Why does it matter? All that matters is that plenty of people do use Linux - literally millions of people. There is a healthy vibrant ecosystem of distros, and devs working on Linux.

I don’t care if people aren’t interested in Linux. I’m much more interested in ensuring those people who choose Linux are happy because that is good for all.of us.

And the best thing anyone can do is donate to the projects they care about. That helps projects fund development and support. It’s much more useful than trying to convince people to try Linux when they have no real interest in it.

To be honest you can get any decent Linux distro working for games; I run OpenSuSE Tumbleweed with an Nvidia 3070 and it works great. Steam works great, and as desktop it runs perfectly.

I also have a miniPC in my living room that I got after loving my SteamDeck being docked but a bit frustrated by switching between Desktop and the gyroscope modes. I have Nobara running on that, with Steam in big picture mode when I use it, but plenty of other things set up on there too and again it works great. I like to game but also watch twitch or browse the net on it, plus run GOG games via Lutris, and SteamOS isn’t really meant for all that even with desktop mode (as it’s not default)

So while it’s great that SteamOS is coming, I think it’s redundant in the desktop space and probably not their prime target. Getting it onto as many handheld PCs as possible is a very good idea and will give Windows a run for its money (Windows + custom interfaces from other handheld manufacturers are all a bit shit right now).

I don’t see SteamOS as it stands as a good design for a living room PC or gaming rig; but that’s not it’s target and I think it’s not realistic for people for expect it to be good for that. There is a huge range of hardware to support, while Valve targetting it’s own hardware + partners + main competitors in the handheld PC space is manageable.

Yes but this is the streaming software service not the tool to optimise the local Nvidia GPU. Steam Deck has an AMD GPU.

This is purely about their cloud streaming service having a native app.

You can already use GeForce Now cloud gaming on Linux if you want. There is an unofficial electron app, or you can use Wine to run it. It can also run in a browser with some tweaks (to pretend you’re running a supported OS).

But a native app makes sense for steam deck and is a good thing for Linux. Hopefully it is made widely available for Linux in the same way their proprietary drivers are now relatively easy to install on most big distros.

This was a new one for me and I’ve been playing with linux for years. Also really enjoyed her video style so delved into some others.

Thanks for sharing!

It is but it’s also better for consumers.

Google dominates search by bundling lots of services in one place and destroying all competition. They want you tied in to all their services and to never leave. You ar ethe product and they want to sell every bit of data they can and sell you to advertisers.

The tech giants keep abusing market dominance to dominate new markets. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with windiws and destroyed the browser market. Then Google search sites and android aggressively pushes Chrome and now dominates the browser market. Microsoft bundles Teams in Office and destroys Slack; one of many egrarious actions by Microsoft over the years. Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use Safari - so you can’t bypass the Apple app and service marketplace - their 30% cut is too important.

Regulation is needed to break up the domination of these tech monopploes. By separating navigation from search, people get back in the habit of using other services for navigation results.

That might be Google maps, or that might be Bing maps or OpenStreetMaps. But Google can’t use bundling to make consumers too lazy to leave.

It’s a start. A minimal inconvenience for users benefits everyone longer term.

Lots of good advice but one question - have you tried LED bulbs before and had flickering problems?

Just worth checking a standard LED from your local super market before you go down the route of expensive brands or online purchases.

The reason I say this is that there are a lot of shoddy cheap and counterfeit electronics sold on Amazon for example. A supermarket bought bulb meanwhile actually has some quality control and standards plus you have somewhere you can go back to should you need to return them.

All my LEDs are from my local supermarket, own brand (Tesco, I’m in the UK, but Philips are also available for me) and I’ve had no issues. I’d also buy from local retailers where you can get good returns policies (Argos here, or your big box retailers in the US)

Amazon meanwhile has a policy of mixing stock that it purchases with stock from small sellers that they place in their warehouses and sending any to a customer. So a “sold by amazon” item may actually be a counterfeit item supplied by a 3rd party. Basically do not buy anything of value or branded from Amazon. So don’t buy Phillips or other brands from Amazon.

And definitely do not buy the cheap Chinese unknown brands on amaxpn or elsewhere. The supermarkets will of course be buying Chinese made bulbs for their own labels but they will be buying them in bulk from specific factories and under contracts with some quality expectations, unlike the shitty free for all small seller type sourcing that your get from Amazon. Small sellers are going to be buying cheap ass unbranded bulbs and the factories are going to sell their cheapest bulbs plus ones that’s do not meet bulk orders quality control thresholds via this route (cheaper to dump the bulbs by selling cheaply instead of having taking the financial hit and binning them). A large supermarket has leverage over the factories to maintain quality (or lose the contract) while small sellers have none.

Personally the only time I had a flickering LED bulb was a dimmer-switch lamp; it was designed for LEDs but didn’t work with the bulb I bought but turned out I’d accidentally bought a non dimmable bulb. Otherwise I’ve not had a single bulb flicker in my house including all ceiling lights and numerous lamps. All my bulbs are supermarket own brand.

