• SavvyWolf
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    492 months ago

    Anyone tried FreeBSD? Linux is starting to lose that hipster allure.

    • Gunpachi
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      42 months ago

      I have used Freebsd for sometime on my desktop back in 2021. For the most part I had a good experience except that I couldn’t figure out how to connect earphones/mic on the ports on my PC case. I had to plug it directly to my motherboard for Freebsd to detect them. I used an Nvidia card at that time and it also worked very nicely although it had much older drivers than Linux.

      I ended up switching back to linux because of 2 reasons -

      1. I have a few BTRFS drives that I use regularly and couldn’t afford to buy some new ones for Freebsd at that time.

      2. I couldn’t play games using steam proton. I don’t know the situation these days, but I’ll surely check it out If it has improved since then.

      You should give Freebsd a try, you might like it.

    • @sugar_in_your_tea
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      22 months ago

      Yup, I love it, but it’s not great as a desktop…

      OpenBSD is ironically a pretty good desktop though.

      • @[email protected]
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        292 months ago

        To be fair, as far as DRM is concerned Steam is pretty mild and game developers gotta eat.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 months ago

        They also sell non-DRM software. And most importantly they invest the money they make from selling those games into developing Linux so it’s better for everyone, I’ll take a corporation that uses my money to make things better for myself than one that sells “only” DRM free" games (when it’s convenient, because GoG also sells DRMd games in case you didn’t knew)

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        I agree, I haven’t experienced the stereotypical “WiFi doesn’t work” (except for a college network), but I have had issues with screen brightness not working (though seems to be fixed in newer versions), and issues with the Nvidia graphics card that I can’t just swap out with an AMD because it’s a laptop and I don’t want to buy a whole new one.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        No idea why you’re being downvoted. I wish I could daily-drive Linux on my laptop, but that would come at the cost of slashed battery life, permanently on keyboard backlight, no more fingerprint sensor, issues with speakers and so on. Even after years of honourable enthusiasts trying to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers, it’s just still not there. Laptops will take a while to follow suite, but Linux really does need to take a larger portion of the market before manufacturers start being interested in Linux support.

        And before I also get downvoted, yes you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad and happily install Linux on it, but please realize that not all people want to limit themselves in their choice of hardware and it’s the software that should adapt to the hardware, not the other way around.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          Yes. Just yes ahah

          I switched to linux on my laptop i had to do 4 reinstall to get my nvidia gpu to work and as of late my speaker arent recognised anymore, despite reinstaling pulse and alsa. One of my informatitian friend that has a linux laptop had gpu issue too, the laptop at work need frequent overseeing by the it to work properly etc etc…

          I love linux and I truly think we NEED to get our hands back on our tech, and understand better the technology we use, but yeah… If you really need your laptop to be fully operational quickly and you’re not tech savvy well think twice…

    • @[email protected]
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      -102 months ago

      It’s still coming, I have tried to switch using my desktop but still have. Needed to swap back to windows for stability.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        For stability? A missing feature or software you need I get, but stability? Which distro/DE are you using? Please don’t say you’re running Gentoo and some crazy TWM setup or something like that lol

        Stability to me was one of the biggest reasons to use Linux - it does exactly what I expect it to do, never breaks, updates never break shit.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 months ago

          LOL never beaks. Most Linux distros are chock full of bugs that the end user has to work around

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            I’ve not had a single breakage in the past ~4 years I’ve been on Fedora Workstation, despite me often moving to the beta channel. Pretty nice for an up-to-date distro.

            Granted, I’ve also been on some less stable distros/DEs (in my case, it used to be Manjaro’s KDE version). Perhaps yours is similar, since you claim to have extreme stability problems?

            I cannot say the same for Windows, where things randomly stop working, I still occasionally get bluescreens, it shits the bed when I change hardware, etc. the last time I booted into Windows my audio stopped working entirely, and no matter how many times I reinstalled audio drivers or did a system restore, nothing would fix it. I ended up having to buy an external DAC.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              There’s a lot of reasons to stay on windows, never heard of stability being one haha. It’s bsod city over there lol

          • Cosmic Cleric
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            22 months ago

            I haven’t seen that on Fedora, in the years that I’ve been using it.

