Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven’t had many if any games that don’t run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).

Mods certainly do work - I’ve modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they’re often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.

The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it’s just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.

Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.

I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven’t used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I’m tempted to wipe it as I don’t use it.

The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That’s not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That’s a problem you can’t get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn’t working on Linux.

This is a combination of terrible legislation in the UK meets awful social media site.

The Online Safety Act is an abomination, compromising the privacy and freedom of the vast majority of the UK in the name of “protecting children”.

I’m of the view parents are responsible for protecting their children. I know it’s hard but the Online Safety Act is not a solution.

All it will.do is compromise the privacy and security of law abiding adults while kids will still access porn and all the other really bad stuff on the Internet will actually be unaffected. The dark illegal shit on the Internet is not happening on Pornhub or Reddit.

The UK is gradually sliding further and further into censorship, and authoritarianism and all the in the name of do gooders. It’s scary to watch.

All of these can be run on any Linux distro. Dropbox is probably a better choice than Google Drive as Google drive doesn’t have an official Linux app (but you can get it working beyond just using it in a Web browser if its a must).

I’d go.with Linux Mint as it’s well supported but any point release distro will serve your needs well. For example Fedora KDD or OpenSuSE Leap, Debian etc. I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu.

I personally generally recommend Mint as a good starting distro. It is widely used, which means lots of support readily found online. It also has some of the benefits of Ubuntu without having the Snap forced on users. It also generally works well on a wide range of systems including lower powered systems due to its selection of desktops.

Your laptop is decent and I’d personally be running a slick desktop on that, specifically KDE. But alot of that comes down to personal preferences, and Mint isn’t the best KDE desktop as it’s not a main desktop for it (although it is available).

However once you get to grips with the basics of Linux I think other distros offer better more focused benefits for different user groups. There are lots of choices such as Gaming focused distros, rolling release vs point release distros, slow long term projects like Debian vs bleeding edge focused projects, immutable systems etc.

I personally use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed because it’s cutting edge, but well tested prior to updates, with a good set of system tools in YaST, and decently ready for gaming and desktop use. I also like that it is European. But that may not be a good fit for your specific use case. Leap, the OpenSuSE point release distro would be better - a nice KDE desktop with a reliable release schedule and a focus on stability over cutting edge.

That’s not entirely true. Snap is a good reason to avoid Ubuntu as you’re not given the choice whether day to day apps like Firefox are a native app or snap app. You can only have snap versions. The lack of choice in having a slower less efficient version of apps forced on users without official alternatives is a good enough reason for people to recommend avoiding Ubuntu.

That is regardless of all the commercial and proprietary concerns people have.

That does not apply to Ubuntu based system like Mint where users are given choices and still benefit from other aspects of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Only caution on this is KDE has had significant improvements in each of it’s point releases. Trixie is looking to launch with KDE 6.3.5 but latest is now 6.4.

It’s always a balance between stability and latest release, but KDE has had quite rapid improvement as it’s still early in the 6 era. Having said that the it does feel like the changes now coming through are mainly polish and new features rather than fixing fundamental issues - so 6.3.5 might be a good base for Debian Trixie.

Been using KDE 6 on this device since last year without issue. The power profiles are present in the system tray and slider in the quick menu, so whatever that issue it’s been fixed. I’ve been using Nobara and OpenSuSE but maybe it’s an issue on LTS releases if they’re on a point release where this was an issue?

The power setting is a very good shout though - KDE defaulted to Balanced setting for me and I needed to change to Performance to get good gaming experiences.

As far as I’m aware they all do. It’s frustrating but I wouldn’t let it stop you buying these. Microsoft has aggressive deals with OEMs, and it’s pretty hard for manufacturers to avoid Windows due to it’s dominance. But OEMs have big discount deals on licenses so in terms of the portion of your purchase that goes to Microsoft it should be small. I look at it as cutting into the profits of the OEM because I was happy with the devices price even if it’d come with no OS.

I immediately wiped Win11 off my PC and installed Linux.

I have the same device and have had no issues with drivers or games. I also wiped Win 11 and have Linux on there.

I started with Nobara and it worked immediately and been running with that for nearly 18 months. I have recently (as in this week) switched to OpenSuSE after my Nobara install had issues, and again gaming is fine.

I’m not sure about Mint or Kubuntu but I can’t see why either would have issues. The drivers should be within the kernel; I haven’t needed separate drivers. I used KDE on both Nobara and on OpenSUSE without issue.

As you’ve experienced, I been impressed with the level the graphics can get to. Largely medium settings at 1080p for many games. I have played Cyberpunk 2077 on this on a mix of low to medium settings.

This may be too basic question but you’re not playing games at 4k are you? The desktop can be at 4k but the games need to be set to less. You should be able to play 3D games on it, and I’d expect Yakuza Zero to play fine. The device is good with a 4k desktop and 4k video, but 4k 3D games is way more of an ask and you need to bring games down to 1080 (or even 720p if you want to push up some of the other game options).

EDIT: BTW if you have a gaming desktop you can stream games to this miniPC in 4k. I switched to playing Cyperpunk via steam streaming and it looked incredible.

