I’ve been going fucking wild with emulators lately.
I have Dolphin, Xenia, OpenGOAL, PCSX2 and RPCS3. I have Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Heroes, Sonic '06, all the Ratchet & Clank PS2 games, the Sly Cooper trilogy and Sly 4, all the Jak games, the first two InFamous games, the Tak trilogy, and even more.
I was wanting Sony (or someone) to port at least Sly and Jak to PC, so I got tired of waiting and just got emulators. Old games are super fun.
With InFamous, RPCS3 works damn near flawlessly (some games need some tweaking individually to smooth out some kinks, but it’s easy to do).
I ran into some issues late-game in the first one where if you attacked a certain enemy with your basic shock attack, it would totally freeze and crash the game, so you need to switch it to the ASMJIT recompiler. Which, if you do that, the game will run almost perfectly aside from minor audio and graphical bugs.
The second one has some framerate issues, but it’s entirely playable. I’m on the last mission of my good playthrough now.
My gaming PC is on Win 11 because it’s recent and I’m lazy and it’s convenient. My laptop runs Win 10 so it’ll be Linux I guess. Not really looking forward to finding a distro and reinstalling and whatnot but what can you do. It’s been a good few years since I last had a Linux box so I’m pretty rusty and not up to date on the recent best distros.
I used to use UbuntuStudio back when I was playing around with music recording and production ages ago because it ran the real-time kernel which was important for JACK I think. Last time though was just Mint.
Well, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that’s what I’d recommend, if you’re not looking to experiment.
Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.
With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.
My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it’s got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It’s kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It’s more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it’s also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
Well, and I guess, I’ll throw in Xfce, too, since that’s likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.
Wow, thank you for the extensive reply! I did used to use xfce back in the day, yes. Never had a problem with it, but those were maybe simpler times. Might look into KDE this time, why not.
I was really thinking less of the DE and more along the lines of if you had any recommendations that weren’t Ubuntu- or Debian-based, as that’s pretty much all I’ve used I think. But maybe that’s too much experimenting…
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.
If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…
Thanks again for the rundown! Snapshotting like that is definitely cool, I can see why you enjoy it. I’m no stranger to having to nuke the system partition and reinstalling because I broke something so snapshots definitely sound like a convenient tool. Though I might be older and lazier now and less prone to do a bunch of weird things.
I know the memes of “Arch, btw” and have always been scared of it tbh. Maybe it isn’t so bad though? I’ve also heard people praise Bazzite, but I might lot end up doing much gaming on my laptop as I said.
Is the whole thing about real-time or low-latency kernel still a thing, or is that old news? Just in case I wanted to play around with JACK again.
Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.
And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.
As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job.
You are just a font of information, thank you so much! I’m starting to feel like I have a handle on the landscape. NixOS sounds like a cool idea, though I am not a programmer so maybe it’s not for me at this current time.
I probably know what to start looking at now when the time comes to make the change, this has been a great help. Pipewire sounds great and I’ll definitely look into that, I do remember tearing my hair a bit occasionally dealing with PulseAudio back in the day 😅
For gaming, people often recommend Pop!_OS, Bazzite, or Zorin, but you can use whatever you want if you are a tinkerer. I use Debian and have a great time gaming.
Outside of gaming and if Windows software compatibility isn't really something you're worried about, you can use any distro you want.
You can try some of them out using a web browser with DistroSea if you feel like it, though they don't have every distro because that would be nuts.
I’ve been on Kubuntu for a while, but snaps are starting to bug me. When I build a new PC, I’m in the market for a new distro. Do you have a solid recommendation for a KDE-based distro that doesn’t have a Windows-esque update step during shutdown and restart?
I'm not familiar enough with KDE to know what you mean by a Windows-esque update step, but if you can explain further I'll see if I can find something for you.
Alternatively, someone else might pop in with some options.
I sampled Fedora a few years back, but, much like Windows, when it installs updates for certain core components, on shutdown and boot-up, it will have a “Please wait while we install updates” screen. Meanwhile, in Kubuntu, it installs everything in the background while I’m using my computer normally, and the change takes place on next restart, when I’m good and ready, with no additional time waiting at that update screen.
