And IMO if one of those students can get Roblox working on Linux, they have solved a harder problem than any homework they would be given 😆.

I’m curious how ootb mint works out for this usecase. Any chance we could get a 6mo update later? I’m particularly curious how well it holds up against non-admin users who may constantly be trying to get root-level access. There’s almost certainly going to be one student who figures out a local privilege escalation.

You can always live boot from a USB drive and try everything out that way.

IMO bazzite is too focused on gaming for people to be daily driving it for everything, but hey whatever works. Just hope they’re not upset when something breaks and the response from bazzite is “well yeah, that’s not something we bother testing for”.

(I have bazzite on a HTPC in my living room, and I think it’s perfectly suited for that usecase)

IMO Mint, Fedora, or OpenSUSE is going to offer the more stable, user-friendly experience long term. Install Lutris through the distro’s package manager, launch it, install bnet through lutris, launch it, install wow through bnet, launch it, Thrall’s your uncle 😉.

Edit: to answer your other question, yes Lutris runs as an app similar to how battle.net or steam works on windows. It’s just that instead of having a storefront and downloading data directly from a central “lutris” server, it’s basically a bunch of community-written scripts to automate the installation and configuration of games from all sorts of places. So when you tell lutris to install bnet, it’s running a script that goes and downloads it from blizzard, then locally creates a wine environment, launches the installer in that environment, you install it like on windows, and then it creates a lutris launcher entry for the bnet executable so that when you click play on it in lutris, it will automatically launch it in a wine environment each time.

And it should all work in KDE plasma, gnome, cinnamon, or whatever window manager you’re using (the window manager on msft windows is called dwm and it’s responsible for the same job).

I played WoW through Lutris (and later Bottles) with minimal issues for all of classic TBC and WotLK. Basically use either platform to install and run the Battle.net client, and then use bnet to install any blizz apps like normal. I used WowUp to manage addons. WoW should not be a blocker for you.

That said, I’m thoroughly done with blizzard’s shit and won’t be playing wow anymore.

Package managers tend to assume they are the only ones touching files in /usr/share. You will find if you try to change any files there, the next update may delete or download a new version of the file, stomping your changes. Instead your local changes should go in /usr/local (if you want something system-wide) or ~/.local (if it only applies to a specific user).

Ex. If you made a custom .desktop file to show up in your app launcher, or a custom .xsession file to show up in a login manager.

A CSV file should work.

Nice! That’ll look great on a shelf!

Re: modding

Nothing is consistent with modding. The idea of a game having “modding support” is a relatively recent concept. For most of gaming history, “modding” meant hacking the game (or sometimes hardware) to do what they want in spite of the creator’s intentions, rather than in accordance with them.

All that said, if you can get a vanilla windows binary running on Linux, getting mods working is usually the same process that it is on windows, especially if the mod is just swapping out files. The same files exist somewhere in your Linux filesystem and can be tampered with just like they can on windows.

If the mod involves running a 3rd party tool to edit a process’ memory in real time, that could be more involved since the windows version of the tool might be making some assumptions that are not necessarily valid when running in a Linux wine/proton environment. In order to get it working, you may need technical knowledge of how the mod is doing what it’s doing.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

It depends on how often you play games with aggressive anti cheat, or games on non-steam platforms. Games like Valorant and Fortnite probably won’t work at all. But I do a ton of non-competative multiplayer (and single player) gaming that is not inhibited at all.

Heroic launcher is your best bet for non-steam platforms (GoG, Epic, Amazon), and lutris/bottles should probably be your 3rd option (I’ve used both for battle.net). But steam games running through proton should “just work”.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

The actual modding should be arguably more accessible. You technically have control over the entire kernel, so nothing is going to stop you from doing whatever you want. The only problem you may run into is if you’re dependent on modding tools that were only made for windows. Some of those tools are basically spyware anyway (ex. Curse), and often times the open source community has made its own alternative you should be using instead.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

YMMV. Valve has done a lot of heavy lifting to get proton to be a one-stop-shop for running windows games on Linux but you can add a program as a non-steam game, launch it through steam, and it often just works.

