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Cake day: Jun 08, 2023

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I’ve tried three times to fully convert my gaming rig to Linux, sticking with the effort at least 3 solid months minimum each time. The first time was back in 2015. Only a small subset of my Steam Library worked, despite all of my best efforts hacking on bottles, and there was no way I could stick with it if I intended to play anything with friends. Community aside, Valve and Feral were leading the charge, but I could not stick with it.

My second attempt was around 2019. Almost half my library ran, some in need of care and feeding, others barely functional, but running nonetheless. This was primarily due to my curation efforts of trying to make sure the games I bought offered some slim hope of compatibility. Wine was still a very inexact science, so attempts to get things running outside of native ports or Valve games was a poor facsimile. WineDB representation of compatibility layers was a wide gradient of colors, with most AAA titles still squarely in silver territory or worse. Anything with anti-cheat was a fool’s errand.

My rig’s now been on Linux for 4 months solid, and the state of Linux gaming is nothing close to what it used to be. The state of EAC support thanks to Steam Deck represents a quantum leap all its own, and that wouldn’t have happened without Proton. The overwhelming majority of my Steam Library runs with no effort, each game running nearly as good or better than it did on Windows. This shift did not feel incremental.


And I wouldn’t advocate for installation of a daily driver OS on anything less than an m.2, these days. Fair enough. A consideration for the future, then.


If you have two separate physical drives to work with, dual-booting is a great “training wheels” approach to the problem. Then you can take your time with the learning process and hop back into Windows quickly whenever you need a break or the ability to do something quickly that the Linux hasn’t been set up for, yet.


That’s mostly preference, once you get things all set up and installed. You can’t avoid updating forever because you’ll eventually need to install something new from the repos, and it’s good to have some kind of update cadence for security’s sake, but daily is a bit much. Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.

I save that effort for a Saturday once every couple of months, and it usually goes smoothly without incident. I could go longer if I wanted, 2 months feels right to me.


Steam Deck changed the landscape of dev support for anti-cheat significantly. It’s still not perfect, but most games relying on EAC work now with minimal issue. You might have to occasionally revalidate installed files or reinstall EAC for the game after a patch and that’s about it.

Other anti-cheat solutions are still a crap-shoot and likely won’t work. Thankfully, VAC and EAC are the most prevalent.


That doesn’t represent disinterest by the developers. In fact, that’s a big red circled F on a report card to them, and including that comment is intentionally bringing attention to a glaring deficiency. It’s very likely that they have a plugin implemented in their IDE which surfaces TODO items vividly, and their associated Jira task or epic can’t be closed out until all of the remaining work is complete.

I’d be more worried if the code presented a clear danger to privacy and DIDN’T directly address concerns in one form or another. You should be praising this dev for raising awareness to his peers and making sure this gets done, not the opposite.


AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.


Given how much I miss earlier versions of the internet, when almost all content was created and maintained by early-adopting pioneers, I would personally encourage a clear split from site-powered corporate shenanigans.

Mountains of objective, factual resources have found themselves drowned out of public mindshare by an endless firehose of intellectual junk food produced by SEOs, bots, AIs, and anyone else on the hunt for their daily clicks. I have trouble even finding good examples anymore thanks to today’s endlessly-manipulatable search algorithms.


Been running Arch exclusively on my gaming rig for 3 months, now, with no issue. Thanks to Proton, the only blocker is games that use anti-cheat solutions that don’t work properly. Everything that’s relied on VAC or EAC work fine, though.

This is my third attempt at making this move on my gaming rig. The first try was back in 2016. The second was in 2018. This time, I think I’m here to stay. The Steam Deck’s success was the final ingredient.