Yeah I wouldn’t worry about Steam, it’ll work.

The most important thing is your graphics drivers and they’re largely the same between distros. Even with non rolling distros usually there are ways to stay with the latest drivers if that’s needed.

For Minecraft, best route is Java edition. There is an official Microsoft installer for Java, and If they’re into modded Minecraft then MultiMC is a better Linux launcher than the Microsoft one as it makes modding much easier; they just need to login to their Microsoft account within it to get going.

You can get Bedrock to work if that’s essential but it is unofficial and definitely needs a special launcher and a little bit faffy to set up. But it works.

All the stuff that gaming distros offer like optimised kernels really is marginal stuff. Definitely keep it simple; it’ll make your life much easier supporting it all and it will give your friend/family member a good stable experience so they can just focus on having fun.

Personally I’d say none of the above for newbies. I have had experience with Nobara and it’s OK but I literally had problems with GPG certificates for updates for the second time in 3 months, and yesterday the update engine crashed during an update and my plasma desktop only showed a black screen with a cursor on it when I logged in.

I can problem solve that but it’s annoying as hell and not suitable for someone who doesn’t want to do that.

Pick a more mainstream distro and not something that is rolling release. They don’t need that - they need something that is rock solid. The gaming modifications on distros are overrated - they only matter if you really want to push things to the limit.

I’d probably go with Mint for your scenario. It’s stable, and the 22.1 is a long term release up to 2029 - so it’s unlikely to break with a major update.

I’d personally go with KDE over cinnamon - it’s user friendly but its slicker than the default desktops in Mint and will make the machine feel more high end as a gaming machine. There is also scope to customise it if the person using that wants to go down that route or has something they’re already familiar with (KDE very flexible - feels like a nicer version of windows GUI by default but can make it look like MacOS or even Gnome, or whatever you want tbh). Cinnamon and Mate have flexibility too but KDE has a whole ecosystem of software to draw on and doesn’t suffer from Gnomes rather marmite design philosophy.

In terms of games - use Steam where possible. It’ll “just work”. There is almost no configuration required and personally I have a huge games library and haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I don’t play competitive games or the highest end fps games though. But I’ve just completed cyberpunk 2077 on my desktop, which is a 3070 and had no issues.

Some popular games like Minecraft have their own clients and set up but it’s not difficult to set up once and leave it going.

Lutris is a good games client if they do have games in other stores like GOG or Epic, and it works well with steam too. Heroic is also a good multi store client - slick and easy to use if that’s preferred, good for gog, Epic and amazon.

Whatever you chose to do, keep.ot simple. I’d honestly avoid the gaming distros and go for something stable and widely support like Mint. Definitely avoid pure Ubuntu, and avoid rolling releases of anything and you should be fine support wise.

True. Bit of a tangent but one issue when you have free Healthcare the cost of smoking to individuals is lower. Genuinely it’s a problem - sometimes people don’t value their health as much as they should because of ease of access to Healthcare. I’m 1000% in favour of free Healthcare, it’s just an interesting paradox.

Public health measures focusing on increasing the cost of smoking through tax work but we don’t have the pressure to stop smoking due to the cost of Healthcare itself which can make it harder to get people to understand the effects. Meanwhile public organisations understand the cost of smoking and invest in trying to reduce it as it puts huge pressure on Healthcare systems. Not just cancer but it’s a major driver of cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, peripheral vascular disease) and lung diseases (emphysema / COPD). The costs of smoking related diseases is staggering.

Smoking is in decline across the west but we’ve known since the 1940s and 1950s definitely that smoking is bad yet smoking rates have been persistently high in Europe until more recently - last 20 years or so.

Smoking rates in France for example - 23% still smoke but there has been a huge decline in the last 20 years. Yet smoking was banned on public transport in the 1970s. To be clear I’m not saying it’s because of free Healthcare - just that in countries with good Healthcare systems there is more going on. People have known for 80 years smoking is bad and there has been a gradual decline but big shifts have happened surprisingly recently.

Edit: maybe this is a bit ott comment for a meme lol

Yeah, it’s like when they talk about economic growth being in decline. Strange double speak of the business world.

As you say, my first thought was they meant slowing growth but that didn’t tally with everything else I’d heard.

X reached 132 million daily actives, as its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%.

To talk about “growth” being in decline is weird. The user base is in decline. X is shrinking.

Also it’s hard to get reliable stats on x/twitters use because Musk and Co try to obscure it as much as possible after damaging the company.

If you search online there are claims.It’s still reaching 250million a day but that is also a decline from previous claims. Also there are plenty of claims about declining market penetration - for example from 45% in the UK in 2020 to just 10% now and falling.

So this story is probably more a mix of growth in Threads (which is also somewhat dubious) and a decline in X/Twitter.

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

I’m really sorry to read this. Thank you for all you’ve done - I’m sorry you’ve had such a torrid time and seen the worst of the Lemmy verse.

I hope you can find some enjoyment on the other side as a user instead of an admin. I’ve found a lot of positive and enriching places and people on the Lemmy verse.

I am sure that is in no small part thanks to the hard work and diligence of people like you.

Hopefully once time has passed you will be able to look back and see all the good you have done. While it is hard to see now when you’re feeling burnt out, there are lots of positives too and you will hopefully be able to be proud of all you achieved in the future.

Thank you for helping make the fediverse a better place.