        • @CancerMancer
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          2 months ago

          Same, I hated how even after turning Windows updates off it would update and mysteriously ruin something with my productivity. All I wanted was to turn off updates during weekdays but Windows does what it wants.

          Switched to Ubuntu at that time and not only were updates faster, they didn’t break my flow. It really felt like the way a computer should, rather than a phone OS with mouse and keyboard support.

        • @[email protected]
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          -22 months ago

          I’m was talking about game stability. This is a gaming related topic right? Linux is stable but games had some issues.

          Truthfully nothing major that stopped me from playing but I had to mess with proton in steam from time to time. Most recently the Last of Us crashes on start, not sure why it was fine previously. Also, there were some games anti cheat did not work and I needed to play in Windows.

          Also, I have consistently had issues streaming to my steam Deck. Windows isn’t perfect either but it’s more likely to work the with windows. Sure maybe it’s my Nvidia GPU, but saying switch to amd does make my setup more stable.

    • warm
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      2 months ago

      Year of the Steam Deck. Linux still not ready for mainstream desktop usage :(

        • @[email protected]
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          02 months ago

          I don’t get why people find that funny, he’s absolutely right. It’s gotten better but Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows, and mainstream doesn’t do tinkering. Let me give some examples as well.

          I have windows and fedora dual booted. I also have 4 physical drives in the PC, 1 for windows, 1 for Linux and then 2 separate drives to keep windows data and Linux data. If I do a clean install of windows and want to play steam games all I need to do is let windows update run, install steam, direct steam to access the downloaded games on my secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I do a clean install of Fedora and I want to play Steam I have to do system update, then manually install graphics drivers, then install steam, then mount the secondary drive then direct to steam to the secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I don’t want to do the last two steps again, because Fedora doesn’t automount secondary drives, I need to also set up automounting by messing with the terminal and confog files. Honestly, you lost the mainstream gamer the moment they had to manually install graphics card drivers (because you need to do it through a terminal).

          Another less important example, but one I still found funny, is when I wanted to make a new distro installer. I’ve used balena etcher to flash my stick on Windows, but I didn’t want to reboot into It Windows so I installed it on Fedora, downloaded the image I wanted to flash, started balena and added the file. I get some header error. I didn’t feel like troubleshooting so I reboot into Windows, download the exact same image, started balena and added the file. No errors and I could flash without any issues. Same file and (in theory) same software but it works on Windows and doesn’t work on Linux.

          And of course there’s the Nvidia cards sucking thing, which is not at all suitable for mainstream considering almost 80% of steam users are using Nvidia cards. I get that’s almost entirely Nvidias fault but it’s still an issue with Linux. When your entire system black screens as KDE plasma is booting up even an above average user is not going to know how to troubleshoot that.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 months ago

            Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows

            As a long time windows user who’s just got a side install of Mint for funnies until.a faster drive I can dedicate to it arrives: lol, no. That’s why people are laughing at them.

            I use fedora and have to…

            Pick a less annoying distro then, babe. I installed Steam in one click (during OS setup actually) and then logged in, enabled proton, and started using it with the games on an external drive. Literally easier than windows cuz Mint installed it with the OS and I didn’t have to go to Steams website.

            nVidia cards sucking thing

            My 2080TI has worked flawlessly on Mint without any tinkering. Used the Nvidia driver manager thing and boom, running games. They even run at a bigger fps on average (about 10%).

            Sounds like you used a specific distro and think those problems exist with every version of Linux. They do not, and there’s a reason why Mint is most often the recommended distro for those unwilling to tinker

            And I’m not even gonna pretend that Mint is perfect, it’s not! For example my sound card just doesn’t work in it despite the OS being aware of literally every aspect of it. But the issues I’ve had daily driving it have been LESS than daily driving windows 10 even after said win 10 install has already had years of customization and tweaking done to it.

