I’ve played all sims games and all work on linux with wine. Sims 1 is the hardest to get to work because you need a CD crack to get it to run. Sims 2 and newer works great in my experience. I’d recommend using Bottles to install Sims 2. You can install it from CD and play it like normal. Need some tweaks to get widescreen though (but you have that issue on windows as well).

Sims 3 I’ve played in bottles through the EA app (I own a digital copy there). Worked out of the box (bottles has a way to install the ea store app easily). Sims 4 I’ve played on steam (using proton).

I think realtime is on mainline now since 6.12 though so anyone with at least 6.12 should be able to use rt functionality.

I’ll continue to call it forge joe. It’s more cute. It’s like “where do I put these files?” “Just give them to Joe, he’ll know where to store them”.

Yeah the thought is that as long as my patch applies without error, I would get the latest kernel automatically built and can just update my laptop normally with pacman. And since I have a server anyways I might as well use it to compile the kernel at night. I’m also thinking of doing the same with some aur packages as well.

I use a custom kernel on my laptop. I just modified the PKGBUILD of the official arch kernel package, and added my patch as a file. Then I could build a proper package with makepkg. I’m planning on setting up my server to automatically build the patched kernel and serve it in a private arch repository, so I don’t have to compile the kernel on my laptop regularly. I’m waiting on forgejo (git forge I host on my server) version 9 to be released first, as it should support arch package hosting by then.

For old not very demanding games by todays standard, yes. As long as you get something new enough to have proper support for Vulkan API (such that DXVK would work). As others have mentioned, AMD have better iGPUs than intel, so definitely look out for that.

I wished tiling windows would work like snapping of floating windows, but more powerful. For example instead of snapping only to the edge of the screen, I would for example hold alt while dragging a window and would get a preview of where the window would snap to depending on where I’m hovering. And that it would resize the other windows accordingly.

Having to remember or customize a billion keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows and rearranging the grid, makes tiling window managers DOA for me. I don’t have the time/energy to set it up or practice the shortcuts.

I don’t know specifically about the T470, but if you have an nvidia GPU, you might have issues depending on how the display outputs are connected to the GPUs. I had a T420s at some point with an nvidia GPU, and it was a PITA to get the display output to work on linux. I had to permanently enable the nvidia GPU for that to work (cutting battery life in half), because the display output was connected only to the nvidia GPU. I swore to never buy an nvidia product ever again after that experience.

I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a few videos about windows users switching to linux mint lately. Having to update the kernel for the computer to work is a common occurrance. IMO the newest available one should be the default one. We should strive towards giving new users the best possible first impression of linux.

They really need to update Mint though. Sure it is good… on old computers. Anything made the last couple of years will have issues due to an ancient kernel and mesa. We should stop calling it stable/lts and unstable, because users will always pick the one called stable, even if the ‘unstable’ one is the one that would in most cases work the best for desktop linux. Or at least we should separate the kernel and mesa away from the rest of the ‘stable’ packages, and include recent versions of that by default, to not scare away people with driver issues.

Yeah linux support for ARM SOCs is not ideal. There might be some fork of the kernel working with specific proprietary driver blobs. But in a few years its basically abandonware.

RISC-V is what we should try to make happen as a replacement for x86, instead of yet another proprietary IP.

The scary thing about this is thinking about potential undetected backdoors similar to this existing in the wild. Hopefully the lessons learned from the xz backdoor will help us to prevent similar backdoors in the future.

It’s not useless. It’s a gateway drug for getting into linux. “But can your windows PC do this?” is a great way to recruit people to try linux ;)

Not 100% sure if it is the same issue as you linked to, but I have an early Ryzen 7 1700 that has a hardware error (google “ryzen performance marginality” to find info about it) causing it not to work properly with linux. I never bothered to RMA my CPU. I’ve made it kinda work anyways, by disabling cool and quiet or whatever it is called, and set a fixed overclock to compensate for the lack of turbo after that. The idea is that the CPU should always run at a fixed clock speed instead of clocking down to save power when idle. Haven’t had any issues with this CPU for a while now after I did that.

BTW I upgraded my desktop with a 3900x and put the 1700 in a server. Never had any issues with the 3900x on linux, so getting a newer generation ryzen for you PC second hand or something might just fix it as well.

This many extensions in gnome will be fragile. Extensions have a tendency to stop working on gnome updates. The more extensions, the more issues you’re gonna have. Though will probably work fine on a stable slow moving distro like debian or something.

Personally I use 3 extensions: dash to dock, app indicators and desktop icons.

They went from doing some communication secure with signal, to doing no secure communication, because of a rug pull of a genuinely convenient feature. The problem with communication apps is that it is almost impossible to convince anyone to use anything they haven’t heard about, if it is not very convenient. They’re not going to use a separate app just for communicating with a single person/a few people.

Looks like RCS might be viable in the future when it works on both iphones and androids though. I just hope that it doesn’t all go through googles servers.

The vast majority of people don’t know what sRGB or DCI-P3 or color profiles are, or care about it. I understand that you may be frustrated about bad support, but it is just not that big of a deal for most people. That said, color management and HDR support for wayland is being actively worked on, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it works better on wayland than X11 in a year or two. Also the distro suggested here (linux mint cinnamon) uses X11, not wayland. I agree with OP that we shouldn’t scare people away from linux. Forcing people to have an opinion on X11 vs Wayland or color profiles, definately could scare them away.

Surge XT is a must. Best FOSS synth there is IMO. 3 oscillators in 2 scenes. Filters, effects, all the LFOs and envelopes in the world, all the modulation, expression aftertouch, etc you need. A bunch of presets out of the box. Very flexible synth, though can be a bit learning curve to get going.

Honorable mentions to Dexed (basically a software DX7), GeonKick (for synthesizing drums), and pianoteq (proprietary, but best there is in piano synth with native linux support).

Fun coincidence, 16 lanes was one of my concerns as well when I got mine. I’m also on an old AM4 motherboard. Currently have a 3900X CPU which is plenty for my needs for now, but it’s good knowing I still have an upgrade path to an X3D. AM4 has been an awesome platform in terms of upgradability :)

Got a 6700XT second hand about a year ago when the price finally came down from astronomical ridiculous crypto bubble crazy, to almost reasonable. Just looked and they’re still going for the same price. Thought this would have dropped a bit by now, but I guess not.