I am completely enamored with Inkbound right now. Its a turn-based tactical roguelite by the guys who made Monster Train. It has a similar feel to the combat from Marvels Midnight Suns, which I loved also. It just came out of earl access recently.

Oh and they took out all the microtransactions in the game during EA. People complained and they listened! So there are some mechanics that look like, for example, a season pass, but it’s free and automatic now. I think that’s pretty awesome.

Anyways, game is fun. Devs are moral. Works in linux. A++

Yeah I get it. It turns out subscription services are everywhere and have been for quite some time so there’s no need to really inform people about the pros and cons at this point.

Sure I don’t own the games. But then again, I don’t tend to replay old games ever. There are SO MANY new games coming out all the time, I’ve never understood the urge to go back and replay an old game. Chances are there’s a new game out there that’s the same idea but better.

My only point here is that GamePass Ultimate is basically paying more to have access on Windows AND Xbox and I don’t use the Windows version anymore. It will save me money when it’s time to renew. Hooray linux!

It’s one of my only regrets from switching to linux full time last summer: the PC side of my GamePass Ultimate subscription is now useless because it requires Windows. I get it, but it still bums me out.

On the plus side, I prepaid using some crazy scam/exploit/deal/whatever from SlickDeals so it cost me like less than $100 for three years. And since I still use it on my Xbox regularly, I feel like it was still a… <glasses>… slick deal.

Yeah I was pretty disappointed when I realized that. Oh well.

Xbox cloud requires a controller, which kinda defeats the purpose of playing on PC imho.

That said, it DOES work well if you’re into that kinda thing. I tested it out with MS Edge installed via flatpak.

I kinda do too. It’s nice having the option to play Gamepass games on PC or console. Some games are just more comfy on one than the other.

I realize this is the linux gaming sub, but it’s worth mentioning that this is on Gamepass too (I still use Gamepass on Xbox even though I don’t game on Windows anymore).

The real shame here is that TFT uses the LoL client and so we can’t play TFT now either. LoL could disappear tomorrow and I will miss going back to TFT for a few weeks every once in a while.

I’m on Pop and my Steam will randomly just restart sometimes. I have not found any rhyme or reason to it yet. And I’m NOT a linux expert by any sense of the word so not much I can do about it anyways.

I tried Nobara and really liked it. Some games didn’t like my the hybrid graphics on my laptop tho and I ended up swapping to Pop. But I actually like Nobara better than Pop and would be using it if I could.

Ow, I just rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. You sound 13.

Oh no! What will I do without EA games?

Oh wait, the same thing I’m currently doing. Not even playing them when they’re free on Gamepass.

Not sure how old your kids are, but mine are 7 and 11 and I would definitely NOT play BG3 with them. If it were a movie, I don’t think it would even get an R rating given all the sex and gore.

(To be clear, not judging the game. I quite enjoy it. Just don’t find it appropriate for my little ones. Caveat emptor.)

FWIW, I had a lot of fun playing thru Portal with my son. No official co-op mode in the first one, but the second one has it and it’s pretty old at this point so should run fine on older machines.

I haven’t run SteamOS but it seems to run just as well on Pop as it did on Windows, if that means anything.

The real trick is figuring out how to install the HD executable into the same prefix after that. From what I gather, vanilla Freelancer doesn’t work in linux well because of dx8.

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, when I double click setup.exe, it opens ProtonTricks, rather than install anything. I tried running it through the terminal window directly and it looked like it installed but when I tried to run it afterwards I got errors like it couldn’t find the files.

I dunno, I will probably just end up dual booting. This is EXACTLY the kind of experience that kept me from linux for the last couple decades. I am positive with enough effort I could get it working. I just don’t want to put in that kind of effort; I don’t want a new hobby.

Fortunately, when I’m not trying to install a 20-year old game made for the wrong operating system, things DO just work. :-D

It’s by the GloriousEggroll guys, and I really liked it a lot. I would still be using it if it worked better with my laptop’s hybrid Nvidia graphics setup. When I get around to swapping my desktop to linux, I’ll almost certainly go with Nobara first.

FWIW, Pop!_OS is where I landed for great hybrid graphics support.

IMHO it depends on what kind of gaming you do. For me, I play all the big tentpole AAA games on console. My PC gaming is mostly indy stuff and things that suck on console like 4x strategy games. For my uses, gaming on linux has been… surprisingly good.

I would definitely recommend trying it out with dual boot.

Random update: I had to swap to Pop!_OS because some games were having issues with the hybrid graphics on my laptop. I couldn’t figure out how to get it working in Nobara but Pop supports hybrid Nvidia graphics (because the company that makes Pop sells laptops with hybrid graphics). It took a little longer to get Pop working as well for me as Nobara was, but so far so good.

I really don’t like the desktop environment as much but I’ve got it working well enough and I’m getting used to it. I don’t want to mess with it more, trying to install Wayland and whatever, so I’ll stick with what just works.

So after a lot of dinking around on two different machines and trying about 6 or 7 different distros, I’ve settled on Nobara and I’m really into it. It does everything I need right out of the box, it looks good, and it just works. I haven’t gamed a ton on it yet, but so far the light-weight games I’ve tried have worked perfectly.

For day to day stuff… linux is there. There’s no reason to use Windows for day to day computing stuff and, if gaming works out, I don’t see why I’d ever need to go back to the Windows boot. I’m impressed.

Anyways, thanks for the recommendation. I have a RL buddy who also recommended this distro. He said it’s a good balance between the slow updates from Ubuntu-based distros and the rapid updates from Arch-based distro. Too slow and your drivers get out of date. Too fast and you get a buggy mess. Makes sense to me.

Looking into Manjaro, it sounds like it’s kind of known for having issues with reliability. Seems like that might not be the best pick for something that “just works”. But I’ve heard good things about Arch so I don’t know.