Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.

After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.

I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????

Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?

What the actual fuck???

I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.

And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?

It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.

I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.

Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.

I'm done.

Hi y'all,

So I read recently that the latest NVidia drivers (550 I think) had some big performance and compatibility improvements to work with Wayland. So I went and gave it a shot. I went ahead and upgraded my drivers to the aforementioned version, installed plasma-workspace-wayland and rebooted.

For your info, I have a 1440p 144Hz monitor and a NVidia GeForce RTX 3070. My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and I got 32GB of RAM.

I tried Mullet MadJack and GhostRunner, which are running fine using X11 on current drivers btw. The performance was awful. I was getting no more than 10 FPS. I did a bit of searching and found I was missing the libnvidia-egl-wayland1 package. Installed it, rebooted just in case and tried again. The FPS was much better. 144FPS for Mullet Madjack and in the 100+ FPS for GhostRunner.The problem I noticed however was how BAD the shearing was in the image in both games. Even if it had no problem running the game.

I went ahead and upgraded the NVidia driver to 555 since some other Reddit post recommended it. But I ran into a slew of other issues. The Plasma compositor crashed all the time, and if my PC went to sleep, my desktop and windows, menu, everything wouldn't get drawn completely and the mouse cursor left a trail everywhere. I had to eyeball click through my menu to log out and go back to X11.

It looks like there's still some improvements that need to be made. Until then I'll stick with X11.

I was just wondering what would happen if I downloaded a game that was infected by a computer virus and ran it in Linux using Proton.

Has this happened to anyone? How would the virus behave? What files, connections or devices would it have access to? Could it be as damaging as running in in Windows?

This is what I get when going to Reddit while connected to Proton VPN, connected to a server in the same country I live in.

When I was 7, our class was brought to a neighboring elementary school to watch a projection of a short movie. It was about different nations of different colors, one blue, one yellow, and one red. Something happened and they all went to war against each other trying to paint each other with their own nation's color. This movie was incredible and really left a mark in my memory.

I only found it recently. It's called Rainbow War. I'm trying to find a physical copy of it, or even a digital copy if possible. The only place I could find it was on Amazon for nearly 100$ CAD. That seems excessive for a short film. Would anyone know of any other source to purchase it or, heck, even download it?

Most companies I've worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees'Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:

• policy control
• Software Center with software allow lists
• controlled OS updates
• zscaler
• software detection tool to detect what's been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
• antivirus
• VPN

I can think of a few things, like a company having it's own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There's already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don't really know what could be used or what setup we could have.

Like the title says.

I've just been experimenting with some distros like Endeavour, POP! and Elementary. I did a little review here.

Elementary really stood out for me as one of the best looking and easiest Desktop Linux distributions so far. Its simplicity is really appealing to me and I feel it would allow me to focus on the important stuff instead of going full ADHD and constantly trying to tweak my desktop with some new widgets or customization. (KDE is horrible for that, even though I really like that environment.)

Do any of you use it as a daily and specifically for gaming? What was your experience like?

Hello all,

Just to provide some background, I've been using Linux since 2000.

My distro experience is somewhat limited as I've only used RedHat-based and Debian-based distros like RedHat 6, Mandrake, Ubuntu (and its various flavors), CentOS and pure Debian. Over the years I've used multiple desktop environments, starting with KDE 2 and 3, Windowmaker, then Gnome 2 and MATE, XFCE and finally KDE 5. I've used KDE 4 when it was released with Kubuntu, but it was a complete disaster. Unity was really not my cup of tea either. And I've tried using Gnome 3, but it feels more like a tablet-oriented UI than anything else.

Lately with the rise of Linux gaming, people are asking around about what's the best distro for a newbie gamer. A lot of people have been recommending Fedora, or even OpenSUSE tumbleweed for their more up to date software packages. Ubuntu less so because a lot of people are disgruntled about Snaps or the telemetry data sent to Canonical. But, a few that stood out to me were POP! OS, Endeavour OS and Elementary OS. So I decided to try them out.

I started with Endeavour OS because it is based on Arch which gained a lot in popularity. Endeavour OS is supposed to be more user-friendly and stable compared to Arch which is more for power users with bleeding edge software packages that can often contain bugs. I've never used Arch or any Arch-based distros before. The installation was simple and I really liked that it offered to select which desktop environment to install with a pretty big list of options. I also liked the welcome app and all its options including links to Arch-specific documentation like the package management system with video tutorials. I picked KDE for the desktop which is pretty standard. The OS was very snappy in my VM which was set up with 16GB RAM and 12 cores in Qemu. I was able to change resolution pretty easily without any issue and could get right to work. However, Endeavour might not be suitable for a Linux beginner. A lot of the tools and configurations are command-line based which is not the most user-friendly. I also find the packaging system to be a bit complicated with Pacman and Yay compared to others, but I haven't messed around with it too much. I was disappointed in the lack of a UI tool for browsing and managing software packages.

Then I tried POP! OS. This distro is Ubuntu-based which I'm already pretty comfortable with and is very popular. It has a lot of existing documentation and a huge community behind it. The installation was also pretty simple. The deskop is Gnome 3 with a custom theme, extensions and dock. I personally never really liked Gnome because everything takes so much space on the desktop. Window title bars and other controls seem too big. POP! has this same issue in my opinion. Everything looks big and kind of cartoon-y. Like it's a desktop meant for kids. But since this distro was aimed at gamers, I guess it supposed to look fun in that way. One thing I like about Gnome 3 however, is that there aren't a lot of customizations available out of the box, which ensures everyone has the same experience. Too many customizations, like with KDE, can be a big overwhelming and if you mess around too much you can end up with a broken UI. I really like the POP Shop app as well which gives a good list of top picks. And the presentation is very nice and clean with a beautiful design. Most tasks can be done through a graphical app. I think the only app missing here would be something like Synaptic or Muon to manage Debian packages without using the command line. Overall it's a very simple and easy to use OS for any beginner, although new Linux users might be confused by the desktop environment that is very different from Windows and not quite like the Mac OS. It could probably use a welcome app like Endeavour with a couple of tutorial videos to guide new users around the UI.

