Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.
If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.
Well you have to state why it wasn’t good. It was incredibly region-dependent, but if you live near one of their endpoints the latency wasn’t noticeable and the quality was great, as it was for me.
In the end I got to play a bunch of games for free, and have an extra controller I still use, so there’s that. They made us whole, at least, after they shut down (I even imported my into the breach save game into Steam with Google takeout after)
What is it with this obsession with JPEG-XL? I keep seeing it mentioned on lots of threads, but as a user, the benefits seem marginal? Like: would be nice, but I’d expect more significant benefits from something that’s brought up this often - so which benefits am I missing?
Honestly? I agree with you that the benefits seem kind of marginal. But I still think it’s a fascinating thing. :)
Edit:
On doing some reading about it and trying it out for myself, the file size reductions are hardly marginal. It’s actually quite impressive. Still, it seems for most people, including myself, that jpeg for lossy & png for lossless is more than adequate, especially with how cheap storage is nowadays.
(And, frankly, I appreciate seeing at a glance if an image is lossy or lossless, but I imagine that’s a priority most people don’t have. Lol.)
Because it’s yet another example of Google’s near-monopoly over the Web’s architecture. It’s not healthy for good web development. It’s like the 90s and Microsoft all over again.
I mean, fuck, we’re already getting websites that’ve been “optimized” for Chromium-based browsers—in other words, semi-broken for non-Chromium browsers.
I said a near-monopoly. Also, even if it’s foss, by creating the format, they established the baseline parameters of that format.
That gives them a significant degree of control.
Edit: I also hate it because so many of the programs I use don’t support it, so I constantly have to copy > paste into image editor program > Save as PNG.
Though admittedly this is mostly an adoption thing. Still, it’s a major problem.
Enable fractional scaling and install Display scale switcher gnome extension - makes it easier to increase scaling when in tablet mode for easier touch input.
logging in on a touchscreen can be a pain, in particular entering the password with on-screen keyboard. Special characters and numbers are not shown by default. On windows you have the option to use pin instead with a numeric keyboard. If you have a fingerprint reader compatible with linux that might work for login (mine doesn’t).
Linux is very terminal-oriented, but Gnome terminal is unusable on a tochscreen. never mind typing commands - try scrolling long outputs - you can’t scroll with touchscreen, it will just start selecting text (i dont remember how this works in Windows)
Google chrome supports gestures, so you can swipe left/right on the page to navigate back/forward. This does not with Firefox. Chrome also has a more touchscreen-friendly UI you can enable in chrome://flags/#top-chrome-touch-ui (Touch UI layout) although I haven’t noticed a significant difference.
while you’re messing with google flags you may want to change Preferred Ozone platform to Wayland - this fixed blurry scaling for me
I was looking at Lenovo and this is good input. It sounds like everyone is not a fan of the tablet keyboard and the terminal is straight bollocks no matter the distro. I keep hearing Fedora and Wayland. I’m going to have to learn about them a bit more.
If you’re planning to get the 3rd gen x1 yoga, don’t. I had to disable thunderbolt ports in BIOS to get it to sleep correctly. Otherwise touch screen would not work after wake. And stylus doesn’t work correctly with Wayland. It stops working after few seconds of use.
I have been using the hell out of bazzite for the last few weeks and I’ve really enjoyed it. There have been a couple of minor bugs but otherwise everything just generally works.
I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve also installed bluefin on my work laptop.
If they are all installed in the same wine prefix you could back up everything in one go by archiving the “.wine” folder in your home. that will include all applications installed in wine and all settings for those applications.
if you want to separate them into one archive per app you should look into wine prefixes, otherwise you would need to identify every folder a given app created during installation and archive those together manually, which can be very tedious.
Makes sense. I wouldn’t want to have all of my games in one wine prefix. I would like to keep them separate like steam/proton does. From looking it up, it seems the issue is that there is a lot of duplicate data that would need to be deduplicated. Steam supposedly does symlinks to solve this. But, if the symlinks points to /home/user/ as the base then that would break on /home/deck.
If you have any experience with Lutris/bottles. Do they do separate wine prefixes? If so, how do they handle it?
Lutris uses separate prefixes and doesn’t do any deduplication. You will need a separate tool for that or just use a filesystem like btrfs that supports deduplication.
I’ve never used bottles, so I don’t know how it handles deduplication.
Linux veteran here. I use Bazzite on my gaming PC and ROG Ally. Once I figured out the quirks of an immutable distro and started using distroboxes it became an amazing experience. No complaints here.
I’m seriously considering Bazzite now. Can you explain whether something like LaTeX with custom packages would work? I also don’t want to redownload the LaTeX packages to vanish after a system update.
Also, I’m a tiling window user (i3). Will it be possible to use it in desktop mode?
Basically installing packages. You’re fine if you default to using
flatpaks for gui apps
brew for cli programs
distrobox when building from source or when you need good control over the package environment (e.g. when installing a latex editor and only the latex packages you want)
layer packages on host with “rpm-ostree install” when the program needs tight integration with the host (e.g. VPN software)
Also, you shouldn’t edit files in /usr, but I’ve never run into that limitation. You can still edit other top-level directorys like /etc .
