I'm Steve - as an elder millennial, I got into gaming in the late 90's with Maxis games, Roller Coast Tycoon, and then FPS games like Quake/Unreal Tournament/Star Trek Elite Force. Now I play RPGs mostly (1500 hours in Balders Gate 3 lol).

I'd been using windows for 25+ years but have always been a tinkerer (including Hackintosh builds), so exploring Linux was fun; I fully switched about two years ago when Proton started getting super solid, and after one too many random Windows issues cutting into my precious nighttime gaming. I started with Mint and now run Fedora. I also built my wife a livingroom gaming PC which runs Bazzite (I also have a NAS that runs Fedora and a Steam Deck OLED). No Windows AT ALL in this house, except for a spare SSD I can plug in for emergencies and random things (like upgrading my MSI monitor's firmware, lol).

Been following the Bluesky account and reading articles for awhile now, happy to join the forum!

hey — eli from genestone here.

mostly lurking linux gaming news on GOL for a while and finally making an account. i make tiny cozy games solo. latest one is GeneBloom — greenhouse plant genetics / flower breeding, sell to quirky customers. pixel art, chill loop.

released it on steam jun 23 2026 with a native linux build (also win/mac) for $2.99. engine is python if anyone cares. still learning the usual linux packaging gotchas so if something breaks on a distro, yell at me and ill try to fix it.

not here to spam — just saying hi. happy to hang out / answer questions.

— eli
[email protected]

Hi I'm Sira.

This year is my first real adventure into Linux. Before that lies 36 years of Windows. I once tried to run a webserver on FreeBSD - that was more than 20 years ago and that experience kept me away from Linux until a friend finally convinced me to try out a distro. I was happily blown away how user-friendly Linux has become and now only run that 😍

I just found Gaming on Linux today and decided I would sign up to the forum, because it looks to be a really good place to find help with my issues :)

Quoting: SiraHi I'm Sira.

This year is my first real adventure into Linux. Before that lies 36 years of Windows. I once tried to run a webserver on FreeBSD - that was more than 20 years ago and that experience kept me away from Linux until a friend finally convinced me to try out a distro. I was happily blown away how user-friendly Linux has become and now only run that 😍

I just found Gaming on Linux today and decided I would sign up to the forum, because it looks to be a really good place to find help with my issues :)

Wow, your first experience with custom OS'es was a freeBSD web server 20 years ago. No wonder you stayed away. FreeBSD has many useful and valuable properties. Ease of use(for people that don't yet have a computer science degree) isn't one of them. Also, yeah within these 20 years giant leaps were made.

Quoting: LoudTechieWow, your first experience with custom OS'es was a freeBSD web server 20 years ago. No wonder you stayed away. FreeBSD has many useful and valuable properties. Ease of use(for people that don't yet have a computer science degree) isn't one of them. Also, yeah within these 20 years giant leaps were made.

Heh... Thank you! I am glad to read that it was not just me that was having a real hard time with it.
Of course, the friend that introduced me to FreeBSD (and was kind enough to make a manual for me) does indeed have a master degree in computer science 😄

Quoting: Sira

Quoting: LoudTechieWow, your first experience with custom OS'es was a freeBSD web server 20 years ago. No wonder you stayed away. FreeBSD has many useful and valuable properties. Ease of use(for people that don't yet have a computer science degree) isn't one of them. Also, yeah within these 20 years giant leaps were made.

Heh... Thank you! I am glad to read that it was not just me that was having a real hard time with it.
Of course, the friend that introduced me to FreeBSD (and was kind enough to make a manual for me) does indeed have a master degree in computer science 😄

You're welcome.

Yeah that's the tricky thing.
For the subset of our society that does have computer science degree, freeBSD has better ease of use.
FreeBSD is literally designed by computer science professors for computer science students.
Once the logic of computer science has finally been ingrained in you, the logic of freeBSD becomes natural to you, because it's the same logic.

You will find that the deeper you stray in the obscure corners of FOSS this becomes true for more things.
The free software movement fundamentally comes forth out of the mind of engineers frustrated with the fact that they were actively being kept from making their own adjustments to implementations.
Not a love for consumer rights, nor the ambition to make money, but the drive to warp, impress and create.
As such the tools they made are somewhat disconnected from consumer demand.
It's the capital players that seek to save on engineering costs that are slowly creating this connection.

You will still see that in Linux, just in less extreme levels.
Take me for example.
I don't (yet) hold a degree in computer science.
I do follow courses at a university that have the explicit goal of making me a computer science degree holder, but I'm not (yet) a computer science degree holder.
As such I use terms like subset, define people's thought process in "logic", describe products as "implementations" and describe modding as "warping" instead of repair.
I also can still grasp the concept that freeBSD is hard.

The first thing you will notice from this is that nearly all useful advice is formulated this way:

$ sudo command -abcdefg --parameter target | command -ab /dev/null
$ command -abcde target
$ sudo command target

On Windows they had screenshots and here we have this ugly mess.
This is, because even to semi-computer science degree holders this stuff makes more sense than point and click.
I try reminding myself it's ugly, so I keep seeing the things that can improve(, because in the end improvement is an engineers job).

Last edited by LoudTechie on 21 Sep 2026 at 1:27 pm UTC

Ayup, Zombie here. The Steam Deck got me back into gaming after I had to sell all my old gear due to financial issues, then that got me into Linux + in turn into new and interesting lines of work.

I'm also quite heavy on remote gaming solutions, I use Sunshine/Moonlight with the MoonDeck plugin to remote stream games from my CachyOS machine to my Steam Deck OLED.

Hi. I'm a guy from Sweden in my forties and It's been roughly five years now since I ditched Windows for Linux. Not regretting it for one second! And yeah, as you can see I'm also a supporter of this site cause I,ve been visiting this site almost since I switched to Linux and quite recently decided to become a supporter since I like the articles here and think it's important to support smaller, independent game-journalists.
As for what games I like/play, it's about 95% indie-games. There are very few big-budget titles I'm interested in. I also like reading, mostly fantasy and love listening to Heavy/Power Metal.