In the past, most software I used was paid and proprietary and would have some sort of limitation that I would try to get around by any means possible. Sometimes that would be resetting the clock on my computer, disabling the internet, and other times downloading a patch.
But in the past few years I’ve stopped using those things and have focused only on free and open source software (FOSS) to fulfill my needs. I hardly have to worry about privacy problems or trying to lock down a program that calls home. I might be missing out on some things that commercial software delivers, but I’m hardly aware of what they are anymore. It seems like the trend is for commercial software providers to migrate toward online or service models that have the company doing all the computing. I’m opposed to that, since they can take away your service at any time.
What do you do?
I was doing the same thing, but it’s a whole new world out there because of Proton. I play flight sims and niche old games. I just tried dipping my toes into moving to Linux again after a longer stretch of Windows usage.
This 15 year old flight sim called Il-2 1946 runs way better on my Linux desktop with zero configuration than on Windows. On Windows it was a bitch to start up, it crashed all the time, I couldn’t switch windows to put on music, the loading screens were choppy and froze now and then… on a fresh openSUSE install it just works. It’s fast and neat and clean.
My flying setup, joystick, throttles, pedals work just as fine. The only thing I’m worried about is Microsoft Flight Sim, but I’m more of a DCS person anyways. Apparently the Steam Deck has 10k games released for it, it will last me for a while.
Yep. I’ve been on linux for 20 years now, and haven’t done much PC gaming for that reason. A bit of KSP and C:S and other native games, but that’s about it.
Recently got a steamdeck and was like holy shit, almost everything works well now without tweaks.
Went out and bought a GPU for my desktop last week. I’m ready for this era.
Thanks for letting me know that, however I play games with DRM. Whatever my friends are into. And janky stuff like stalker with a bazillion mods.
I don’t feel like juggling 2 OS-es in a dualboot or trying to trick DRMs into thinkig they don’t just run in a VM with a gpu passthrough.
Luckly I don’t have to care about ms office or adobe stuff anymore like in school so one less thing to hold me back. I work in IT where we have OK policies. So work stuff stays on work machine.
I’ll give it a try at some point.