EDIT2: One thing that is generally important is to install gstreamer and available codecs. They categorise them as “Good”, “Bad” and “Ugly”. Often the “good” category codecs are installed but sometimes the more proprietary codes in the “ugly” category are not (they are “Ugly” due to their licenses but are still excellent quality). I don’t believe it makes a difference to gaming but I certainly noticed issues with video. OpenSuSE doesn’t install proprietary codecs by default. Nobara did (I think) but I’m not sure about Mint and Kubuntu’s approachs.

EDIT 3: Just wanted to highlight another important point mentioned elsewhere in this thread by just_another_person@lemmy.world. KDE defaults to balanced power mode for me and that certainly does impact the GPU performance. You need to change it to Performance mode in the power settings. That can either be done from the “Power and Battery” area in the task tray or in the “Power Management” section of the KDE Settings app (near the bottom of the list in the “System” group).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?

It’s the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it’ll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?

That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world

There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it’s hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.

You can of course create a dedicated “private” email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you’re worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it’s own silo separate from other personal emails.

Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.

If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.

Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).

So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.

If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.

I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.

If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.

The cost difference may reflect the performance difference.

I’m assuming you meant the RX 9060 XT? It is significantly more powerful than the B580.

I’d say the AMD card is the better purchase - it’s more powerful and the drivers are well established with lots of support online for solving issues with specific games with Proton. Most of the time things just work but to be using a card and platform that is widely used makes life easier.

It’s great Intel are supporting Linux and there is more competition in the graphics market, but I personally wouldn’t suggest being a pioneer buying their cards. You’re already doing something a bit unusual by gaming on Linux (even if it’s growing rapidly). I wouldn’t throw a new relatively niche card into the mix for now. It’d probably be fine but I’d stump up the extra cash for a better card that might last you a few years longer for AAA games.

Yeah all you have to do is circumvent the security settings in your browser and suppress warning messages to enable Manifest 2, all in 8 easy steps (written as if it’s 6 steps to make it seem less onerous). For now. Until Google switches it off completely.

Or, drop Chrome and Chromium based browsers (such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc) in one easy step. Install a privacy respecting Firefox based browser like Firefox itself or Librewolf.

Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. The fork Strawberry is a safer bet; actively maintained.

Elisa is a modern music player from the KDE project. It’s quite slick but not always the most intuitive - some options are hidden away in menus to keep the main interface slick.

It definitely has Repeat One.

Otherwise Strawberry is probably the best bet. It’s not the slickest looking in terms of modern UI design but it’s rock solid and still actively maintained. It’s basically the continuation of Clementine (which is largely untouched since 2016) which itself was a continuation of Amarok.

I like Strawberry but I do find the UI a bit jarring in the modern era. It’s feature rich and stable though.

Yeah I wouldn’t worry about Steam, it’ll work.

The most important thing is your graphics drivers and they’re largely the same between distros. Even with non rolling distros usually there are ways to stay with the latest drivers if that’s needed.

For Minecraft, best route is Java edition. There is an official Microsoft installer for Java, and If they’re into modded Minecraft then MultiMC is a better Linux launcher than the Microsoft one as it makes modding much easier; they just need to login to their Microsoft account within it to get going.

You can get Bedrock to work if that’s essential but it is unofficial and definitely needs a special launcher and a little bit faffy to set up. But it works.

All the stuff that gaming distros offer like optimised kernels really is marginal stuff. Definitely keep it simple; it’ll make your life much easier supporting it all and it will give your friend/family member a good stable experience so they can just focus on having fun.

Personally I’d say none of the above for newbies. I have had experience with Nobara and it’s OK but I literally had problems with GPG certificates for updates for the second time in 3 months, and yesterday the update engine crashed during an update and my plasma desktop only showed a black screen with a cursor on it when I logged in.

I can problem solve that but it’s annoying as hell and not suitable for someone who doesn’t want to do that.

Pick a more mainstream distro and not something that is rolling release. They don’t need that - they need something that is rock solid. The gaming modifications on distros are overrated - they only matter if you really want to push things to the limit.

I’d probably go with Mint for your scenario. It’s stable, and the 22.1 is a long term release up to 2029 - so it’s unlikely to break with a major update.

I’d personally go with KDE over cinnamon - it’s user friendly but its slicker than the default desktops in Mint and will make the machine feel more high end as a gaming machine. There is also scope to customise it if the person using that wants to go down that route or has something they’re already familiar with (KDE very flexible - feels like a nicer version of windows GUI by default but can make it look like MacOS or even Gnome, or whatever you want tbh). Cinnamon and Mate have flexibility too but KDE has a whole ecosystem of software to draw on and doesn’t suffer from Gnomes rather marmite design philosophy.

In terms of games - use Steam where possible. It’ll “just work”. There is almost no configuration required and personally I have a huge games library and haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I don’t play competitive games or the highest end fps games though. But I’ve just completed cyberpunk 2077 on my desktop, which is a 3070 and had no issues.

Some popular games like Minecraft have their own clients and set up but it’s not difficult to set up once and leave it going.

Lutris is a good games client if they do have games in other stores like GOG or Epic, and it works well with steam too. Heroic is also a good multi store client - slick and easy to use if that’s preferred, good for gog, Epic and amazon.

Whatever you chose to do, keep.ot simple. I’d honestly avoid the gaming distros and go for something stable and widely support like Mint. Definitely avoid pure Ubuntu, and avoid rolling releases of anything and you should be fine support wise.

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.