It really should be.

Battlefield 4 still works on Linux and we always been more transport pilots…especially on Flood Zone.

Pop!_OS in early 2023, I used it for about 3 weeks before my bootloader broke so bad even Pops own recovery tool couldn’t fix it. I went back to Windows 10 for another month before trying again with EndeavourOS and haven’t had to use Windows since.

Funnily the thing that triggered me to install Linux on a spare SSD was I couldn’t play Battlefield 4 on my Windows install anymore because the EA app randomly stopped working even after reinstalling the whole thing, Got the EA app and BF4 working on Pop within an hour.

Honestly might be the other way around for me. I was mainly a multiplayer guy for the longest time but most franchises I was invested in quickly went down the drain and a lot of the newer battle-royal style shooters didn’t appeal to me.

Started mainly playing older games that had been on my backlog for a while. And videos of the Steamdeck running them games started popping up.

So since I already hated Windows 10 from the start and I didn’t need my PC to run the latest AAA multiplayer games anymore, seemed like a better time than ever to switch.

I still play some multiplayer with Battlefield 4 and Battlebit Remastered. (R.I.P Battlefield 1 and Ironsight on Linux though…)

EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I’m a lazy people.

I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn’t have to worry about with Endeavour.

Only other distro I’ve used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.

Heavily depends on the game and how the patches are installed.

If the patch comes as an exe, on Lutris next to the Play button you’ll find a wine glass icon with a menu next to it, you can use ‘Run EXE inside Wine prefix’ to run the patch installer and I’ve had it work most of the time. Sometimes you’ll need a .NET dependency which you can install through Winetricks using the same menu.

A lot of patches for older games require DLL files which you have to manually declare in Wine, One again in that Wine glass menu you’ll fine ‘Wine Configuration’ and in the Libraries tab of that, you declare what DLLs you need to “override”.

I don’t play either of those games you mentioned but I mainly play and mod older games these days and had pretty good luck running 95% of them through Lutris. You just sometimes have to find workarounds.

As a Librewolf user I wouldn’t make it default for casual users this kind of distro is aiming for. Sure enabling logins to use it as a main browser is piss easy, but that’s still more work than the average person wants to put into setting up their system.

Waterfox would be the better choice since it’s just default Firefox in every way besides Mozilla’s spyware.

Gives me more Windows 8 flashbacks than Mac.

An interface that works well on touchscreens, but feels clunky on mouse and keyboard and the general theming of it looks more phone like than a desktop PC. Gnome itself being harder to theme doesn’t help with that.

That being said I’d pick Gnome over all else for touch devices. I threw it on an old Surface 3 and it worked better than the original Win8 interface.

I’ve been wanting to abandon ship for years, but sadly convincing the average gamer is another story.

Which is the main reason most of us are stuck using it if we want to talk to friends.

Welcome to the Club!

I had a similar issue around 2 years ago now on POP where my bootloader didn’t even show up in the bios anymore.

If you still have the a USB with the live boot of POP you can use it to recover your files n stuff.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-recovery

qBittorrent! You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.

Was using Deluge before on Windows and for a while when I switched to Linux but started having issues with it.

As someone who started using Linux while on Nvidia and stuck with it for over a year before going full AMD.

Just go AMD, so many little things I had to find workarounds for just because of Nvidias shitty drivers.

Even after Nvidia claimed to support wayland I could never get it to run on my install, then having to manually configure my xorg just to get my 170hz monitor working which then introduced graphical issues I just couldn’t fix…NONE of that was an issue the moment I swapped to a RX 7800 XT, didn’t even have to install any drivers they’re just standard in the kernal.

I don’t use Battle.net but I had a similar issue when using EA Desktop through Lutris. The program would demand a restart to apply updates then would just shutdown and say the same thing next time you ran it, if it even still ran.

My permanent fix was to use Bottles for EA Games and it’s worked fine ever since then. Lutris works fine for everything else though.

EndeavourOS is what got me to daily drive Linux finally.

The installation is easy, it’s got sane defaults and pre-installs most common dependencies.

As crazy as it sounds, some people only trust software backed by a large corporations.

Valve for the most part has extremely good will amongst the typical gaming crowd. While Linux as a whole doesn’t.

I’ve tried to sell people on Bazzite before when they’ve brought up wanting SteamOS for the desktop, But I always get ‘But it’s not “REAL” SteamOS, just some random Linux devs clone’.

I agree it’s the wrong way to go about thinking of it, Probably backed up very few people outside the Linux space understanding what a distro actually is. But it’s still the general consensus among your average gamer sadly…

Still I’m hopeful an offical SteamOS release will be good for getting more people to try and explore the Linux space.

I dunno about you update issues, But one thing I have to point out is the Linux native version of BL2 is an outdated build so if you want to play co-op with Windows players you have to run it through proton.

I’d like to think there’s a difference between “keeping up with the times” and chasing whatever new thing gets advertised.

Unless you’re really into number chasing with benchmarks then just keep using whatever you like until something YOU find better comes along.

Also I’m GenZ and just use whatever comes with the DE, it’s not an old person thing shakes fist.

TempleOS is the only OS corpos won’t touch, It’s protected by a holy shield!

My personal experience has been hit n miss.

Was using one 4TB Seagate for 11 years then bought a newer model to replace it since I thought it was gonna die any day. That new one died within 6 months. The old one still works although I don’t use it for for anything important now.

I didn’t clock much on my Steamdeck time as it doesn’t seem to count non-steam games…

Honestly my Steamdeck has kinda become a bigger beefier PSP for me, mostly PS2 games or PC racing games of that era.