            • @[email protected]
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              02 months ago

              You do realize that just kicks the ball down to a different problem that prevents from mainstream use, picking the wrong distro?

              That said I’ll give mint a go.

          • Cosmic Cleric
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            2 months ago

            It’s gotten better but Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows

            Depends on the distro, and if unique or ancient hardware is being used.

            I use Fedora/KDE (I believe it has better hardware support).

            During install I click one checkbox for using proprietary code, and then everything just works. I code, office/print/scan, and game on it daily.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 months ago

        My computer illiterate mother in law that has been using Linux for years strongly disagrees.

        • warm
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          22 months ago

          Sorry, Linux is ready for basic usage such as web browsing and creating a document.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 months ago

            It’s ready for a lot more than that, can you tell me something that Linux can’t do without mentioning a third party company that refuses to support Linux?

        • Cosmic Cleric
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          2 months ago

          My computer illiterate wife’s right there with your mother-in-law.

  • @[email protected]
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    282 months ago

    Guys I have a foolproof plan to reach 10%

    spoiler
    • Stop using GNOME as default DE
    • Throw cash money at Wayland devs and hire an assassin to harass slap Nvidia’s CEO
      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        Gnome = bad is a common Linux community circlejerk.

        People will tell you Linux is about personal choice, but the second you say cool, I’m using flatpaks/Gnome/Wayland/System-D/any other thing that people get upset about, those same people will lose their fucking minds over you having a choice different to theirs.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          It’s not so much a circlejerk as much as a knowledge that KDE plasma is the most approachable DE with the most polished first experience for the majority of new users

          The reason it gets interpreted as Gnome bad is that both Plasma and Gnome both mainly target users who want something that just works out of the box and doesn’t have a steep learning curve, however KDE have managed to keep up better with what new users want in recent years while Gnome has fallen into a semi-trap of doing what their current/older users want. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad distro, frankly it’s great for their current users, however it does little for newer users who may not find it as intuitive as other DEs, therefore making it a worse default DE for “off-the-shelf” distros targeting new Linux users.

          At the end of the day though, it is about personal choice, and nobody’s saying i3 isn’t better for powerusers or that LXDE doesn’t run faster, but if you have the knowledge that you want to install one of those or the many other DEs available, then you can just find the iso/distro/package with that DE and install it rather than just clicking the all-in-one-guaranteed-to-work-lts download button on the distro’s homepage

          • @[email protected]
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            32 months ago

            That and the Gnome devs carry a lot of anti-consumer opinions and practices in particular since Gnome 3. Must be something to do with the Microsoft influence from around that time.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            It’s not so much a circlejerk as much as a knowledge that KDE plasma is the most approachable DE with the most polished first experience for the majority of new users

            You say that like it’s a fact rather than just your personal opinion.

            The reason it gets interpreted as Gnome bad

            No no no. I’m not misunderstanding people liking or preferring Plasma as hating Gnome. I love Plasma, and so should most people, it’s a very good DE. I pretty much only use Gnome and Plasma these days, and can happily praise or criticise either of them.

            People do have a hateful circlejerk about Gnome. Look at any large discussion about Gnome and it gets full of haters who still can’t accept that Gnome 3 went in a very different direction to the traditional WinUX. People that say it’s shit. People that accuse the devs of being evil. Go onto a submission about a new Gnome release and you’ll find some smoothbrain making the classic wHaT fEaTuReS DiD tHeY rEmOVe tHiS TiMe joke which holds zero basis in reality.

            And I’m not talking about fair criticisms either. I could rattle some off the top of my head. I’m talking about hatred.

            Shitting on Gnome very much is the hip, trendy thing to do in the Reddit/Lemmy/reactionary YouTuber space.

            According to many in the Linux community, Linux is all about choice, so long as your choice is the same as theirs.