Finally, I tried Elementary OS. This was my favourite out of the three, even though it had some issues out of the box. This is another Ubuntu-based distro, so again I'm very familiar with it. The people behind Elementary OS wanted to provide an experience as close to the Mac OS as possible without getting sued. And I gotta say, they really achieved that goal. The installation was very easy. And when I logged in for the first time, I was very pleased with the desktop environment. The desktop is basically highly customized Gnome 3 desktop. But, they made some tweaks to the UI that make it look a lot more elegant. Unlike in a default Gnome 3 desktop or the POP! desktop mentioned above, the various UI elements don't take as much space. The dock is clean and very easy to use and very reminiscent of the Mac OS dock. Anyone who ever used a Mac before will be in their element with this distro. I love the overall simplicity. The file browser is awesome and has the same column-based browsing as in the Mac OS, which is something I always envied. There's also a bunch of keyboard shortcuts like the Mac OS. You can get a list on screen just by pressing the META (Win) key by itself, which is great for new users. The system tray is simple with a practical notification area. The App Center reminds me of the POP Shop. Actually I think they're both kind of the same with a bit of re-branding and different suggestions. However, I was not able to install Muon or Synaptic out of the box to manage Debian packages and repos. The default browser out of the box is Gnome Web (Epiphany) and it had issues rendering pages right away. I had to install Flatseal through a Flatpak using the command line to modify permissions to make it work. I immediately installed Firefox through a Flatpak afterwards, though the browser was available in the AppCenter. Another bug was with the docker, which hides by default when you maximize a window. When moving the pointer to the bottom of the screen, the dock wouldn't pop up as expected. So I had to make it show at all times through the system settings. Speaking of the system settings, I love its simplicity. There's practically no way you can mess up your desktop but you can still tweak a few elements. Honestly, Elementary OS is what Gnome 3 should look like out of the box. It's so clean and beautiful. I honestly fell in love with that environment. I am highly considering using it as a daily driver.

Dear Linux gaming community,

Do you have any good recommendations for a GameCube controller compatible with Linux? It can be wireless or not, that doesn't matter, as long as it is as close to the original controller at possible or better.

I've never owned a GameCube, so I intend on giving its games a go with an emulator. Especially the legend of Zelda and Metroid.

Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Ok so a little background first. I'm an older millennial. I started using Linux when I was in college back in 2001. It was Mandrake Linux back then. I had an Asus V6800 DDR Deluxe graphics card with 3D shutter glasses and video-in for video capture.

The kernel module for my graphics card was limited and the shutter glasses didn't work in Linux. For the video capture, I actually had to download an open source kernel module from some enthusiast. Then I had to literally recompile the kernel with the NVidia and video capture kernel modules to support my graphics card. And when I finally got this to work, I could finally play 3D OpenGL games in Linux. Except there weren't that many.

If you wanted to run a Windows application, there was Wine, but it took a lot of technical knowhow and a lot of troubleshooting just to get something as simple as freakin' NOTEPAD to run. Let alone a whole god damn game!

Over time Linux improved quite a bit and received more support from NVidia, but it was still a bit complicated until Ubuntu provided some repos with pre-built modules you could install. Wine was still a pain in the butt and it was mostly used to run MS Office anyways.

When I heard Steam was working on a Linux-based console and that they were working with a pimped up version of Wine, I was a bit skeptical. I was certain there wouldn't be any support for advanced graphics stuff like ray tracing and DLSS.

On my home PC I have a dual-boot setup with Win 10 and Ubuntu. I've been spending most of my time in Win 10 for gaming and entertainment and just the simplicity of it.

Since a couple of years I've been hearing more and more about Windows 11 and how everything was going to be tied to your Microsoft account and how much they were going to collect information on your usage and how your privacy was simply gone in that new OS. Also the user interface looked horrible. I love the Win 10 UI. It's flat, square, the start button is easy to click, the start menu has huge tiles that can be organized in groups making it really simple and quick. I mean, the ergonomics of the UI in Win 10 is the best I've ever had. Win 11 is a fucking downgrade. And this week I had to upgrade my work laptop to Win 11 and it's fucking horrible! Microsoft really screwed up the ergonomics.

Knowing that one day it will be inevitable and that I'll have to upgrade from my beloved Win10, I decided to give gaming in Linux a go since the gaming part is basically the only thing keeping me from switching entirely to Linux. So booted in Ubuntu, installed the Steam Linux client and started reading on how to take advantage of Proton to run Windows games in compatibility mode.

I went ahead and set it up and installed Ghostrunner. I immediately ran into some problems, but I was expecting this. However, they were simple error messages and within 5 mins of Googling I found out I only had to add some command line parameters to set some environment variables. The game launched! And holy shit! It ran flawlessly! There were no issues with the graphics! I could enable all the NVidia RTX options! Everything worked practically out of the box! I was blown away.

We went from a time where you had to rebuild your fucking kernel to get your graphics card to work and fucking around with Wine to get to a point where you nearly throw your PC out the window until you can get a little app to run to simply running apt install nvidia-driver-xxx and clicking on a button to make a Windows game run in Linux.

You guys. This changes everything.

I think my dream is coming true. I think I might finally go 100% Linux on my PC. I never thought I'd see the day!

Holy shit!

I posted this on reddit a decade ago. Someone found their old hand-drawn map of the original NES Metroid game. It's incredible.