Hmm, I suppose the big difference between Fedora and Kubuntu is that Fedora is a fixed point release distro (similar to rolling release but less frequent) that applies updates only on restart, so it's possible that it needs a moment to ensure that everything is compatible.
It's certainly a weird choice to kidnap your desktop, so I don't blame you for being annoyed. If that's causing this, then you might want to try a stable release distro. This is part of why I like Debian, because it doesn't change very quickly and updates are unlikely to need special care to ensure stability. Debian also doesn't have the issue you're talking about, it updates right away in the background.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu-based (duh) so if you like how it behaves, you could try Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) or try another flavour of Ubuntu. Pop!_OS and Zorin are both Ubuntu-based and should definitely be on DistroSea.
I’m using Fedora workstation (Gnome) and the updates are done while turning off the computer.
Next time I start it, it starts without having to apply or download anything.
The only thing which could be improved is that you still have to go to the software center to download updates, but you can apply them whenever you want.
To choose your distro you must first decide whether you want a a stable distribution (debian) or a bleeding edge one (arch). Then you have to decide whether you want it to be a rolling release (tumbleweed) or a fixed point release distribution (fedora).
There's a lot more that could be said about each of these distros, but they all have KDE sessions.
Snaps are a pest and Ubuntu is more or less a failed experiment. I had way less trouble installing and maintaining a couple of plain vanilla Debian hosts than Ubuntu machines for years. The killer argument for Ubuntu was easiness of installation. Nowadays a standard Debian install is a matter of a few clicks. Sure a custom install like encrypted LVM over several partitions is still a demanding task even for an ecperienced user - but at least it is possible.
Does Debian have the same update woes I ran into with Fedora? Or if there was a way to tweak that in Fedora, I couldn’t find the option, and it was several years ago besides.
No. Debian updates tend to be interruption free. Apt/dpkg is a lot more consistent than RPM and deals very nicely with dependencies in both directions.
Some friends and I play multi-world randomizers together. Randomizers modify a game so that important items/unlocks are in different locations or are obtained in a different way. I usually play Ocarina of Time and a randomizer changes all the “treasure chest” items found throughout the world, so instead of finding the bow in the Forest Temple (where it should be in the game), it could be found behind a rock in a cave in the middle of the field. I constantly have to ask myself “What items don’t I have yet?” and “What areas do I have access to that I haven’t searched yet?” It turns the game into a kind of puzzle game. There is a website we use called Archipelago.gg that lets you connect randomizers together. I can play an OOT randomizer and my friend can be playing a Pokemon Emerald randomizer, and when I open a chest I can find items from his game and he gets a gym badge, an HM, or something else dropped into his inventory. And it works the other way when he beats another trainer, he could get one of my items and I get some rupees, or a hookshot dropped into my inventory.
Most games I play that I don’t plan on playing a lot of. I use trainers hacks and cheats on things I find grindy or just feels pointless. Or unnecessary hard games.
Dying Light had a mediocre story and repetitive gameplay, but the parkour mechanic was what made it interesting in the long run. Jumping around and climbing stuff was so satisfying.
As for side scrollers, Ori might not be the most difficult platformer I’ve ever played, but it certainly was the most fun, thanks in no short part to the fluid and dynamic movement of the main character. The camera is also very wide, to allow you to see the road ahead clearly, which is not something that all platformers do right, surprisingly enough.
The movement in Sunset Overdrive is amazing and I think was the base for the movement in Spiderman since it’s made by the same developer. I preferred the movement in Sunset Overdrive, personally.
You have to get to the point that you get the air dash for it to be smooth and you can chain together your parkour movement across the entire city
The humour is a bit divisive/hit or miss though and the open world is a little dead by today’s standards.
Ah, maybe that’s the missing ingredient. Pretty sure I don’t have that yet. I fucked off from the main story almost immediately to go find balloons and such.
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