2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
There’s a bit of controversy regarding Ubuntu that I don’t need to get into but Fedora and Pop!_OS are also really good for Proton support. Ubuntu will work fine but I just prefer not to use it. Maybe you could let him try out the live environment for a couple distros to see what he might like in terms of UI.
I second popos and mint. I love fedora but if he is a gamer you want something that will just work (navida built in or a very easy one click mechanism to get it). If he has to research PPAs and installing rpmfussion it will get all too hard very quickly. Also do some expectation setting before hand, research what games he plays work on linux, better he finds out now rather than after 2 hours of pain or getting band for “hacking” because of proton triggered an anti-cheat thing.
Edit: I run fedora on all my machines except my gaming rig which is popos. Fedora works too but popos is hassle a free experience.
If he wants something similar to windows, get Linux mint, it’s the best parts of Debian/Ubuntu but made modern. If you can do it on Ubuntu, you can do it in mint (like online guides cuz mint is based on ubuntu if you couldn’t tell).
it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam and not because Microsoft stopped patching it several years ago
Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
People don’t care about security until they get hit. Source: working in IT for 10 years.
And then suddenly they care a lot and do all the wrong things for wrong reasons because they know shit
I don’t think Steam actually recommends any distro since some time anymore
I think they do by proxy since they only distribute it via .deb (and with Steam of course) and all games in the store that have a native Linux version mention some kind of Ubuntu version in their requirements as well. Which is funny since the Steam Deck doesn’t even run Ubuntu.
All these people saying “use this or use that distro instead” is why Windows users don’t go into Linux. Ubuntu is a solid choice for beginners because that’s a distro with a lot of tutorials online if not the most.
It might not fuck over people as bad as their abandoning XP did, but its still really fucking shitty that they abandon OS’s like this.
Simply because it means people who have games they used to be able to play on old machines, now cant get those games anymore, cause the service itself wont run on it on those machines.
They should at least fork off a special legacy version that lets people download their old games on their original platforms.
but they dont want to do that, not because of supporting it, because they dont want people to remember how sleek, slim, and fast steam used to be.
How is this shitty? Windows 7 isn’t even supported by Microsoft anymore.
If you were looking to preserve games for playing on old computers, you chose the wrong platform.
because there are games that people fucking own that don’t run on newer platforms, that they should still be allowed to fucking play and not have defacto taken away from them?
How is that hard to understand?
I swear to god the absolute short sightedness of gamers. If this prevented you from playing one of your games you’d be here spewing shit and fire and brimstone over it.
It’s. Not. Your. Game.
You’re buying a license which is subject to conditions decided upon by the developer, publisher, platform, and others. If you want to own a copy of the game, don’t buy it on Steam.
Downvote all you want, reality isn’t changing to match your feelings. Stop supporting DRM or quit bitching while simultaneously strengthening the system you are choosing to ignore.
