Russ

Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I’ve landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a “consistent” state, for example.

On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.

We believe in the open internet, but we do not believe in the misuse of public content.

That’s real rich, coming from Reddit.

Hate? No, I do not hate Google. I still use a Pixel phone (and photos/assistant on it), my Gmail is still my primary email (I also self-host a few other domains but those are primarily used for automation and a few other one-off things), I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I still utilize my Stadia controller as my primary game controller, I use a Google TV set top box, etc.

I don’t use Search (I use Kagi instead), I don’t use Chrome (Firefox), I don’t really utilize Gemini all that much (I just run ollama for the few times I want to use an LLM).

Really I just use their products that work well for me, and don’t use the ones that don’t. There’s no love/hate about it.

Yep that’s the one, thanks!

Kinda. One of the Linux “wrappers” (I’m a bit tired and can’t think of the correct term here, bear with me) that lets you utilize some Linux utilities on Windows, maybe it was mingw or cygwin, actually uses pacman as their package manager IIRC.

I have a weird one! The smell of one of the hand sanitizer brands (“Germ X”) always brings me back to Kindergarten when we’d all line up for some hand sanitizer before lunch and after recess, then right before going home for the day. Times were so much simpler back then.

I don’t have a lot of “visual” memories left of those times, but the smell of that specific hand sanitizer brand seems like a memory that will never fade for me.

I dual boot on my primary/desktop PC, and only run Linux on my laptop and Steam Deck.

I find more often times than not, I feel like I’m either fighting with Windows or it does these small but annoying things that when added up tend to really get on my nerves. For example, one thing that I’ve been running into a lot (and happened earlier today) is if I put my computer to sleep while its booted into Windows, it’ll randomly decide to wake itself up for who knows what reason - flooding my room with light often times while I’m trying to sleep or relax. It does it enough where I should by now remember to just physically turn off my monitors when I put my computer to sleep, but why should I have to? The 95% of the time that I’m booted into Linux, if I put my computer to sleep it stays asleep until I explicitly wake it up, and thus I haven’t formed a habit to turn the displays off.

The only reason why I even keep Windows around on this PC is to occasionally play Destiny 2 and some VR stuff with friends every now and then.

As another person who also has Crohn’s, that sounds absolutely perfect!

I can’t speak for Epic Launcher games (I know that Heroic Games Launcher exists but I’ve not personally tried it with Epic games) however Blizzard games absolutely can be played in SteamOS - you can utilize something like Bottles or Lutris to install the Blizzard launcher, and then download the games from it as normal and run them. It is how I originally played Diablo 4 on my Deck before I picked it up again on Steam. I swear I remember both Bottles and Lutris even having an “Add to Steam” option to integrate shortcuts directly into Steam (and thus, coming up in the Gaming Mode UI) but don’t quote me on that one.

Blizzard games are actually some of the earliest non-Linux-native games that I remember running very well back in the days where we just had Wine (before Proton, DXVK, etc) which is something that always impressed me.

This statement is false!

Just ran into this exact problem this morning which was incredibly frustrating. Performed a routine system update, and I’m pretty sure I had a kernel panic (all input was non responsive, couldn’t even switch to a tty) in the middle of pacman’s upgrade phase.

While I was able to chroot into my install and reinstall the kernel, half of my system’s packages were left in an inconsistent state so I still couldn’t properly boot - and so I just nuked my root subvolume and reinstalled Arch (I suspect I could’ve somehow got the packages reinstalled if I wrangled for a while with pacman but it was just easier to reinstall at this point).

Atomic distros like Bazzite are designed to prevent that exact situation I ran into, unfortunately I just haven’t had enough time or energy to try to make my own custom image that has what I need in it (got kind of close with NixOS but that had its own issues), otherwise I’d probably be running that.

I had one of these done for an endoscopy - it ended horribly. It got “stuck” so I ended up having to have surgery for it to be removed.

Getting that surgery coordinated and scheduled took months all the while my health was declining. Eventually it got so bad that I couldn’t hold down food and I had to be pre-admitted to the hospital a month before the procedure and put on IV nutrition…

Granted I do have an autoimmune GI condition which is what prompted that test in the first place, and the chances of this happening is supposedly quite small but… Yeah I’ll take the endoscopy and colonoscopy over even that small chance of going through all of that all over again…

I’m not sure if this is a Pixel feature or if its available across all of Android, but there is an option when you connect over USB to connect your phone as a webcam - but that is of course tethered instead of being wireless.

Let us know how it goes, and if you have any further questions, feel free to give us a shout!

No problem! It looks like there’s an AUR package for it - though exercise caution since it is still in beta. That being said, 555 has been in beta for a bit now, so I expect it’ll probably be promoted to an official release imminently.

Definitely would give Wayland another try once the newer Nvidia driver is installed later on (either via the beta or the official release). I don’t use an Nvidia card anymore (this bug is precisely what caused me to switch, ironically - it has been around for a while and got worse for me when 535 came around) but I’ve heard from a lot of folks that it resolves the flickering issue.

Either way, I’m glad to hear that you’re glitch free now - and on a side note, it appears its your cake day so happy cake day!

I’m pretty sure the explicit sync fix requires the 555 beta version of the Nvidia driver to be installed, as there’s a driver component that’s required.

What distro are you on? If it has a decent way to install the 555 beta that would probably be a good route to go with - but otherwise, no, switching to X11 shouldn’t require reverting any settings at all. I used to switch between the two sessions all the time, right before you enter your password on the login screen (you have to be completely logged out, not just at the screen lock) click the menu at the bottom right and it should have a “Plasma (X11)” option.

Ah, gotcha - yeah that is definitely one of the pitfalls of Linux gaming still, which is the “there’s so many different configurations and some of them just work, others don’t” issue. I have an AMD card so perhaps it is an Nvidia issue - hopefully those sorts of issues smooth out once NVK is fully ready to go.

What issues does Forza have on Linux? I can’t speak for the Motorsport series, but I’ve been playing 4 and 5 on my Steam Deck and desktop for a while now without issue.

Exactly the same for me too haha, I’ve beat the ender dragon with friends before on shared worlds, but I’ve never beaten it in my own single player world.

I generally have really short bursts of playing MC these days, and by the time I play again a new update has come out so I usually just completely reset to new world features and such. I know that they generate in unexplored chunks and that you can go prune chunks and whatnot, but rather than spend time doing that I’d rather just spend the time playing. Hell, these days I don’t even usually get to the stage of getting Netherite gear.

I haven’t tried it myself, but I believe the OC is referring to the webcam USB mode that Pixels (idk if this is an Android feature or a “Pixel” feature) have. To enable it, connect over USB then you’ll have a notification along the lines of “Charging this device over USB”.

If you click that notification it’ll let you enable Webcam over USB mode, which I assume just causes the phone to act as any other webcam device would.