the main difference is that Microsoft builds features quickly and for profit. that means the focus isn’t always on what the user wants, so they make tradeoffs that are good enough to not disturb the user base. recently with the AI craze basically showing how little they really care for the user.

Linux on the other hand is FOSS, anyone who wants a feature can build it. this is slower to deliver because the profit incentive (if there even is one) isn’t as big but that also means there don’t have to be compromises to delivered features.

looking at both these operating models i would rather be in the group building the future for users rather than shareholders. if it means waiting a few months for a few things to work as smoothly as I want I’m ok with that because it only keeps getting better and it’s literally free.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope

might go through some of those troubleshooting steps and make sure you have drm kernel modeset.

one other thing you might try (at end of the page) by setting LD_PRELOAD=”” with the command which can at least rule out features that sometimes break on certain games. I’ve had game recording and overlay cause similar issues and could only launch after disabling those in game settings.

also might not need gamescope? mesa 25.1+ and proton 10+ have a lot of the features built in and I’ve not noticed much if any performance difference. now i only use gamescope if i run into issues and usually only if protondb shows consensus that you need to use gamescope or specific workarounds.

Squad even has imo the best Star Wars mod (Galactic Contention). just be aware it’s a much slower pace than battlefield/Cod and heavily depends on teamwork

i never know what’s expected on those type of captcha. if the handle bars of a bike go into an adjacent box and are 99% covered by a hand does that count? what do you do when you have a blurry image full of jpg artifacts and are asked to identify if it contains a fire hydrant. I’m pretty sure it usually classifies me as a bot for being too exact since I’m asked follow ups for a few minutes until i give up and just close the tab out of annoyance.

yeah the flatpak version of gamescope is the latest version which is meant more to be used in something like lutris or directly with wine. my understanding is a bit hazy on the issue but i think flatpak steam or the Vulcan layers required a specific version or you get something about compatibility and the game would still launch but disable gamescope.

i think the workaround was to install gamescope through pacman and then configure steam to be able to access it.

flapak when i was using it on arch always had issues getting gamescope to run as the flapak version doesn’t match the version in steam. with wine adopting support for native Wayland and improvements to Vulcan layers i think flapak version may start to get more popular. but for now the main limiter is, “do i need gamescope to play?”

have been using bazzite for a while now and don’t have issues with Firefox, could be tests Google are running. they recently are targeting users of adblockers and artificially setting high load times in hopes users disable them. a decent alternative is freetube (on flathub) which is anonymous so you can’t login but you can import playlists and includes ad+sponsor block. they’re pretty fast at fixing Google’s attempts to break it too, sometimes you might have to change instances to get it working.

no one understands how these models work, they just throw shit at it and hope it sticks

caches are never really a concern to me they will regen after the fact, from your description i would worry more about db, this is dependent though in what you’re using and what you are storing. if the concern is having the same system intact then my primary concern would be backing up any config file you have. in cases of failure you mainly want to protect against data loss, if it takes time to regenerate cache/db that’s time well spent for simplicity of actively maintaining your system

I’ve been using scope buddy to manage my gamescope config, has auto resolution/hdr detection and you can set global defaults. you still have to pass scb -- %command% but it seems easier to manage. with proton 10 i set it to actually disable gamescope and use it to set the proton Wayland+hdr env variables and haven’t had any issues so far.

my recommendation if you do is to look at refresh rate, going 120hz to 240hz felt like a much bigger upgrade to me than sdr to hdr. especially if you’re playing games that depend on response times, it just feels smoother. hdr in Linux is decently there on kde but there’s still issues getting it to work everywhere like Firefox, though they still look nicer than regular sdr imo. also avoid hdmi, especially if using amd!

nobara is more focused on gaming and includes patches and software to play games without having to tinker a lot. you could use any distro but some games might have performance issues or require additional settings and configuration. nobara gets rid of maintaining that yourself, you might still have to tinker with a few things like launch options but not as in depth as other distros.

another popular distro is bazzite which does similar things, though i feel that’s a bit more advanced to understand some concepts.

if your curious about switching i would recommend, if you can, to install a second hdd (can be cheap/small) and try one or both of them for a week to see what it’s like and how well your games run. also if you don’t like how one looks you can also try different desktop implementations. coming from windows, KDE will feel very familiar.

there was a study done in the 50s that pretty much decided US health policy for decades that said fat is bad and makes you fat. the reaction to this was for companies to remove fat from their products to claim it’s low fat but in order to maintain taste they replaced it with sugar. this proliferated all food products and being coupled with both parents working 40+ hours a week caused a lot of families to fill fridges with highly processed foods with “healthy” sugar/fat levels that could be prepared easily. tie in the fact that there’s no time to exercise with the fact that most Americans drive to destinations, it becomes easy to read articles that x is the cause of obesity that it took a long time to realize what the real problems are.