My guess is if that happens, studios will choose not to put their games on sale anymore or less frequently. Why would they discount the game when the used market is an option. It also depends on the average price of the game used and if a sale undercuts the used market. Lots of variables and there’s opportunity to boost new sales in the form of perks, bundles, exclusive in game content, etc…

Check out protondb.com/ to see how compatible a game is with the deck (and Linux in general). The comments will usually have suggestions for getting the game to run well.

As a few have already mentioned, a Debian based distro is a good choice, and you Mentioned vanilla Ubuntu isn’t ideal do to prioritizing snaps, I would then suggest Pop!_OS or Mint. I like what System76 (Pop) is doing with their scheduler and the upcoming Cosmic DE (written in Rust and should see an alpha early next year).

Keep an eye on Pop’s Cosmic desktop. Even the current customized gnome version is a nice tiling DE.

I’ve been avoiding Nvidia for a while and I generally recommend it (at least for now). I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory though. Nvidia support has come a long way.

That being said, if you can snag a good used amd card to replace your 3060ti then why not if you’re not benefiting from the rtx features and you find your current vram is causing issues, then you do you.

You could also hold out a bit longer and see if the 6800xt becomes more affordable given the recent launch of the mid tier 7000series.

I have corded USB type headphones. It’s not a good replacement. The dac is in the connector which makes the portion that sticks out much larger; the port isn’t designed for even mild leverage to be applied to it regularly. Go cycling with your phone in your pocket or even just sit down multiple times with your phone in your pocket while the usbc headphones are plugged in. They will either work their way loose or they will start to break the phone’s port. I’m not even covering how the USB type c spec leaves a lot of room to be interpreted differently by companies, significantly increasing the probability of headphones working for only some phones.

Backup all your personal data on windows prior to attempting anything. On a separate disk and cloud if possible. For cloud backups, just pick the important stuff. No need to backup steam libraries since steam servers are the backup in this case.

Like others have said, if you can use a separate disk, do that. If you can’t do that and you just want to try out Linux, use a USB live disk to test hardware compatibility and the user experience, or if you have an old laptop or desktop that isn’t being used, load Linux on that first.

Pick a popular distro for better community support. If you have a recently released laptop (less than a year old) might want to pick a distro with newer kernel for better hardware support. My personal recommendations are Pop!_OS, Fedora (both gnome and KDE versions). Both work well on newer hardware. Others you might want to try are Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

After getting Linux installed, try and keep your home partition backed up, especially if Windows is on the same disk.

Try and use Flatpak for all your apps, flathub is the web “store” for Flatpak apps.

Be open to trying the Linux alternative to apps since the windows version might not be available.

This is a new OS so expecting things to work a certain way isn’t realistic.

Most of the time a GUI is available for what you need to do, but learning the terminal is super helpful and a lot of people prefer it once they make the switch.

When searching online, try to include your distro and its version. It will help narrow down results.

If you’re gaming, check ProtonDB for game compatibility, and be willing to tinker a bit.

If you do have Nvidia graphics, Pop!_OS and other distros that bake the drivers into the disk image or install process are better for beginners.

Opinion portion: Firefox is a better holistic choice over chromium based browsers (see Google’s web environment integrity aka DRM for the web). KDE is a great desktop for people who like the Windows workflow, but I prefer Gnome. Nvidia graphics are much less problematic these days, but I still prefer amd and Intel hardware.

Life is hard; everyone is doing their best; be hard on problems and soft on people.

Good luck ;)

Second, gotta love the new rust based tools and apps getting developed. Although I’ve seen some weird formatting issues on windows. Linux version is solid though.

I’ve been using Firefox Relay for about a year and its been great. I might switch over to Simplelogin since I already pay for a premium sub with proton and its now included.

One small thing that simplelogin might do better than others is sending from an alias. Replying is fine from Firefox Relay but if I wanted to start a new email using an alias, I think simplelogin is capable but Relay isnt able to.

Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.

Well as long as you take a snapshot of your data and move that snapshot to another drive, you’re free to tinker without real worry. Arch Linux wiki should have lots of examples of what you’re trying to fix or modify. There’s always a fresh install as well, which isn’t ideal most of the time but as long as the data is safe, then its an option. Best of luck, hope you’re able to resolve the issue.

Only thing I can think of is the subvolumes left over might be causing an issue. I don’t know how snapper performs a rollback and I’ve seen a couple ways to do it. Sometimes its modifying the default subvolume to the snapshot you want to rollback to. This is fine IF your kernel params are NOT specifying the subvol. That would look like this rootflags=subvol=subvolume_name.

Usually I just rename the subvols and make sure the snapshot I’m renaming to replace the current root subvol is not set to read only.

So rename current root to root.broken Then rename snapshot to root Then set readonly prop to false.

Did you setup this server with a boot partition?

Rolling back the root subvolume with an older kernel could create a mismatch to the boot partitions kernel. Not sure if that’s contributing to your problem, but might be worth looking into.

No worries. Yeah I ran into this same issue with flatpak steam and got it mostly working about a year ago and then distro hopped. Lost the changes for some reason and just didn’t bother fixing it lol. Glad you got it working!!

I believe its an option when you right click the game in steam.

If you don’t want the desktop icons, you don’t need to relax the flatpak permissions for the xdg-desktop. Just the first two for allowing steam to see the icons and the applications folders.

If the right click option isn’t there in steam, there might be a way to regenerate the icon, but off the top of my head I’m not sure. Reinstalling the game should do it but that’s a pain for larger games.

I’m on the fence about this since how would proton verify that “best practices” were followed? They are a privacy focused product and a feature like that could be used to decrease their services privacy. This author would likely implement best practices and many other likely would too, but say a competitor wanted to prove that their product was more secure, a feature like that could enable a competitor to showcase a security “flaw”. And since headlines are all people read these days it would be damaging.

The feature the author described would be great but ProtonMail would need to make it fool-proof and temper-proof which requires a lot of Dev time and effort. I’m still waiting on proton bridge to work with calendar and contacts. Or contacts birthdays to show up in my calendar.

Like I said, its a good feature, but its likely a large ask for a niche group of customers.