KDE doesn’t control what packages are released on a distro? That’s Aurora that chooses not to have point releaes version, and instead seems to have a rolling release from your description.

Bluefin GTS is based on Fedora 40 while Bluefin is based on Fedora 41. Fedora doesn’t do rolling release outside it’s Rawhide rolling dev branch. It does point releases and bug fixes.

There are plenty of KDE based distros that are also point release and not rolling release if that’s your preference. I’d also recommend feeding back to Aurora if you think they should alter there KDE release schedule; they chose when to feed KDE releases into their distro.

You have so many options because your system has a lot of audio output options available. Presumably your mother board or your graphics card display outputs given the “Navi” label.

As others have said, from that section of the settings you should be able to click on the “proaudio” drop downs on the right and disable any you don’t want to see.

The Navi outputs are the audio available via your hdmi and display ports - you may want to keep those on if you ever want audio from the screens directly but if you don’t ever use audio from your displays you can disable the audio outputs. Most people don’t use screens with integrated audio output but some may plug headsets into their screens via 3.5mm cables so may want it. But that’s an usual use case - most would plug into the PC itself.

The starship/matisse HD audio is your audio jack on the front of the PC (often USB provided) - I’d keep that one available if you ever plug in your headphones. Personally I have my noise cancelling headphones plugged in via audio jack - you get perfect uninterrupted audio and longer between recharges as the headset doesn’t have to use Bluetooth. However may not be desirable if you’re using a mic on your gaming headset too.

You then have your Bluetooth device itself which is the gaming headset.

The other devices below that are your microphones. Again you will have multiple inputs which you can disable if you don’t use them.

Just remember in the future if you ever want to plug in something that you’ve disabled these devices here.

“United Healthcare - healing health care, by turning off ventilators one by one”

I use virtual machines and live usbs to try out distros when I’m thinking of a change. That gives you a chance to get a feel for the design philosophy of a distro and whether it works for you.

As others have said, back up is really important. You can back up a lot of settings and preferences and bring them to a new distro. They’re stored in your home directory in folders like .config and .local.

I keep a back up of my /home folder. I’m also a KDE main so use Konsave to specifically back up my KDE theme and settings.

If you are at the point of moving then that’s the time to make backups ready to restore. Also get a list together of the apps you want to keep so you can get set up quickly in a new distro.

Also another habit to get in to is backing up any major config changes into your Home folder for later reference. Even if you don’t use the exact same file it can be useful to have somewhere that reminds you what you tweaked or did to get the system how you wanted it. For example I keep copies of my fstab file (just for reference!), and config files for programs I put in /opt amongst other tweaks I’ve made.

I also save Web pages which have specific tips I used in Linux configs - really helpful if you ever need to go back and do something again. I write txt files on some complex or niche things to remind me exactly what I did as you’re unlikely to remember things you’ve only done once. These are two habits it’s worth getting into - saves so much time hunting for how to do things when you need to, even if you’re not moving distros.

All these things together make switching distros much easier should you want to do it.

It is just a buzz word in the industry and doesn’t have a tight definition. It’s basically any big budget full priced game from a big or medium sized publisher. They’re just communicating that they’ve made a big budget game with an expectations of hopefully big sales and profit.

It does imply the game should be popular and high quality, but those are not a given. Plenty of AAA games end up being trash and flopping yet they’re still AAA games.

It’s similar to the Blockbuster concept in the film industry.

I find this kind of approach is bizarre and increasingly out of date. “don’t politicise an attack” but the attack raises very important political questions.

Parties shying away from the discussion are just giving free space for Afd to push it’s narrative and version of how to deal with the problems. Other parties in Germany, and across the West, need to start dealing with this issue head on - the idea of a some central mass consensus is breaking down because it is not offering any solutions to the problems being raised by such attacks.

Lots of far right parties are rising across Europe and instead of blaming voters, politicians need to listen and start address the problems instead of allowing the extreme end of politics to come in and offer extreme solutions.

The “mainstream” parties need to start addressing immigration, integration and social cohesion. There are not going to be easy solutions, but stop leaving such topics for the far rightt wing parties to offer the only solutions.

Complaining Afd are “exploiting” the attacks is weak and a failure of leadership from the other parties to tackle the actual issues.

Probably because it’s long standing and fully featured. It’s been going since 2001 after all.

This is a slightly dodgy comparison - a native linux version versus a windows version run through Proton?

Bearing in mind Valve make Proton they may have done zero optimisation or work to ensure the Windows version and Proton work together. It’s possible settings need tweaking in Proton to make the game run optimally, but given there is a Linux native version of the game it’s unlikely anyone is going to have spent time doing that.

So the windows version may not be running optimally at the moment in Proton and may not get there as people aren’t going to be motivated to optimise settings.