It is! Heads up on a known bug tho, which will already be fixed in the next release. GOG games can show up as “not installable” for seemingly no reason preventing them from being installed.
Should work fine, especially as this mainboard has Realtek ethernet (ASUS sets up Intel I225 ethernet in a way that can cause issues, see this post on Reddit).
That’s not good, I actively try to avoid realtek cards since they are unreliable in linux. I have an asus board with an Intel nic but I haven’t had these issues.
YMMV of course, but I had this happen mostly after hours of using the computer (4+ hours). I think it’s mostly random when it happens though. The network adapter just fully disappears.
This probably doesn’t affect all ASUS mainboards, but I’d assume it affects all ASUS AM5 mainboards in a similar way.
My mainboard is an ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E by the way.
No I think it’s revision 3 as well (although I’d have to double check to be sure), all revisions have (different) issues apparently. What I’m saying is that the I225 seems to be rather picky about what switches it plays nice with, so while it might work just fine with your specific setup, it might stop working fine when you change one variable (like the switch you’re connecting to).
Also in addition to the issues the I225 has anyway, ASUS (and judging by some comments here other mainboard manufacturers as well) seems to have additional issues related to the power management of the built-in I225 adapter. From what I gathered dedicated PCIe cards with the I225 work much more reliably.
The I225 has several issues in all of its revisions, that’s true. There’s still better and worse implementations, and ASUS seems to have gotten it “more” wrong.
Anyway, the Reddit post I linked to includes a workaround, you might want to try it since you have the same issue.
In addition to what others are saying, there is a lemmy for people that moved from r/blind: rblind.comIt has a small number of active users, but perhaps you might get some help there. You could perhaps ask in their main community, !main.
As an r/blind mod and RBlind.com adminI am, in fact, aware of it. Hehehe.
Seriously though, the blind community Linux desktop install base is small and virtually nonexistent for gaming, and I have very simple accessibility requirements, so I figured I’d get better feedback here.
It’s great to know there’s some awareness of the instance around the broader Fediverse!
KDE offers full screen zoom out of the box with Windows Key+ and Windows Key-
It also lets you choose a huge green cursor.
Gnome doesn’t have either of this, and don’t even bother looking at any other DEs. In general, accessibility on Linux is really, really, really not great.
Well, actually both Gnome and KDE include screen readers.
In Ubuntu, activation of the screen reader is the very first step in the installation.
But they only really work for the English language.
I know they do, the app accessibility support is just unacceptably bad. Orca is also known for crashing - not that hardcore Linux users aren’t used to losing their interface all of a sudden, hehe.
Back in the old days I fixed an error by editing Xorg.conf blindly, because the error caused a black screen after booting.
Some config errors could actually damage or destroy your hardware.
I don’t miss those days.
Hahaha. I find that kinda thing incredibly fun. I once had to fix my soft-bricked Android phone in a hotel in a foreign country with no other connected devices around. That’ll teach me to run nightly builds!
I’d recommend Ubuntu mostly because it’s going to be the easiest to get working. I recently started playing with Proton on Ubuntu, and it was surprisingly painless. There’s been a lot of improvement over the past few years.
Take a look at www.protondb.com and search for your games. It’ll let you know how difficult they are to get working and give you tips on helping them run.
Here’s the visual impairments page for stock Ubuntu:
There’s stock magnifier support. It’s not great to be honest, but it does allow you to enable crosshairs that will make it easy to find your cursor.
A little more searching found Magnus which might be a better option.
It’s also pretty trivial to install gnome tweaks itsfoss.com/gnome-tweak-tool/ and install custom theme elements like high contrast icons and cursors that can help.
Ubuntu is actually particularly terrible: Snap packages (general controversy aside) theme the cursor, so my mouse kinda disappears into them. It’s nice to know people are making alternative magnifiers though - that one doesn’t work for me because I need full screen zoom, but it may be handy for others.
Thanks for reminding me of ProtonDB, that’ll be a good tool to evaluate this possible move.
As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.
Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.
I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.
After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.
I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.
Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.
Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.
KDE has a good zoom feature built in, however it keeps the mouse centered which is good for doing precise graphical thing, but maybe not the best for gaming. It’s good for reading if you hold your mouse still. You can absolutely find or make a green cursor. Some guy here said gaming on Linux is janky but honestly I’ve been super impressed for the past year I’ve used it. I only had one game that wouldn’t run out of the box so far and got it running by installing some Microsoft VC runtime or something. Everything else just starts runs without issue. Edit: runs without issue in steam.
That shouldn’t be a problem, both Gnome and KDE gave decent accessibility features as far as I’m aware. Or at the very least, it’s got zoom, and the cursor can easily be changed to something of your liking. I think KDE’s also got the macOS “shake cursor to make it extra large so you can spot it” available.
I’m more concerned about
I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.
That’s not a lot of time, and if you’d rather not spend it tinkering I would stick with Windows.
I would at least make it a dual boot setup, so you can switch between Windows and Linux as needed. Don’t have time to tinker? Just do it in Windows until you have time.
KDE Plasma is the only desktop with a functional screen reader on Wayland and even then its limited. Other than that, KDE has a magnifying glass setting bound to Super + +/-/0 you can enable.
I don’t have experience with visual impairment, so take my answer with a grain of salt, however it seems that KDE has all the features you need. Plus it’s super customizable, so you could set it up to essentially emulate the MacOS desktop.
I totally can’t help with the visual impairment, and I’m sorry about that. My sister is mostly blind, but not a gamer.
I have been able to play Steam games on Ubuntu and thus far haven’t had any problems, but I haven’t stressed my system with AAA games, either, because I typically play those on console. That’s all I’ve got, sorry. Good luck!
Honestly I could never recommend an Asus board. They’ve done some really shitty things as a company recently, but besides that, I’ve had like 3 of their boards to go bad in weird ways. I’ll never buy one again.
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