4get.ca has been great for me.

Ah good to know. I’m using Hyprland on my main device, but never even considered installing anything other than the default on the Garuda box.

Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.

I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.

All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.

I took degoogling as an opportunity to review and purge a lot of accounts and actually hold myself to going through the GDPR data removal requests and all that. I refreshed passwords and emails of accounts I actually wanted to keep, and pretty much ditched the rest. If the account never made it into my password manager in the first place it clearly wasn’t very important, so it can bounce around cyberspace forever I guess.

Amazing! Thanks so much for the info!

Syncing freetube with syncthing?? I use both of those, but I didn’t know there was some way to keep freetube synced across devices. What does that setup look like?

Not a proxy, but cryptpad is a fairly good alternative.

I think I know two Destiny 2 streamers that have mentioned it. That’s about it because that is the only online “competitive” game I play. To be clear, I daily drive it for all the other protections it provides. Mullvad just struggled with speeds when I gamed, so I couldn’t just leave it on. Proton didn’t have a noticeable impact so I could just leave it running.

There’s some games that use peer to peer connection that can expose your IP if the person on the other end cares to do the digging. In some competitive games people that are trying and caring way too hard will use this to say DDoS people in order to win games. While I’m probably not good enough, or well known enough for people to be doing this, you’ll hear streamers mention it happening to them every now and then.

I daily drive Proton mostly because of speed for gaming, but I keep a mullvad account handy for special occasions. I have zero interest in the full Proton stack, I don’t want to centralize my data like that. Especially once they joined the AI train, I’m glad I kept my VPN and email separate.

I host my own private git server and use Unix Pass for my password vault, FastMail for email, Syncthing and SMB for file sharing, don’t really use crypto so I couldn’t care less that they added a wallet. The VPN interface on mobile and Windows/Mac is fine. I’d love to see the Linux options improve, but I just use OpenVPN profiles and it works well enough.

Another Fastmail user. I’m happy with it. The unlimited alias and masked emails are nice. From what I can tell I’ve only ever gotten emails from things I have directly and explicitly given my info to, so I’m assuming my email address isn’t being sold around resulting in lots of spam.

I had pretty good luck with Garuda on an old gaming laptop. In fact I’m pretty sure gaming wise it worked out of the box. Any tweaks I made were for other use cases.

Look up Syncthing and then never stop trying to replace closed source and paid software/services. Like any time you launch something ask yourself “does this hit the same way as when I swapped to Syncthing?” If the answer is no you then put “[name of thing you want to replace] foss alternative” into your search engine of choice. You’ll end up down so many rabbit holes, but you’ll come out the other side a whole lot better at making your technology work for you, not the company that made it, and with a suite of free open sourced tools you are in complete control of.

Here are some tools I use that are super easy to get going.

• Syncthing (cloud storage replacement)
• KeepassXC or Pass if you’re a command line person (locally stored password manager, coupled with Syncthing you have your own private cloud password manager
• Tailscale/wireguard (private VPN that allows you to easily connect all your devices without exposing any of the traffic to The Internet)
• PiHole (a DNS sinkhole that blocks a lot of ads and tracking on your entire network, bonus points if you set it as you Tailscale DNS provider to give all your devices ad block no matter where you are as long as the device was a connected to Tailscale)

Those are the ones that got me going and I personally believe act as a solid core. Most people will find all of those useful. Other services are more user specific, but that’s a lightweight bundle of software that your RPi will handle well. Much more and you might want to look at beefier hardware.

I used to manually port games to macOS using wine/wine tricks/wine bottler, and honestly it’s not that bad. Especially if using GUI versions of all of those. Yes it takes fiddling and tweaking and a decent amount of failure, but I found it worth it once I succeeded in doing it once. That was almost a decade ago, and while I haven’t tried it since (I rely mostly on steam at the moment) I have a few games from say GoG and other places I’m planning to manually port. Ignore the haters, and just go for. Read/watch a tutorial, fail miserably for a while, and eventually you’ll tweak enough parameters and change enough values you’ll find what works. Once you do that for one game all the others will be easier. Every game is a bit different, but the freedom and knowledge you’ll gain is great. If my 13 year old ass could do it on a school issue MacBook to share Skyrim to all my friends you can definitely do it with more modern tooling.

EDIT: I think at one point I ported the windows version of steam, and then could use the “add non steam game” option and then could simply hit run. Didn’t work for everything, but there was a handful of games that was a quick and dirty work around for.