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.
It’s just not ready for this situation combined with gaming. Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.
Many games do work out of the box on steam. However, features like ray tracing and HDR can be touchy. And I’m not confident screen reader software will play nicely.
Epic Games and Game Pass do not work without much tinkering (The game pass streaming feature might work well but I’ve not tried it myself.) and you’ll likely need to stay on top of that as each update could potentially break it.
Outside of games it’s ready for a wide spectrum of accessibility needs and could potentially be a better experience than windows.
Xcloud streaming does indeed work very well via Greenlight. I’m also using GeForce Now combined with PC game pass via gfn-electron so I can play Diablo. Very happy with it. On debian bookworm btw
Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well
I don’t tinker with any games. And I play a lot of them. I just hit the launch button. Depending on distro you may have hit “enable steam play” first but that’s about it.
“Steam play?” This sounds like something I should know about. And what would you otherwise, generally, say is a good distro? One that plays well with KDE, if I’m reading the room correctly.
Currently you’re required to tinker with each game to get them to work well. I’d suggest revisiting this in ten years.
Yeah, this is flat out not true. I play many games on my system that I just hit the launch button on. As one other person said you only need to make sure that Steam Play is enabled first. This is even on an nvidia gpu based system. Not to say that EVERY game is going to work out of the box, but to say that they all need to be tinkered with is just wrong.
If you continue to read what I said I explained my point that games do tend to work out of the box on steam. But OP was asking about multiple platforms and I have no way to know which games op intends to play. So the experience will vary from user to user.
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.
Linux handles a 7800X3D in the ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus just fine, and since the motherboard in your bundle is almost the same, I would expect that to work well, too.
Some of the early BIOS versions on AM5 boards caused hardware damage if EXPO was enabled, and Asus was one of the affected brands. Updated BIOS versions with sensible VSoC limits have been available for quite a while now. I suggest updating the BIOS soon after you have your system running, just in case you get old stock. Rest assured that just booting up with default settings won’t fry it, even if it has an old BIOS.
Asus boards are among the few that officially support ECC RAM, which is nice if that’s important to you.
Asus warranty support for their video cards and ROG Ally have been particularly bad lately. I don’t know if their motherboard support has the same problems. (I’ve never had to RMA a motherboard.)
I have a GeForce RTX 3070 which I will keep and I am running Linux Mint 21.2. Any thoughts on compatibility?
AMD GPUs are better supported and better integrated with linux, so you might consider one next time you upgrade, but the GeForce card you already have ought to work fine for gaming and basic desktop stuff (once you install Nvidia’s proprietary drivers).
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.
I have a Gigabyte B650 skew and I’m happy with it, I think the X670’s are overpriced for general use tbh and the 7800X3D was my first choice but it was way too expensive where I live so I got the 7900x. I’m not sure if its still a thing but when I was buying last year, it was recommended to go with 6000 or lower speeds for AMD CPUs for better stability so that should be fine for you.
I’m in Europe so I can’t comment on value because its completely different over here and also Microcenter is auto blocking me anyway lol
There was an issue with Over Current Protection on AM5 motherboards when EXPO is enabled that can cause the CPU (especially X3D) to die.
TBH I usually wouldn’t recommend one vendor over another when it comes to motherboards because realistically nobody spends much time in the BIOS anyway, I’d just suggest the one that has the features you actually want but as the other comment pointed out Asus has been pretty crappy with customer repairs and warranty stuff so it might be worth spending a little bit more in case you do have an issue down the line but that’s completely up to you, I have no idea if Gigabyte is better to deal with than Asus, but I do remember they had issues with exploding PSUs before lol
That looks like a pretty good deal. At least on paper. ASUS is having a bit of a consumer care meltdown at the moment, so you may wanna check that situation out before you decide. (Search “gamers nexus asus”)
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