Wine is your other option. Sometimes the community has gotten windows apps running reliably in wine or proton, other times no one has ever tried it or it’s too much of a headache to get working. protondb.com has user reports for how various games run.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

The short version is yes. The long version is the same as the previous answer.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

Most distros come with some form of package manager that works similarly to an app store on your phone (an app store is basically a package manager with purchases). Ideally, everything you want to run can be installed through the distro’s package manager, and then you use the package manager to update everything. But sometimes the software doesn’t exist in the package manager, and you have to download, run, update, and sometimes even build from source, your own programs. Those programs usually have a guide on the best way to run it on popular distros.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

It is actually more secure due to being open source. Source code can be audited by anyone rather than relying on “security by obscurity”. There are antivirus programs, but I don’t know much about them. Generally, don’t run programs from shady sources, don’t expose your machine to the open internet, and don’t run everything as root and you should be fine.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Yes, though historically AMD has better support for the newer features asked for by Linux compositors (namely Wayland). Nvidia’s drivers are still not fully open source, but otherwise work fine. Driver bugs are rare in my experience.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

To the same extent that windows can, yes. But if your concern is YOU misconfiguring something to cause Linux to do that, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. It is unlikely you will be interfacing directly with the kernel at all. Most distros configure the kernel in some specific way they want and you never worry about it. And still, a proper kernel-level driver should ensure that it will never send commands that could damage something, even if the config vars are incorrect.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

First off, install Ventoy to a USB drive. Then take advantage of Linux’s ability to “live boot” by downloading several .iso’s for several different distros onto the USB. Then boot off the USB, and you should be presented with a handy menu of ISOs to pick from. This will make trying out a bunch of different options really easy, without actually installing anything to your hard drive.

I’d say try grabbing mint, fedora, Pop!Os, and opensuse to start. Maybe also try Zorin. These are all geared toward new Linux users.

It is a fact that there is a pattern termed a “death cross”, and it is a fact that Tesla exhibits it.

It is also stated clearly in the article that, in the opinion of the author,

the chart pattern reading kinda strikes me as astrology for guys in suits.

And according to Reuters,

about half the time that a death cross appears, it marks the worst point for the index rather than a harbinger of a steeper decline.

Imagine reading an article before making inflammatory statements about it in 2025.

Ah yes, the ol’ ‘ostracize the core fanbase to gain a more ephemeral one’ strategy. A popular choice these days, unfortunately.

Yeah, I put dozens of hours into Hunt with some friends. We would only be able to play every few months. So every time we logged in, they had made new mechanic changes, some of which made the game less of what we liked. I always appreciated that there were no respawns. If you killed someone, they were out, period. If I die, then i wasn’t careful enough.

And then one day we come back to play, and kill someone, only to have them pop back to life behind us. I felt like the gameplay I enjoyed had been betrayed.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.

The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they’re close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.

The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.

barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.

I just don’t buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works. IMO it comes down to marketing budgets.

I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).

people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They’ll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing

I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.

Do you believe that the film industry didn’t start until the 40s and 50s? Of course not. The first “films” came out around 1900, but the technology was still improving, and the industry was still figuring itself out. It wasn’t until the 20s that both had progressed enough for real “traditional” films could be made.

Similarly, the gaming industry collapsed and rebounded twice before the 90s because it wasn’t getting off the ground. The tech wasn’t there yet. So yes, if you look at a timeline of the gaming industry, it was objectively in its infancy until “like the late 90s”. The same way the dotcom bubble came and went a decade before the vast majority of people even realized the internet had anything to offer them. I get that maybe you were in a nerdy little bubble of early adopters, but I’m talking about the world outside that bubble.

• Note that revenue in ~1975 and ~1990 are basically the same. Industry revenue was mostly sideways for 20 years.
• Then the 90s came. People shifted from arcades to handhelds, mobile, PC, the internet.
• The number of games published per year increased significantly.
• And an explosion of objectively “influential titles” were published in this era. Many of which are featured in Bafta’s list. (Though obviously Rogue should be on there).

To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn’t be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.

It’s actually really surprising that Pokemon isn’t on this list. I guess people forget that the gameboy games started it all.

Yeah, the rest are like “ok sure, but maybe not in that order”. But BG3 and KCD2 are like 90% recency bias. Great games, but probably on par with Witcher 3 or the RDR games.

But they didn’t do any research here, they didn’t have a panel of judges, they just put it up to a vote of the internet. By “influential” they really meant a popularity contest.

Thanks for the followup, I found a couple of plasma-wayland packages (I forget if they were through apt or the software center, and i don’t know what the difference is) and tried them out. One of them I’m not sure what it added, but the other did seem to create the necessary file for my partner’s launcher to use plasma wayland. I don’t know if it’s a mint thing, but we always had to do a full reboot between using wayland and x11 window managers; if you just log out and choose the other, stuff would be borked.

It did really take off about 5 years ago.

It’s neat that this exists, but not neat if someone hosts it for a year, a bunch of fed users rely on it and share a bunch of links using it, and then the hoster takes it down for whatever reason, and now there are a bunch of dead links littered all over the place.

Even less neat if some malicious group can then buy the lapsed domain and forward all those dead links to ads and viruses.

Please host responsibly, is all I’m saying.