Linux vs. Windows

[CottonTexas]

Grave-digging here, but I finally got my L4 put together, and after months of being restricted to YouTube for entertainment (turns out my crap-top = < potato & Sims 2 was a no-go), I finally got a chance to sit down, and give Mint the good ole' college try on my shiny new machine ...and the results were not great. I started with Mint 19, and Lutris, Vulkan, & WINE all had me searching to find out what is a broken package, and how do I find dependencies, and dependencies for dependencies, and how to add what repositories, and finally it became too much for this script-kiddie. I will give POP!_OS a try once I get a chance, but only time will tell if that's going to be the way to go.

 

[CottonTexas]

I tried POP!_OS, and the first thing I noticed was that it looked a lot like the front-end that I hated when Ubuntu "upgraded", and pushed me to Mint years ago, but while it was unfamiliar, it wasn't confusing. I got a lot further along with Steam, Lutris, & the like, being readily available in the POP!_Shop, but in the end it failed to boot any of my games, and it took all day to try. After pages and pages of forum threads, and finally wearing thin my welcome at my buddy's place, sucking up some unlimited WiFi, I had to give up empty handed yet again. I'm sure I could have figured it out eventually, but I just didn't have the time for it. I have found LTSC for ~$100, but I've got to wait for my piggy-bank to catch up with my wants-list before I can go spending. I'll admit that Microsoft buying Bethesda's parent company helped scare me enough to que the trigger on the necessary evil that is Windoze. If/when The Elder Scrolls VI ever comes out, I'm convinced it will be a LONG time before anyone with a Linux machine will be playing it, and those that aren't wizards will likely be waiting years before doing so.

 

[Stevo_]

Did you try flatpak for install of lutris, wine? That should give you a better runtime, less or possibly no dependency issues.

 

[CottonTexas]

Did you try flatpak for install of lutris, wine? That should give you a better runtime, less or possibly no dependency issues.

I downloaded what I could from the package manager, but I think Lutris was one that I DL'ed from their site. WINE was being especially difficult because Lutris wanted to utilize multiple versions (I guess), & Vulcan was also problematic for reasons beyond my understanding. I wish I had retained more details for those that are interested, but my brain had started to melt there towards the end. An upgrade to Mint 20 was my last-ditch effort in hopes that maybe some dependencies might be satisfied by built-ins, but by then I was thinking that even if it didn't help, it couldn't hurt, but no improvement.

POP!_OS received everything from the POP Shop, and I researched for fixes, but I never was presented any obvious info as to why things didn't work. I'd double-click an icon, the machine would lag for a split second, and then nothing - not even an error report in a GUI box. I dug around on the net for a while, copied & pasted a few things in Terminal (that I don't know what they were, or what they did, but had allegedly worked for a forum-poster somewhere), rinse & repeat. <--- This is pretty much how I operate everything with Linux. It's a bit of a sad game of Terminal-Roulette that I was hoping could be put in the past.

At this point, I've pretty much resigned to the idea that I'm stuck using a product I hate, if I want to use the products I love.

 

[Stevo_]

Installs from Flatpak would probably help rather than package manager, it would also be better to stick with 32-bit version of whatever distro due to Wine and probably lutris as well. LM20 you'd probably have to add 386 architecture package to get 32-bit compatibility.

 

[Freeks]

As someone who runs multiple machines, I've split up work into Linux (Ubuntu) and private into Windows (I have full control over my work-machines and requirements). I've gone with the private Linux-machine for about half a year with focus on gaming and browser. You can absolutely get most games to work, and some don't even run worse than on Windows if you tinker enough but that's the crux basically. If you're not a Linux-Wiz and are forced to tinker on everything while you 'just wanna play' the whole situation gets real frustrating. Linux is something you have to learn, especially gaming on Linux.
I've personally decided to keep that separation where I keep learning about gaming on Linux but have the Windows install running so that my free-time is not necessarily a frustrating mess.