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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • I don’t think that’s the job of Valve.
    They tried to push Linux gaming a decade ago by providing a Linux distribution optimized for gaming and invited hardware vendors to sell machines with that distri.

    At that time a gaming optimized distribution was hardly needed, so they were pioneers at the time.
    And they still maintain their SteamOS, although it is only supported on Steam Decks.

    But there has so many happened since then. Gaming Hardware is working from Day 1 with Linux. Proton - wich is supported by Valve - is supporting latest games on Linux, mostly from Day 1. At least if the developers don’t actively sabotage it.
    As a result we don’t have that one SteamOS distribution which would ultimately put us in dependece from Valve. We have several different gaming optimized distributions that you can use.

    It’s great that Valve does so much for Linux gaming, but I don’t want them to manage everything.




  • I want to add OpenTTD and Battle for Polytopia to the list.
    OpenTTD is a free as free can be transport simulation. You have to get used to the controls, but I had some fun with it on my android tablet. Although I prefer to play it on PC.
    Battle for Polytopia is a Civilization style game with awesome Voxel graphic for mobile devices. One game in standard mode lasts about an hour. It is free2play in a way that you get the game and the first 3 civilizations for free and can buy additional ones for a small fee. Offline playing is possible and I’ve never seen any ads in it.

    Oh, and of course try Gwent.
    This is a CCG in the world of The Witcher - known from the books, the games and of course the Netflix series too.
    It’s free to play, and very generous to free players. No ads, no pay2win, and you gain ressources to craft your cards very fast.
    If you want to see some gameplay: I am streaming it every wednesday on Twitch.


  • Depends.
    …from what games you want to play, which hardware are you using, and so on.
    I built up a new pc last november, mostly for gaming. So nobara was a great choice and all my games are running fine on it. Including Baldurs Gate3, Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory and Everspace2.
    If you are not into buying the top-notch games on day one, you may look into other distros too. Nobara is grear, but I had some issues with my display setup (2 monitors with different rosolution) that may not have happened with mint or another more stable distro






  • you have two problems here:

    • save and config files of linux native games. They will usually create a directory somewhere in your home directory - usually under .var or .config
    • and then the save and config files for wine enabled games. They are saved in the steamapps/compatdata directory tree together with all the (windows) files wine needs to run the program. One folder for each game.
      you would need a separate compatdata structure for every steam account to keep the saves separated.
      A possible solution would be to create a start script for every steam user that links the respective folder to compatdata, and then starts steam with the correct credentials.
      You may need to separate other folders too, although I am not sure which those may be. Steam itself can do several users, since it’s based on the same code as on Windows. So you may just test with swapping the compatdata folder and check what it’s doing.

    A funny thing: Proton/wine seems to have a mechanic to provide a username. Because on my games installed by Heroic Launcher i find the windows Profile folder (in the Heroic prefixes folder which is equal to steams compatdata) under “c:\Users[Linuxusername]” while in the steam compatdata the folder is just named “c:\Users\user”
    I found that out because I recently copied my saves files from some games that are not cloud- saved to their folders.
    but I haven’t seen a setting in Steam to use different profile folders in Proton. Which means you will most probably break cloud features when trying to enforce this by start parameters.



  • If you want to avoid the hassle that it takes to set up a Microsoft account you may try Minetest instead of Minecraft.
    It’s an free and Open Source reimplementation that needs no Java, and the game mode “Mineclone” is very close to the original.

    Regardings RTS I can recommend Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

    I you want to try out a business simulation you may look at OpenTTD which is free (and free of ads) over Steam.

    And don’t forget Among Us.