 2007, and I’ve been through 3 PCs, gone from Windows XP to 7 to 10 to LMDE to Fedora, and she’s still going strong today

My mixer is preamped and I also use my headphones for a guitar amp, so I need higher ohms to handle and match the output. Not good for my hearing ik but with open back headphones and loud music I might as well be at a concert

Honestly if it needs an app it’s probably overpriced garbage anyway. High quality analog headphones have been made for decades without any apps. As others have said ditch the “gaming” headphones, they almost always suck and are overpriced for what they offer.

You should ideally look for headphones with a frequency range of 20Hz to 40kHz (the full range of human hearing) but even a 40Hz to 20kHz range would be decent. This is the biggest quality factor for headphones.

If you’re gonna plug it straight into your computer or audio card via aux or usb you want something with low ohms (either 2Ω or 6Ω) but if you’re gonna use an audio interface or mixing board you want something with around 200 ohms. In laymans terms, low ohm headphones with powerful audio device = blowing out the headphones. High ohm headphones with tiny device (like a phone) = quiet muffled audio.

For microphones, range doesnt matter as much because most people talk around 200Hz and don’t really go too high or low. Also look for “condenser” mics which capture voice much better than dynamic mics.

For connection, best quality is probably gonna be an audio interface. The mic connects via XLR cable, the headphones over aux, and it usually has a USB-A connection to the pc. If you’re running Linux, Pulseaudio has great support and is much better than default ALSA.

My favorite mic brands are Shure and Rhode, and my favorite headphones are made by a German company called Beyerdynamic. Mackie also makes some cheap and quality mixing boards. Probably more info than you needed but the audio rabbit hole is very fun to explore!