Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you’re ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.

Here’s a few pointers based on what I’ve found out:

1. The desktop environment or WM is important. Given your need for Steam Link to work I’d suggest using one with X11, as last I checked Steam Link just gives you a black screen and audio under Wayland. Linux Mint would carry over your knowledge of apt while maintaining an interface that’s pretty familiar to Windows users and is I believe still an X11 distro for now.
2. I got the EA app working using Bottles but it constantly feels like a cat-and-mouse game fixing it whenever it has an update. I basically stopped using it altogether for that reason. Not trying to scare you off — it’s just not a great experience.
3. Play with drivers for your GPU. The situation with Nvidia is, I’m told, not as dire as it once was on Linux but still needs more work than AMD or Intel graphics to work well. The proprietary driver may still give the best experience on games, though Nouveau seems to be doing very well. This is admittedly something I need to come back to in order to confirm (I have one machine with Nvidia graphics and it’s in storage specifically because Nvidia graphics under Linux were such a pain).

Yup, addressed in my original reply.

You’ll have substantially better results from modern integrated graphics (even on the low-end Intel UHD side). This is genuinely the card you get if you just need the extra outputs and don’t care about performance, or you have a CPU lacking integrated graphics and don’t care about performance.

In other words, there are use cases for it, but I absolutely agree that a gaming card this is not and it has a very specific niche.

I would argue that NixOS absolutely is the OS you get if your time is worthless, but not every distro is the same. I’d argue that if you need something that doesn’t have so many issues a stabler or easier to use distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, and even Fedora or openSUSE) is going to be a better option than trying to bend specifically NixOS to do what you want.

I personally use a mix of Pop, Debian, and Fedora, not because they’re particularly powerful, but because they tend to be more straightforward for what I want to do than NixOS, Gentoo, or Arch. I don’t mind tinkering, but for my main machines I don’t want to tinker much.

Edit: I should clarify that there are plenty of reasonable uses of Windows and I don’t fault anyone for using it especially if their familiarity is keeping them from understanding Linux as well as they want to. But I also would make the case that there are a lot of distros out there.

What type of connection do you use for your monitor? My first thought is just that you might be using something that can’t do better than 60 Hz.

You and I would have been enemies in the 16-bit era, but I adore the Sega Genesis. (However, I’m also a sleepy bisexual, so I’m gonna say we’re probably nowhere close to enemies.)

It was an arcade monster and got a ton of amazing games from the arcades and purpose-built for the machine — many the SNES also got, but some exclusives that really took advantage of what the Genesis could do well. I’d argue that the gritty FM sound chip was better for certain types of game music as well, though that’s not to say that the SNES wasn’t largely superior on that front.

At the end of the day… yeah 16 bit stuff looks amazing

The info from the Steam Hardware Survey is collected on an opt-in basis. I’m sure Valve has plenty of ways to get this information otherwise, but this specific data set requires acceptance of the terms of the survey.

https://sopuli.xyz/c/anarchychess

Tetris Worlds on PC was one of my favorites — A surreal, story-based Tetris with interesting twists on the gameplay, and the first Guideline Tetris game, setting in stone what “official” Tetris would look and act like even now. (Some love that, some hate it, I’m nowhere near a high enough level player to care either way and just like a cool looking Tetris game.)

This, 100%. While GB Tetris and NES Tetris were some of the first games I remember playing, Tetris DS was one of the first Tetris games I loved. And you’ve absolutely got a point that the original DS does best; the mushy D-pad on the DS Lite just plays it so much worse in my experience. (I feel good about it on my New 2DS XL though other than the either very soft image or very small image I get from it though)

I think their joke was that Thinkpad Arch users (at least online) have a strong correlation with trans women

I’ve also had this issue with both of my SN30 Pro+ controllers but haven’t really found a reliable fix. Sometimes it works if I connect it undocked, and then plug the Deck into the dock, but that doesn’t always work. It’s a shame because it used to work great!

The 1040EZ has been discontinued for several years now, but I’m with you that most free file tax software needs a simple return. Unfortunately, Direct File is one of those at the moment, though I hope it expands soon to at least slightly more complex returns that some other free tools (like FreeTaxUSA) can handle.

Ares as a project has a goal of accuracy at any cost, so tends to need a lot more resources than most other emulators. Before the tragic loss of Near, they wrote an absolutely exceptional article about the development of bsnes/higan and how much power it required for cycle-accuracy of SNES hardware, and it’s way more than you would think is feasibly necessary given that emulators like ZSNES (or Gens, as was my Sega emulator of choice at the time) ran under a crappy Celeron in the 90s.

I will say your CPU will likely throttle back well before it’ll shut down due to overheating. It might affect emulation performance some, but your PC shouldn’t shut down or anything.

Please, I don’t keep a curling rock in my purse.

About two bowling balls are much more effective.

This is my real problem with this (and also broadly pointing the finger to the “Unix philosophy” whenever a project like systemd or Wayland exists, ignoring that the large, complex, multifaceted, and monolithic Linux kernel itself flies in the face of that philosophy). Linux may have originally been built to be Unix-like but has become its own thing that shares a few similarities with Unix.

I forgot about Corel Linux and Lindows as well now that I think on it.

…Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.

I was a Twitter user and had been for a while; Bluesky replaced it for me and I rather like it. It feels very old-school Twitter, but is lacking some niceties such as videos and DMs.

Manjaro isn’t that fragile on its own. No, seriously, their goal is to make a stable version of Arch. No wait stop laughing —

The majority of issues with Manjaro itself (notwithstanding the team’s other issues) would be fixed by retiring the AUR as an official software source altogether. It simply isn’t a repository built with Manjaro’s slower burn in mind; it demands a bleeding edge system. If you don’t use the AUR, Manjaro is as stable as any other system. It just sucks for many other reasons, which is why I personally wouldn’t use it.