She goes by “Debra” now ;P (Do we really both have an Aunt Debbie/Debra?)

Also, for sure I don’t mean to pressure anyone nor suggest that you do. I also tried other distros first, even fearing a little that I’d break something. Dual booting (I knew Windows better back then… dunno if I’d know what to do with 11 😅) was a help, but also I started with easier distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint… definitely Mint gets my recommendation as an easy/comfy/friendly distro even though I haven’t touched it in over a decade) and found that I wanted them out of my way so I could set up my computer how I wanted it to be. All’ the stuff happening “for me” kept doing things I didn’t like and changing things I did, so I moved toward the “harder” or “harder-core” distros less because I wanted Linuxy cool-cred (though I did a little bit ;P ) and more because I just wanted to get my OS out of sight and out of mind rather than having to fight the thing over control. Arch mostly does that, Gentoo does it a bit more. These days I don’t have the latest high-powered gaming hardware and I myself am starting to feel a little old (2⁵+1 years! Augh!) so the compile waits don’t feel so great… but I’ll be back 😅I’ve been oscillating between Arch and Gentoo (may try Funtoo next time! Could be a fun… or two 😹) for ages so unless something else fits I don’t see a reason to quit.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, no need to jump right into Gentoo or LFS or something… but also no need to worry if one does! I really want to make one point in particular: everything can be fixed. Everything. Broke the kernel? Fixable. Broke networking? Fixable. Package manager set off a bomb in its own backend? Fixable. There’s always a fix, whether it’s rolling back a package to an old version, booting another OS or computer, GRUB’s recovery console, a fallback kernel, rolling forward a package to a new version, using a newer/patched/forked kernel that doesn’t crash your graphics driver on a new laptop. No matter how deep into “I’ll just go until I trip on something,” you can get back up and you can learn something from it… or you can just reinstall or hop to the next distro.

And maybe the thing you tripped on was a cute kittycat who you can appease them despite their annoyance at you for tripping on them :3

Also no, I don’t know why I felt like yapping for ages <.< Sorry about that? 😅

Breaking things is arguably the best way to learn

Hee hee, some may agree with you. jumped into Gentoo very early and hasn’t stopped breaking things yet. Sometimes for fun, sometimes 'cause some distro maintainer type did something horrible ^.

I definitely support “Just try things, see what breaks, then learn to fix it” as a learning method. Not necessarily for everycritter and not necessarily as a sole learning method but certainly it can be many fun and very productive, sometimes in ways that other methods would not be.

Assuming I’m understanding you correctly (I think I am: “ghost files” would be files of the old filesystem read and kept by the new one?) No, that’s unnecessary unless you have data you specifically want unrecoverable, in which case you’ll want a ‘file shredder’ or srm type tool to handle that. Other than that you’ll probably not be using any filesystem format Windows offers, so it also won’t be recognizing any Windows files even if such a thing would otherwise be possible.

As for your main post, you seem to have the right idea. Steam recognizes that Windows games won’t run natively on a Linux system and will either “automatically run with a compatibility tool (Steam Play)” (or something like that) or refuse to launch/install the thing until you configure it to run everything non-native with Proton by default (which is a checkbox in the normal settings menu, not anything weird or buried).

…Also sometimes it just launches Wine? At least for me? That’s kinda weird, honestly, but I set up my systems in weird ways so that may just be a me problem 😅

Simply put: I think you’ll be fine just not worrying about anything and going directly to your “boot from install/live media” step and not worrying about anything else unless there’s a problem… at which point you come yell at us and we help you fix it ;P

As a Gentoo user currently vacationing in Arch-land I’m not sure whether to feel insulted or affirmed. Imean, it is but some might say that to disparage it or its users 😅

I so want to join that one :D Brilliant name.

… Then go back to Gentoo and stay anyway >:P

Well, I have this:
https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots

Then there are some bits like bemoji (emoji selecty thingy) and getting getting grim (and now swappy!) set up to handle screenshottage, aaand getting Sway to behave (mostly?) like herbstluftwm through tricks like
bindsym $mod+1 [workspace="1"] move workspace to output current; workspace number 1 (which seems kinda odd but whatever; I don’t care that much at the moment and it works fine 😅🤷‍♀️)
Aand there’s this lil pile of stuff to get some things to use their Wayland modes (and some other fiddly bits that may not be Wayland-related): MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland-egl QT_WAYLAND_FORCE_DPY=physical ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 GDK_BACKEND=wayland which probably isn’t all necessary but whatever, somecritter will probably say something if it isn’t 😅

Never gonna take Terminology with the Nyan Cat cursor away from me, though 😝Not unless there’s something better that also has cats and/or rainbows, anyway.

:3 ^.

They like to make a show like everyone on Earth is just like they are so how dare we exist differently but it’s clearly just them being hateful. Idunno how bigots manage to still think they’re clever and totally not insecure whilst making self-contradictory statements and raging over nonsense and trivia for hours at a time, often in spaces where they’re not even welcome.

Terminology, with the Nyan Cat cursor! ^. :3

Buying it now probably doesn’t come with the legendary 600% buyer’s remorse booster.

[Joke] Ugh, probably have to buy it as a microtransaction or whatever DLC crap. I hate when they take stuff out and try to sell it!

