ShaunaTheDead

I think upgrading the RAM as you mentioned is going to make a big difference. While the physical RAM might be soldered to the motherboard, you could buy a fairly cheap SD card or USB and set the system up to use that as virtual memory. It won’t be as fast as actual RAM but it might help and large SD cards are honestly really cheap these days.

Are you using the dedicated GPU as your primary GPU or the integrated GPU? I’ve found using the dGPU as the primary can sometimes lead to suspend/resume issues.

If you have an unusual setup, it can be annoying trying to give programs permissions and sometimes it just outright doesn’t work. For example, I mainly game on a laptop which has a pretty small hard drive, so I tend to put most of my games on an external hard drive. Flatpak really doesn’t play well with that.

Yeah, I’m saying that I agree that version numbers are harmful to mass adoption and I go on to explain that it’s not really a version number at least in Ubuntu, but a “YY.MM” formatted date. I think making that more clear would help people that are unfamiliar with versioning and development.

I would use Heroic Games Launcher personally. You can add any game you want, and before it creates the prefix for you, you have the option of running installers on the prefix first. Then you can add the game executable. If the game requires proton fixes which it very likely would, you can search the game on SteamDB to find the AppID then make sure there’s a file called steam_appid.txt next to the game executable with the game’s app ID from SteamDB. That will tell Proton to apply any fixes that it has on file automatically.

If you’re a fairly advanced user, you can also just look at what files are included on the game’s SteamDB “Depots” page. For example, GTA San Andreas looks like it requires “DirectX Jun 2010 Redist”. You can either download that from Microsoft or you can run winetricks (through Heroic, or through terminal) on the prefix to add d3dx9.

Heroic Games Launcher: https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher
Steam DB: https://steamdb.info/

Anyone coming from a development background will entirely get the idea of stable releases. 23.10 or 24.04 are just rolling releases of a stable distro. It’s the production ready version. You can choose to opt-in to the development updates at the risk that your system might be slightly more unstable, but that’s not a decision that a casual user should consider.

The version numbers on Ubuntu specifically, are just dates. 23.10 is the stable release from October, 2023. That’s all it is and there’s really no point in thinking about it deeper than that. It’s a date, not really a version number.

First of all, make sure that Steamworks Common Redistributables is installed because according to the steamdb page for GTA 5 it requires vcrun2022 and d3dx9 installed from winetricks (or protontricks) which it normally gets from the Steamworks Common Redistributables automatically.

From my admittedly very brief research, it doesn’t look like you can play GTA 5 online if you skip the launcher but if you want to just play offline you can set your Steam Launch Options by right clicking the game and going to properties. If you set it to %command% -scOfflineOnly that will skip the launcher but disable multiplayer.

You can also try setting the Steam Launch Options to PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% which forces Proton to use the OpenGL driver rather than the Vulkan driver for D3D.

My partner likes to listen to lofi music. Lately she’s been obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3 so she plays a youtube video that’s 10 hours of the “down by the river” song and a campfire sound from BG3. We’ve also done a 10 hour Star Trek TNG bridge noises video before for awhile lol

I’ve tried both pretty extensively and moonlight is so, so much better. I was really surprised, but it’s far and away better than steam link. You can stream your PC by using Sunlight - https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

I just started using Proton, but I don’t think any of their apps are available for Linux natively, which is disappointing. I mostly use Proton apps inside Ferdium which I find useful for combining all of my productivity apps and Ferdium basically just keeps a website loaded, and websites are always cross platform compatible. I would love to know if there’s a timeline for Linux apps in mind.

It’s definitely an edge case by say you’re in ~/ and you run a script like ./code/script.sh then it thinks the current working direct is ~/ rather than what is probably intended which is ~/code/. If your bash script uses full paths like /home/$USER/code/ then it will still run correctly regardless of the current working directory that the scrip was run from.

YouTube throttles some of the more popular instances. Find a less popular one. I was also finding that thumbnails and subtitles weren’t loading on some instances. After switching to a fairly obscure one, everything works. You could also try piped which I find generally works better and I like the interface better.

It really depends whether he got the devs of “Lutris, Heroic, Legendary, Bottles, etc.” to agree to use the unified runtime before starting this project. As long as he gets most of the big players to join then it will actually become the only standard worth using.

The only thing that’s different between Chrome and Firefox for the average user is that WebGL doesn’t work (yet) in Firefox, which I know is technical, but it means some websites that need more graphics processing won’t work in Firefox. Since WebGL is fairly new, I haven’t run across it much, only once or twice.

Gitlab is quite good and used by a lot of open source developers.

You need to learn bash scripting. Also, there are a few default files that the .bashrc uses which can be helpful to compartmentalize the custom things you do to it so that it’s easier to undo if you screw something up. To do that, just add this to the bottom of your .bashrc

if [ -f ~/.bash_custom ]; then
    . ~/.bash_custom
fi

What that will do is check if the .bash_custom file exists and then run the .bash_custom file in your home directory and apply anything in there. Also, you can call the file whatever you like, but bash does have some defaults that it will check for and run them without editing the .bashrc at all. It’s kind of hard to find a list of the the files that it automatically checks for, but I know that .bash_aliases is one of them, and I think it checks .bash_commands as well, but I’m not entirely sure. Either way, you can force it to check your custom one by using the code above.

Then you can create the file and add any custom things in there that you like. For example, I like to frequently update through the terminal but running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt autoremove && flatpak upgrade was a bit tedious and I wanted a bit less feedback so I made a custom alias for my personal use.

alias update='echo "Updating packages..."; sudo apt update -y &> /dev/null; echo "Packages updated."; echo "Upgrading packages..."; sudo apt upgrade -y &> /dev/null; echo "Packages upgraded."; echo "Cleaning up packges..."; sudo apt autoremove -y &> /dev/null; echo "Packages cleaned up."; echo "Updating flatpaks..."; flatpak update -y &> /dev/null; echo "Flatpaks updated."'

Which hides most of the text from updating and just gives me feedback on what it’s currently doing if I don’t really care to know all of the details. So now I just run update in the terminal and plug in my password and it updates and upgrades everything in a human readable way.

There’s a lot that can be done with bash scripting, like editing files, iterating over files and directories, setting environment variables. It’s basically a full programming language so the limits are mostly your imagination.

My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.

As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.

I may be wrong but I think it only does that if you enable proton compatibility in the settings.

Ugh yeah, FF7 when Aeris is killed by Sephiroth. And the scene where Cloud carries her into the water… I was bawling. Afterwards I think I just sat there dumbfounded, staring at the empty spot in my party until after like 5 minutes I turned off the game cause I needed a break to mourn. I know the graphics don’t really hold up these days, but it was all to real to me as a child and it was one of my first experiences with death even though it was just a video game character.

Ezarr is a pretty great little project for getting started. Just clone the repo and follow the README and it should just be plug and play.