Yup, I had this exact experience. Installed Bazzite because it was a “gaming OS”. Had trouble just installing any non-gaming apps, or looking up guides to do so. Even gaming wasn’t perfect.

Installed CachyOS, and yes, there are annoyances, but also a nice path to fix them. It’s both a good gaming OS, and a daily driver for casual use.

My daily drivers: Outlast Trials, Dead by Daylight, Wild Assault, Helldivers 2, Warhammer Space Marine 2.

All of those work fine on Linux. It just seems to be the most toxic, gamerfuel-heavy games that go full kernel anticheat.

I like the premise, I think I just get this very “boomer” complaint about a lot of competitive FPS’s where I’m firing at people’s afterimage hitting nothing as they slide-dash around for 5 seconds before they turn and bring my HP to 0 in 2 headshots.

It could well be a genuine skill difference, but it hasn’t changed much with practice, and it prevents me having much fun with those games. I’d theoretically like such a game if it could somehow shift the skill entirely towards positioning, prediction, and ability/gadget-usage, rather than twitch-reflexes, but it’s a hard design to make work while still satisfying players. Arc might be different if it’s primarily PVE.

Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)

I’m not so sure Valve is the right maintainer for the core desktop. The Deck works well, but mainly what Valve is maintaining is the Game Mode feature and Proton. Everything else is largely better handed off to a bigger group.

I’ve definitely run into some snobbish “Accept my incorrect solutions and be grateful, or go back to Windows, newb” types of people. I don’t have much love for them. I recognize it takes patience to acclimate new users, but it’s part of the job.

By and large I’m preferential to just stay with something that works; part of what pushed me off it has just been Microsoft themselves enshittifying the experience. I feel like I remember a day when Windows start search actually took you to what you wanted, and now “notepad” immediately queries the shopping network before your own program list, and when you get Notepad open it has a Copilot button.

You’re doing the right thing as long as you stay on an OS that keeps you going day in and day out. I tried Linux earlier in the year on two distros that did NOT work as well as the internet said they would, and went back to Windows. More recently, tried another one and there were stupid difficulties - but I got past them, at a time when Windows issues were just giving me “This is the way it is now, just put up with it”.

I’m dual booting with Windows because of a project I’m finishing that would be difficult to move OS, but Cachy is now my gaming OS. It’s nice to move away from the “forced” behavior from Windows.

Tangentially, a few UI decisions felt locked-in on Ubuntu and Mint too; or at least I couldn’t find an easy way to change them. I’m still a little annoyed my scroll wheel changes form options but it’s a minor thing.

It’s a little funny that all my multiplayer games work fine, and the only ones broken on Proton are mainstream ones I hate.

It’s like an invisible filter telling me “These devs are jackasses and the playerbase is toxic. Don’t play this.”

How do people feel about this company using generative AI? That was a concern of mine around The Finals; they’ve defended the decision on voice acting and it made me wonder where else they’re using it.

EDIT: Learned some new things from the responses, certainly an interesting situation. I’ll consider them.

IGN: “Traditional gamer journalism is dying. Please support honest journalists.”
Also IGN: “Good work, 47. Now publish the article and locate an exit.”

Did anyone else know the reason Morpheus is “reborn” in an odd way in Resurrection is because he canonically dies in the MMORPG? I remember wanting to play that as a kid…probably didn’t miss much though.

Remember, mangos are read from right to left! Also, when the characters end each other’s name with “san”, it means…

Even America is taking some steps forward in some odd ways.

Trump: “Alaskan refuge drilling is wide open! Drill, baby drill! Who wants first bid?”
Shell: “Ew, no. Literally no one wants that bad PR.”

Wait…is this what that video game, 999, was about!?

There are definitely some ways I’d like to see media shifts, but I’m always very cautious about govt regulation around it.

For instance, I always hated how much we parodize authoritarian dystopias. The “parody” element is often lost on people, and they end up respecting it; like people who lose the irony in vouching for Helldivers’ “For Managed Democracy!” or feel like Warhammer40k’s Imperium of Man is awesome.

We probably need more Spec Ops: The Line’s, but also more hero fantasies about destroying those dystopias.

Like how in Stranger Things, instead of the whistleblowing heroes telling the media that “The government covered up a dimensional lab connected to an alien world that summoned a monster that lead to deaths in town”, they tell the media “The government covered up an infectious disease laboratory that lead to deaths in town”.

Same general point, but far more acceptable to most people.

So, a bit of a spoiler, but…This is basically the plot of the ending of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”.

It is horrifying, and really sad. But the look of dismay on that officer’s face at the end gives a very small touch of karma to it.

There’sa pretty great modern comic I got from the library: Superman Smashes the Klan. Tells a story about a Chinese family moving into Metropolis and getting marginalized, has some good hero moments as well as identity moments for Superman - who, of course, is not from America.

I’d really love it if we had more modern media that sets aside the “complex, humanized villains” trend and just has Nazis as villains to get decimated.

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If nothing else, I like how directly The Matrix Resurrection lampshaded this. Thomas Anderson’s game company is forced into making a sequel to their Matrix trilogy by Warner Bros itself, and provides infinitely conflicting corporate views on being completely original and yet repeating the source material.

They couldn’t escape the sequel trap, but they could at least draw attention to it.