🤮

Why do people on this community sem to assume that just because I don’t like the way that something works that I don’t know how to do anything? It’s quite condescending.

Probably because many of us have seen really snide “This is why nobody uses your stupid shitty OS!!” posts/comments so much that “Here’s why people don’t use Linux” for 2435808th time this month just sounds like another condescending prick come to tell us how stupid we are for using “bad” software that doesn’t work like they expect it to. I see that you seem more reasonable than that but I’ve also seen others around here with really crappy attitudes and ideas who’ve maybe stirred up a bit of a defensive mood that your phrasing stepped on.

…Now I’ve got to go before I also go off on a rant. Here is a virtual pancakes: 🫴🥞

Gross, gross, grrooossssss!

Whoops, I forgot about this tab and now I’m late to the fish party 😅 I used to use customized zsh but have since switched to fish and it’s basically everything I had to work to get zsh to do, only without any of the work. It just is what I want from a shell, I just grab it from the nearest package manager and off I go.

…Unfortunately for fish, that’s made me curious that there may be “another fish” out there somewhere that’s what I’d be struggling to turn fish into if I knew any better than I do now 🤣

So much this! As a user of both Arch and Gentoo I say, don’t use Arch as Gentoo! It’s not Gentoo! AUR is not a standard repository and there’s a reason they make you jump through hoops just to use the thing.

Also, it’s a total pain when normal package management is quick and easy. The building alone is weird in Arch and somehow like 60% of the crap I try to build from AUR fails hard and I just can’t be bothered to spend more than like twenty minutes tweaking on it. Gr. 😅

(Aaalllsooo, apparently lots of people break their Arch installs using the AUR like it’s a normal repo and then wonder why Arch is so crap and leave.)

Not a fan of how the OP’s written but whatever.

Like any distro, it’s for who it’s for and if you don’t like it then feel free to distro hop until you find one you do. Why is the “average user” trying to use a “hard distro” anyway? Seems like the “average user” is increasingly “some rando who just wants to use their computer” so yeah, I’d say it’s pretty useless for someone who has no use for it. I suppose it’s more of an “if you don’t know why you want it then it’s probably not going to help you” sort of thing. I like that it lets me set things up my way then mostly just goes away until I want it for something. Other people like software that holds their hand or handles a bunch of things for them. It’s fine, not everything must be for everyone.

Suddenly I’m curious about how many of these are the same people who laugh at warnings on coffee cups and power tools.
“WARNING: don’t put your hand here or this will saw your fingers off!” “haha lol who would do that”
“WARNING: don’t flip this switch or this will break your computer” “omfg why puter not work!!”
Like, damn, if you’re straight-up warned then maybe the real problem’s in the chair :-\ Seems there’s kinda no solution for that but for the user to get smarter. Can’t put all of the intelligence into the software.

Also, what’s the story with the immutable distro hype? peeks out from under her rock I’ve heard of NixOS and various critters seem to love it but I never imagined that sort of thing would become a thing (kinda thought it was just a neat little niche) let alone a big thing for ‘inexperienced’ sorts.

Meanwhile, Windows changes its whole-ass UI (possibly a slight exaggeration but it’s enough that they complain every time) every time a new version’s out yet somehow “something new” doesn’t apply, all of the software people would actually be using is just the same anyway, and the removed/forced “features” don’t count as “good reasons.” Bleh.

| If your Windows 7 or newer computer blue screens, it’s very likely a bad piece of hardware, occasionally a bad driver. The OS itself is quite solid.

Okay, really, though? Windows is solid and good because it doesn’t kernel panic much? Who’s getting kernel panics out of Linux without faulty hardware or doing something risky? I think you’ve equivocated a bit here: either we’re comparing kernel to kernel or we’re comparing userland to userland. You’re comparing Windows itself to Linux userland or using some kernel even freakier than the weird patched-up stuff I like to play with.

I feel like discussion of this topic is plagued by double standards and shifting goalposts :-\ Apples to oranges comparisons, refusals to even consider things just because they’re ‘foreign,’ blaming “Linux” for things that really aren’t its fault (neither in the OS sense nor in the broader sense) … including of course (sometimes) turning the discussion into an “us versus them” thing. Software on Linux has iffy documentation! … But the same software exists on Windows, or the equivalent(s) is(/are) just as bad. Linux kernel documentation is scary or weird! … But no one relevant is touching it anyway and wasn’t touching Windows kernel anything either. The UI is different! Yeah, so’s the new one on every version of Windows you get forced into. Casual Windowsers all hate it every time but somehow “Linux” is unusable because they won’t learn a new UI unless Microsoft tells them to.

You can buy (a licence to, if MS likes you lots, borrow) a copy of Windows and apparently buy support for it too… yeah okay, but that’s business, not a software issue. There are enterprise distros and software packages with all’ that business-type support, unless they’ve all vanished? That’s how that stuff works, no?

I’m not demanding anyone switch and distro hop over the course of months to find a distro they love but I’d really prefer to see some more fairness discussing the matter. “Linux” is never going to be “usable on desktop” if it’s always just the enemy to be spurned and derided.

(Also, sorry this got so wordy. It’s not meant as a diatribe, just I feel like there’s a lot to say and I’m not saying much of it 🤷‍♀)
TLDR: It’s unfair or outright dishonest to blame an apple for not being tart enough and hide that your actual standard is “is it an orange.”