I understand that with wine/proton prefixes they should be installed to a “fake c:/ windows hierarchy” can I just compress that and copy to a different Linux machine?
Yup, your save games are in your wine prefix so feel free to back them up and just use them again. Note that the game itself isn’t necessarily in the prefix, you could have installed it elsewhere.
Does it save which proton version was used?
I don’t think so, but it shouldn’t matter. You can change versions any time and it’ll just update your prefix.
If I use something like Lutris or bottles can I import into them?
Yes, you can set the prefix path to that folder you copied and it should pick up where you left things.
Cool, thank you! A lot of games on ProtonDB list specific versions of proton that work best for different games. That’s why I asked. But, I could just add a file in the root of the prefix with the version that worked (for troubleshooting purposes).
Do you have any preference for Lutris, bottles, vanilla proton?
Jorge, Kyle and the others over at ublue is doing a great job with their Fedora spins.
I run Bazzite on all my computers and if you got a full AMD system you can even get full gamemode running by installing the deck image. This in turn give you the best controller experience for games, as Desktop Steam got several issues with Steam Input valve have not fixed yet.
But not all credit should go to them for this but also ChimeraOS team, Nobara and others that are constantly working on an improved gaming experience on Linux.
When developing RetroDECK Steam Input profiles I mainly use the Steam Deck with SteamOS and Bazzite on my desktop to test them.
Your game files do not need to be inside a prefix, and I generally do not set things up that way.
Same as on windows you can have your c drive, but then install games to a different drive. You can mount any file location as an additional drive in wine. There is usually already a “z” drive mounted, which gives the prefix access to the filesystem outside the prefix.
This means there’s not actually any need to place things inside the prefix, except for save files which need to be in specific locations like appdata or documents.
So to move things over and run them, you’d just copy the game files anywhere you like. To run a game, instead of a location on the c drive, you’d use the corresponding z drive path to the exe.
With bottles, this is super easy. Set up a bottle, and copy any save files into the prefix. Easily done with “browse files” from the config page of a bottle, which will open the fake c drive in a file browser.
With a configured bottle, simply navigate to the game .exe. Right click it, and select run with bottles. Bottles will ask which bottle to run it with, and that’s that. Alternatively, use the “Run executable” button found on the config page of the bottle. For ease of use, add the exe to the bottle as a shortcut.
Shortcuts can then also be added as start menu items, or even added to steam.
No need to fiddle with putting all the game files inside the fake c drive.
Setting things up this way means you have your prefix, with save files and such, separate from the game files. You can easily delete or add games, without touching the save-file-containing prefix, and move games around to wherever you need and still have them work.
You can re-use the same bottle for many games, and keep the save files for those games in one prefix.
If a given game needs a bit more massaging to work, bottles makes it very easy set up and manage additional bottles for any such games.
Does it install winetricks and wine? Or is it up to you to install that? I believe the steam comes with it pre-installed though, so it’'s probably not necessary.
Bottles has a wine manager that allows you to install various wine versions, and switch between them. You can also use the system installed version or even more versions installed by protonup-qt.
I use Lutris and set up my directories a “GameName” and then 2 subdirectories “game” “prefix” and point Lutris to these.
All of the game files go in “game” and the prefix is created in “prefix” when I press play in Lutris. Any extras dlls that are needed can be installed with winetricks within Lutris to that specific prefix
This way you can just compress and decompress “GameName” folder and point Lutris to these locations on whichever machine.
You can choose which prefix version you want in Lutris and it will download that version for you. I’m pretty sure it saves the version to somewhere in ~.local/share/lutris I’m not at my PC now so not 100% sure of the path.
It saves it to ~.local/share/lutris/runners/wine and you can put a custom wine build here and Lutris should recognise it when configuring the runner options
So you could copy this over to the corresponding location on the deck and Lutris will automatically detect this version as installed and won’t have to download it again but its not necessary unless you don’t have internet on the deck, or you’re like me and want to keep an archive of the working prefix for the future in case the prefix version is no longer available for whatever reason and other version just won’t work.
If you’re new to Lutris, I wrote a step by step guide on how I use Lutris on a different community
Wow. You wrote a guide on it. I’ll try to find time to read it tonight! I do have a question, what if a game makes use of the windows registry? Would that change the prefix?
Guide is maybe not the right word lol, it just exactly what I click to set up the majority of my games
I’m not 100% sure, but from my understanding yes the regisrty in the “prefix” folder would be changed. You can manually edit the wine prefix registry with regedit www.winehq.org/docs/…/using-regedit and Lutris supports this, just click the arrow that brings up the winetricks option and its under Wine Registry
The registry is one of the reasons I was thinking I would need separate prefixes that I can copy. But, I also understand that games that actually use the registry are few and far between. If I actually come across one that needs registry edits I can just pack that differently.
Has someone tried Steam VR with an Index on Bazzite? How well does it run?
I tried some setups with Steam VR, as Steam inside Flatpak is not supported and not working, but even when installed via deb it can require some restarts and be janky.
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