You can do lots of things with both, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

People have used Lutris for other apps because it was a more convenient wrapper for Wine than the defaults offered but it’s not primarily designed for it and support will be limited. Lutris is designed to be a games library and that’s it’s focus.

I personally wouldn’t recommend wine newbies to be using Lutris to run everything because if nothing else it would be annoying for the Lutris dev team to be dealing with “I can’t get Microsoft Word working”.

I also personally wouldn’t recommend Bottles for games because of all the other features Lutris offers. I have a huge library of games and I wouldn’t want to manage that in the Bottles interface. But I’m aware people use it for that and Lutris is one of its supported runners.

Bottles and Lutris complement each other and work together well. But lutris is designed to be a games libaray while Bottles is designed to be for everything.

I personally use Lutris for games (most of my wine use) and Bottles for a few other windows apps.

But the real star of the show is under the hood - it’s wine and Proton doing the heavy lifting. Lutris and Bottles are tools to get the most out of them and it’s choice which you use and how.

Lutris is for managing games, and can use multiple different engines. Proton is one, but also Linux native games, dos, ScummVM, etc. Lutris also interfaces with popular stores like Steam, Epic, GOG etc. It’s a game and gaming library tool.

Bottles is a general purpose wrapper for Wine. You can run games but also any wine software. It’s a general purpose wine tool.

Lutris makes running games in proton easy. Bottles makes running apps in wine easy.

I’m not too bothered by variable lengths but I do think the lack of time constraints can lead to bad writing and show making. If the episode needs to be 40 mins, fine, but sometimes it just feels like as no one is saying “cut this back, tighten it up” so episodes become uneven or series sprawl and never get to the end.

I’m British and I agree.

30 degrees is the exception here, not the norm, so we’re not set up for it. For example homes are designed to trap heat with big windows and good insulation because we have mild to cool temperatures most of the time.

We don’t have air con in most homes and even many work places. Our public transport isn’t designed to be running in 30 degree weather - the Tube in London is stifling.

And our culture isn’t geared up for hot weather. We don’t have a siesta culture and late night cafe culture. Instead for us it’s normal to be out and busy in the hottest parts of the day.

So when we get 30 degree weather it’s throws us off - homes are stifling hot, public transport is uncomfortably hot, and we’re out and about in the hottest part of the day because we have work or social plans already set up.

So yeah, it’s nice to have a hot day but if we have a heat wave and hit 30 it’s in the context of a country not prepared for it.

Add to that we’re generally not adapted physically to 30 degrees so sweat and feel uncomfortable in a way we’d not be if living in the heat for weeks at a time.

So yeah it’s a bit of a meme that Brits are not good in the heat, but it’s grounded in the reality of where we live and how.

Yeah I agree.

I also don’t like the green dots and new tags - I do see how it is reminiscent of the bloat on Windows start menus even if the motivation is very different. But if I recall they can be turned off so I’d don’t see the issue.

I’m also not a fan of someone donating €100 and then saying “I’ll donate another €100 if you remove this feature”.

There is an official Jellyfin plugin that adds DLNA support; content can then be accessed via any DLNA client including VLC (built in support). MPV can also use DLNA with it’s own plugin.

Really? Seems like.a very shit teacher and school. Dont think a 7 yr old getting upset by that is unusual. Id be furious of that had happened to my kid.

Its kind of a perfect example of how mediocre has become acceptable and even celebrated. And the attidues of don’t question, or don’t challenge. Scale that up and you start understanding how the world is as it is, particularly in the US.

I’ve never had toilet paper like that. I buy supermarket own brand stuff here in the UK. Even when I’ve bought cheap stuff I’ve not had that issue.

Switch to a different brand. The paper they’re using is bad of it’s flaking off all the time.

Interesting read. This is the risk of being bought out by big corporations. For Kraftob the priority is strong sales at the right time to boost their share price. Early Access is risky to them - instead of a big release and big numbers there is a long dragged out release and a smaller 1.0 release. Also there is the risk the game is poorly received when it hits early access and having to recover from that.

Big corporate publisher/developers only care about short term numbers and boosting their share prices. It’s why AAA gaming is in “crisis”. They release games for short term boosts, then lay off the staff to save money and start the cycle again. Or they try to build “games as services” and gamble on big or pull the plug if it fails. And everything tries to be franchises that they can release on a regular cycle to boost earnings.

To Krafton, Subnautica is IP and the priority is it releases at the right time and right way to boost the share price. No doubt they will lay off all the devs after the release and talk about “difficult decisions” and “market pressures”. Fuck them.

Yeah this is nonsense - believe in god or a “universal spirit”. That is a very weird question and should not be conflated with religious belief.

Alot of people don’t know what they believe and if asked say they believe in something. Yet those people are not going to church or mosque or synagogue and not following religious scriptures etc.

The question should have been “do you believe in God?” And separately ask do you have other beliefs. The way it’s phrased this is conflating belief in something with religious belief.

That’s cool you had such experiences. I don’t remember anyone getting excited about a book and sharing it like that in my school, which is a shame.

Although I do remember everyone getting excited about the book buying thing in primary school and I think there were lots of DK books in that? My family couldn’t really afford that stuff so guess it just isn’t a nostalgic thing for me.

I remember they were glossy and attractive but expensive. I wouldn’t have bought one on a whim as a kid, and you kinda just read the ones school might have bought? Wikipedia is free and expansive; nostalgia aside I think kids today have it way better.