            • Cosmic Cleric
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              2 months ago

              It’s not so much a circlejerk as much as a knowledge that KDE plasma is the most approachable DE with the most polished first experience for the majority of new users

              You say that like it’s a fact rather than just your personal opinion.

              It’s a safe assumption to make though, based on the fact that KDE most closely mimics the Windows UX, which Gnome does not, and that the vast majority of human beings who use computers are most familiar with the Windows UX, hence most approachable.

              • @[email protected]
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                -12 months ago

                I reject the premise that just because more people use Windows, a Windows UX must be the most intuitive and alternatives must appear more complicated to use.

                There are more households that drive cars than ride a bike - is a car therefore a more intuitive to use transport tool than a bike?

                • Cosmic Cleric
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                  12 months ago

                  I reject the premise that just because more people use Windows, a Windows UX must be the most intuitive and alternatives must appear more complicated to use.

                  That’s one hell of a ‘heavy lift’ to create a non-Windows UX experience that is more intuitive and easier for Windows user to adapt to that is completely different from the Windows UX experience they know today.

                  Not saying it’s not possible, but I think you’d have better success in pulling people over from Windows to Linux if the UX experience was similar, since they’re already dealing with a retraining issue (Linux) that is a barrier they have to overcome when transferring over.

                  There’s no need to add more obstacles to that transference process.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 months ago

                  That’s a crazy take though. Everyone knows that what you’re most familiar with is way more intuitive than something you’ve never touched in your life.

                  There are more households that drive cars than ride a bike - is a car therefore a more intuitive to use transport tool than a bike?

                  How intuitive something is only affects the initial experience. This is why driving a car usually takes a year to learn in most countries - it’s not very intuitive. If you know how to drive a car, however, you can learn to drive a bus much faster - it’s now intuitive because you already know how to drive a car, which is similar.

                  So of course whichever DE replicates windows the best is going to be the most intuitive. Doesn’t mean that it’s better once you’ve gotten used to it though.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          I really don’t understand why anyone feels the need to hate on a desktop environment. It’s not like on windows or mac where it is what it is and you’re stuck with it. If you don’t like it, just shut up and switch to something else (unless you like your de overall but have some improvements in mind of course, no reason to shut up for that).

        • @[email protected]
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          -22 months ago

          People forget that freedom is a lie within the natural world. Why do they think they have freedom within the digital realm they all made up?

    • @[email protected]
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      82 months ago

      I love Libadwaita. It’s so good I started to use it to develop general cross platform apps

      • Ich, einfach anders
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        11 month ago

        Does “cross platform apps” include Windows in your case? If so, how is your experience compiling and packaging a libadwaita app for Windows?

      • fmstrat
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        52 months ago

        Because he wants it to be Windows and hasn’t found Dash to Panel and Wintile yet.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Thank you about mentioning Wintile! I was wondering today if there is a way to do 2x2 tiling on gnome

          • fmstrat
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            42 months ago

            Hah, no problem. I’m the author, so it was a bit of a plug ;)

    • @Grass
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      12 months ago

      Who even does that? The distros I have used recently that aren’t headless have a choice either at image download or during install.

    • @[email protected]
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      -32 months ago

      Stop using GNOME as default DE

      No need to go as far. Just jail everyone working on Adwaita.

      They always acted like the are the only ones in town, but while checking the spelling just now, the first result says “Adwaita (from अद्वैत, meaning “one and only” in Sanskrit)” The serious UX designers were a joke to them from the start.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 months ago

        I love libadwaita/GTK4. All my apps are consistent, look and work in the same way, they all look gorgeous, and there’s extreme attention to detail and adherence to good, well-studied UI paradigms.

        Libadwaita has went a long way in making my system feel like one cohesive ecosystem, rather than a smattering of inconsistent, wildly different apps.

        Libadwaita and GTK4 is amazing and the developers deserve a lot of praise.

        But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.

          Not when you are forced into it because it’s made a dependency of something you use.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            Then use an alternative, if you really hate anything even remotely connected to it on your system and are seeking the ideological purity of having zero related dependencies.

