Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).
Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)
Yeah, I was playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game on Linux Mint the other day. It blows my mind what Proton can do.
As someone who regularly games on a Deck and occasionally uses Nobara on a desktop, it definitely shows, yeah. Incredible how far we’ve come in that regard.
I do still stick with Windows on desktop 90% of the time because unfortunately it seems some of the more advanced NVIDIA features I use very often like DLDSR are unlikely to ever make their way to the Linux drivers, but that’s a petty me problem.
I definitely agree that for the vast majority of users it’s a pretty good experience nowadays unless one can’t make do without the handful of games with unsupported anticheat and such.