Do you really need all of those drives? You may want an NVMe drive, which will help the system well so much more snappy and load games faster. A 1TB NVMe is ~$80, which would be plenty for your OS and most (all?) of your games.
I had a few interactions with Bridgman over on reddit years ago. He was always friendly, and always seemed to try his best to meaningfully help solve people’s problems. We owe him a lot for how good gaming is on AMD systems. We were lucky to have him on our side.
I have used Freebsd for sometime on my desktop back in 2021. For the most part I had a good experience except that I couldn’t figure out how to connect earphones/mic on the ports on my PC case. I had to plug it directly to my motherboard for Freebsd to detect them. I used an Nvidia card at that time and it also worked very nicely although it had much older drivers than Linux.
I ended up switching back to linux because of 2 reasons -
I have a few BTRFS drives that I use regularly and couldn’t afford to buy some new ones for Freebsd at that time.
I couldn’t play games using steam proton. I don’t know the situation these days, but I’ll surely check it out If it has improved since then.
Even tho I don’t own a Steamdeck seeing all games I want running on it is what got me to give Linux a serious go.
I’m now considering grabbing one of the older LCD models 2nd hand since I’m away from my PC a lot more lately. Last portable gaming device I owned was a PSP!
I can say that I was a little dubious about how much I’d use it. I also left portable gaming many years ago. I now have a nice, beefy desktop with a nice 240Hz monitor with good sRGB coverage, and I have a Steam Controller. Why would I want something smaller and weaker?
While it’s still obviously weaker from a hardware standpoint, it’s nevertheless very capable, and the fact that I don’t have to abscond to my computer just to play games and can instead play them on the couch or in bed, the fact that I can put the Deck into sleep mode at a moment’s notice, the fact that I can take it on a plane or to another city and still play things from my library, the fact that it’s a regular computer underneath and can do anything a Linux-based computer can do—these are all aspects that made me glad I bought it.
I sometimes get buyers remorse, even if just from spending a lot of money on something I really wanted, but I haven’t once experienced that with the Deck.
the fact that I can put the Deck into sleep mode at a moment’s notice, the fact that I can take it on a plane or to another city and still play things from my library
This is the largest thing for me. It’s insanely convenient just like the switch when taking the train or the bus, except that I have a full library of my Steam games and it runs way better.
I don't have any use for a handheld but I use Linux on the desktop for a few years now, since I did not want to switch from W7 to W10 or god forbid W11 (especially after dabbling with the W10 upgrade nuked itself along with my C: partition and all its data). If you don't play competitive multiplayer stuff and have a half decent technical understanding of things under Windows then it's a fairly easy switch. Not saying there are no caveats or bumps but those also exist with Windows, to a point where it became a bigger hassle for me than Linux.
The nice thing about the Deck for me is that I barely even have to look up things on ProtonDB anymore because most things just run out of the box or with little tweaking, and already have the Deck playable image on the Steam store page. It also kinda pushed the OS past OSX now and the handheld formfactor makes it a bit unique to the point where developers just get interested in it. And if they support the Deck, they'll basically also support my desktop by proxy. Win win.
my last hand held gaming device is a Gameboy… After that PC only not even console. But with the steamdeck having my PC gaming experience in my backback would be a great intresting.
Bridgman is an extremely talented dude who’s contributions bettered the entire industry. I really hope he enjoys his retirement, and continues to post in the forums over at Phoronix. The guy is extremely thick skinned but laidback and incredibly friendly despite all the flame wars and trolling.
Heck of a nice guy who did some really great work for Linux, Linux Gaming, and gaming overall. nVidia users benefitted greatly from AMD’s surge in competitive software.
Windows 8 really was one of the worst in recent history. I’d personally put Win11 as second-worst since Vista. Sure it worked well enough, but so intrusive to both your workflow and privacy. I had trouble with my last attempt to switch to Linux for gaming, but I think it’s time to try again.
Yeah windows 8 was terrible. Windows 11 was not that bad, enjoyed it a bit, except that nagging feeling I am being mined for data. But what killed it for me is the instabilities, my PC stuttered and froze like crazy, and all they say is do a clean install. So I clean installed, Mint that is
So true about Linux improving more rapidly than Windows, it’s incredible how the ecosystem has evolved just in the last few years while windows doddles along investing their dev resources into adding cloud and AI into all they’re offering.
How many times do I have to tell them I’m not interested in their AI crap on my Win10 box? I didn’t use Cortana, I’m not going to use this. Just make it stop!
Also on Mint, only real issue I’ve encountered was trying to get my old gaming mouse working… What a cold med fueled rabbit hole that was while home from work for a few days. I think I understand the issue now, which is there is nothing written into the distro itself to support more than a 3 button mouse, so I would need to write in custom USB inputs after mapping them from the device. Wanted it bad enough at the time to actually go and see if input detection was able to see the extra mouse buttons, and it could, so I finally launched a game and tried rebinding to buttons to test it, and it just worked… I think I rebuilt from a snapshot about 4-5 times in the whole process trying to make sure I hadn’t messed up something else up while trying suggested fix after suggested fix, and remembering I had issues with the initial setup of the mouse software on windows thanks to .NET Framework 3.5. I don’t need extra mouse buttons for my DE badly enough to go through the whole process of custom inputs if it works the way I need it to in game, but it’s nice to know I have a “rainy day” project if I need one.
I don’t have an answer for you, but out of curiosity, is the freeze exactly 25 seconds? Because if so, it suggests that something is waiting for a dbus response that never arrives. (The dbus timeout defaults to 25 seconds, IIRC.)
Also, while it’s frozen, you might want to check beneath all the open windows to see if a new window has appeared behind them. It’s possible that Steam opened a dialog box that’s waiting for you to respond to it, but it somehow didn’t get brought to the front.
I don’t have an answer for you, but out of curiosity, is the freeze exactly 25 seconds?
Possibly? How would I do some dbus debugging to confirm that?
Also, while it’s frozen, you might want to check beneath all the open windows to see if a new window has appeared behind them.
I don’t think this is it, because when the UI unfreezes I often move the window around because it goes into drag mode and don’t see anything behind it.
The freeze behaves like, I get a message and I open it to respond and maybe get a letter or 2 types before it just hard freezes.
This weekend I finally joined the club of folks that install Mint on their parent’s aging laptops. I’m a Nix/Arch user btw and am very impressed with the ease of use and flexibility that Mint brings to the table.
Yeah, it’s a nice almost out of the box and getting started distro. I have tried Arch and Manjoro about 8 years ago, not for me, nice customisation but it is really too bleeding edge with the rough edges that go with it. After trying a crap load of distros I like the boringness of Mint
Are you running Cinnamon? I was impressed with the customization options out of the box and had to stop playing with it as I wanted to keep things fairly plain. Looking forward to later dropping it on a burner laptop for my own twiddling.
linux_gaming
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.