I wonder if they also plan this for their game engine and “online services” library that are included in many other developers’ games.

Fortunately the license forces them to contribute the code back

It doesn’t. It would only compel them to share their changes if they distributed their modified kernel to others, rather than simply running it on their own servers. And even then, they wouldn’t have to contribute their code back upstream.

They chose to contribute their changes upstream anyway, presumably so they aren’t burdened with having to adapt them to every new kernel version in the future. Fortunately, we stand to benefit as a side effect of that decision.

I dislike Meta as much as anyone, but sometimes a cucumber is just a cucumber.

Do you have any experience using it with large modlists? Like a couple thousand mods at a time?

How does it compare to Fluorine Manager?

Looks like it has support for Wabbajack and Nexus modlists. Nice.

you can accept the free trial

In my experience, accepting a “free trial” usually requires accepting a long list of some company’s terms and conditions.

You might find that an acceptable imposition in an interface upon which you depend, and on the expensive device that you bought. Many of us do not.

For the sake of other readers, let’s state this clearly: A custom domain with only one user can be used to track you just as a personal email address can, and Cloudflare itself is a massive surveillance operation. So I guess this might be helpful for some threat models, but it won’t do much for others.

license plate readers

This is a bit like referring to thermonuclear bombs as firecrackers. It’s very misleading.

it feeds you lies about sandboxes. AND YOU BELIEVED IT!

No, you simply failed to comprehend what I wrote.

Literally every distro has seamless gaming.

To expand on this: Some distros want a little more setup than others for gaming, but it’s generally a one-time thing and not particularly hard. Even my Debian Stable system plays games beautifully with a handful of Backports installed.

Is flatpak the way?

Steam can be installed natively or in a Flatpak. The latter can be a little fussy every once in a while, depending on your setup, but has the advantage of somewhat better sandboxing. (For better privacy protection, do your gaming on a dedicated machine or at least in a dedicated user account.)

What about Proton?

Proton is great. Steam comes with several versions, allowing you to choose the one best fitting any game that doesn’t work with the latest/default version. Some users choose to add third-party Proton builds (like GE-Proton) to Steam alongside the standard ones, but it usually isn’t necessary.

Matrix isn’t a drop-in replacement yet, but it’s slowly improving. Here’s a relevant post from early this year:

https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/

This so-called article contains absolutely no information to support the headline. It’s worthless garbage.

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.

It was a different perspective, not a personal attack.

Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.

Bear in mind that an OS image captured from a bare metal installation might fail to boot in a VM, depending on whether the original installation included the drivers needed in the VM environment. In that case, I would suggest learning about whatever recovery tools Windows offers these days, and trying to add the needed drivers.

taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.

There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.

I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)

Debian in general is not meant to run on the latest hardware.

When I see someone on social media claiming Debian is unsuitable for gaming, I know immediately that they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve been gaming on different distros since before Steam ran on Linux at all, and on Debian Stable for nearly a decade. This includes my current system, which was built a few months after the GPU was released.

In general, Debian can run just fine on new (Linux-compatible) hardware. If you’re talking about Debian Stable and hardware that was released less than a year ago, then you might have to pull in a newer kernel and/or firmware, but it’s not hard. In most cases, it’s as simple as enabling Debian’s Backports repository and installing the couple of new packages that you need. (You might not even have to do that, since Flatpak and Steam provide updates to much of what games need, but it would be wise to remember Backports anyway just in case you need them some day.)

The main thing to consider is that it’s not completely effortless. It will probably require a little more setup than a game-focused distro would, so if you’re considering Debian for a gaming system, you should know why you want it. For example, maybe you want a very low-maintenance system once it’s up and running. Or maybe Debian’s focus on Free software appeals to you. In such cases, a few extra steps when getting started might be worthwhile. But if you don’t have a specific need that Debian fills, then another distro might be more convenient.

Debian 13 is not going to get the latest versions of Nvidia drivers and there are better distros for us.

I don’t know if that’s true or not. Nvidia has a well-deserved reputation for making their hardware painful on Linux, and although the situation is less bad today than it once was, it’s still not great. If you’re determined to stick with them, then sure, a distro that does the extra work of packaging all of Nvidia’s driver releases might be a better choice for you.

(For what it’s worth, I finally ditched Nvidia in favor of AMD GPUs, and have been very happy with the results.)