            You’re not entitled to have the software that’s provided to you for free be exactly how you like it.

            But if your view is popular enough, there will surely be alternatives or altered forks.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 months ago

              Oh no I do when it comes to that. The problem’s (usually) not there.

              The problem mostly lies with distro packagers. They often ignore the “this dependency is optional” part and make the dependency mandatory. Back in the day Fedora was terrible at packaging new stuff (trying to remove PulseAudio would also try to remove Libreoffice, for example), nowadays it seems it’s Debian’s turn at the horribad packaging wheel. So in order to “use an alternative”, which would actually be the exact same software I’m already using except correctly compiled and packaged, I’d have to jump distros.

              One notorious example is NetworkManager, which in Debian requires systemd for some weird-ass reason even tho you can run a correct Debian system without systemd. The Antix people compile it correctly, with systemd as optional / shim’d, but that means having to add Antix’s repo to Debian to use NetworkManager in Debian.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.

          The entire point of FOSS

  • @[email protected]
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    112 months ago

    I tried a few games on Linux and I spent more time looking for why one game wasn’t saving my game and why another game wouldn’t actually launch with no error messages then actually playing a game.

    • @[email protected]
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      122 months ago

      The only games thus far that I couldn’t get to work were pirated. Id say 80%+ pirated work, and so far all legit games. Even weird launchers like FF14 (stock, not the 3rd party) and Guild Wars 2. And then of course Steam does most the work.

      Everyone’s mileage varies, obvs, plus there’s different distros and games.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 months ago

        I’ve just recently gotten into this and installed steam through ubuntu’s store. Could be why it thought subnautica was on Linux and let me download it. I uninstalled and installed through apt-get this time, hopefully that fixes that issue.

        • Chewy
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          62 months ago

          Having issue with the Steam snap isn’t surprising, as even Valve recommends against using it. A few years ago flatpak Steam had similar issues that got fixed over time.

          For now I hope you’ll have more luck with the .deb!

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            Sounds way too confusing, and goes against the whole idea that “Linux is easier than Windows because it has an App Store” and “you don’t have to use the command line”.

            • Chewy
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              52 months ago

              Yes, it’s sad that Canonical is pushing Snap before those kinks are ironed out. In general it’s a solid distro for people not familiar with Linux, but having to stumble over those issues is a dealbreaker.

              Linux being easier than Windows is true in some ways, but it completely sidesteps issues Windows and macOS solved for a while, e.g. forcing users to upgrade. It’s annoying but some people just… don’t do the bare minimum. E.g. a friend’s dad has been using Linux for probably a decade by now, and for some reason apt auto upgrades broke (likely powerloss during upgrade). An image based OS like Fedora Atomic doesn’t have this issue, as it won’t apply updates to the running OS (by default).

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Hmmm? You can run Subnautica on Linux through Steam, as you can run most games written for Windows.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            Well, I’ve tried subnautica and BG3 and hitting play on either would just not do anything. Saves in Civ6 wouldn’t work either.

            Troubleshooting BG3 is a hassle mainly due to it’s such a big game and I have a dumb internet data cap.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 months ago

              I don’t have Subnautica but it is on my wishlist because you can play in VR, which is what I mostly play these days. PCVR is not as reliable on Linux as standard games, but nevertheless more than 50% of titles do work flawlessly now. Subnautica is definitely one of them - you should check for other people who’ve got your problem on ProtonDB. If you actually care, look into it more, you should be able to get all of those games running.

        • Cosmic Cleric
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          2 months ago

          I play Subnautica on Fedora/Linux, installed directly from Steam (native), so I’m guessing it let you download it because with Proton enabled it’ll play just fine.

          Just right click on the game and go into the properties and turn on the Windows/Proton support for the game.

          As a side comment, I love Subnautica, a great game!

    • TwinTusks
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      102 months ago

      Thats the game, once I got the game working, I’ll just leave it and never open it again.