It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…

Yeah. I’ve got my home server set to install all security updates and restart Monday at 3 am; my first thought when seeing a two-month uptime on any of my machines is ‘whoops’, not ‘wow’.

Amazing uptimes are strictly for machines that aren’t connected to a network, and I’d start to be concerned whether they’d restart on eg. power failure if I started seeing really big numbers.

Flatpaks bring all their own libraries with them rather than using the system ones.

• (plus) you avoid dependency hell, apps “just work”
• (minus) centralised version updates are less effective for bug and security fixes; all flatpaks must be updated separately
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional disk space since they bring everything with them
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional memory; Linux can’t keep a single copy of a library read-only in memory if multiple apps are using it

I think they have their place for apps that are under very heavy development, or for apps which are extremely “resource heavy” in comparison to the system resources that they use (by which I mean, games). I wouldn’t want my bread-and-butter system utilities to be flatpaks.

Speaking as an Arch btw user, my socks match, thank you very much. How rude.

Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.

Some high-end professional monitors have really sophisticated colour calibration tools, and perhaps a gaming monitor might allow you to automatically configure HDR or refresh rate on a per-app basis. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a monitor might have some software. The problem is automatic installation of shitware that you can’t get rid of again. Fuck LG, fuck Windows for allowing it.

A couple of years ago, I might have still checked protondb for Linux compatibility before making a purchase, but it seems a waste of time now. Everything that I’ve bought through Steam, or bought on GoG / claimed for free on Epic through Heroic has Just Worked, and has done for years. I think it got better when the Steam Deck was released; put a lot of visibility on Linux compatibility.

If you aren’t in to AAA, and even then only the competitive multiplayer with intrusive anticheat, then Linux is all you need.

Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They’ve also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.

A CD with RedHat on it? Pretty fancy. My first RH installation came on about three boxes of floppy disks, took hours to unpack it all. And damn right, been all uphill since.