It absolutely kills me that games like Destiny 2 and PUBG can now run on Linux, but I can't play them, except through Google's proprietary bandwidth hog.

Kills. Me.

I mean, great that people can benefit and play it. Especially until the end of May while it's still free. But I have zero interest in this model of gaming. And it hurts. It really hurts! :)

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I fancied giving this a go, but you need to register a DragonEvo account before it lets you play and I was just... naw. It's free though, so maybe I'll give it a go eventually.

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I've had lots of fun with this one. I'd recommend it, although no where near (for me) the same level of replayability of Dreamgate or Slay the Spire. It's one I'll go back to though, as I was just scratching the surface of the core game with the five hours or so I've spent so far.

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Quoting: NanobangIt's been a few years since I had Manjaro on one of my machines. I liked it for the most part. I was just getting used to using pacman --- and really digging the sweet logic of it --- when an update broke something with my Steam Controller, and I didn't discover it until I opened Steam to play something with a friend. The next day, after a bit of fruitless troubleshooting I went back to Xubuntu because when I want to play a game, I want to play a game.

Still, I find comfort in knowing that Manjaro's always in the wings for the day when Canonical is bought-up by Microsoft, or Ubuntu refuses to let me install anything that's not a dog-diddling SNAP. At times being an Ubuntu user can be as troubling as it is troublefree --- so it's nice to know that options such as Manjaro are around. :)

I hope to be on Mint for a long time for much the same reason. All the power and compatibility of Ubuntu, but they have one eye on switching directly to Debian instead. No snaps on Mint, no Gnome-shell. Just a beautiful, snappy (see what I did there?) polished desktop. It's bliss.

I might give Manjaro another shot at some point in the future, but my two attempts at installing it previously didn't go well. On the first install I got to the LightDM/GDM login prompt, but entering anything at all gave me a blank screen for a few seconds, then dumped me back to the login. The second attempt on the same day after burning a new LiveUSB dumped me straight at a command line... no GUI at all. That was about 3 or 4 years ago though. Definitely worth another shot at some point, as long as there's an XFCE or Cinnamon option.

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Quoting: Zlopez

Quoting: ExpalphalogWhat's the difficulty level like?

I got Darkest Dungeon when it came out and I absolutely loved it right up until the final dungeon where the difficulty spiked so hard that it made me uninstall and never play again. That game was tough, and I can handle tough. It slowly increased in difficulty as your stable grew in power and was very well balanced throughout almost the entire game. Then it suddenly went straight from "Only by careful planning, strategic gameplay, and a bit of luck can you beat this boss" to "The first minion you encounter is going to wipe your max level party without breaking a sweat."

I felt the same way when playing it. It has really nice start and the difficulty is raising as you level up, but then you just get something that is almost unplayable. Never finished it because of this. I like tough games, but this was too hardcore.

Quoting: GuestYeah that kind of garbage game design, *ahem* "hard core difficulty", is all the rage with kids these days...

Darkest Dungeon is essentially a basic JRPG like Final Fantasy series without any real story, with a labyrinth to navigate, cool artwork and edgy themes, and tons of grinding and difficulty to make an 10hour game into an 100hour slog. And kids eat this trash like it is candy and rate it "best game evah" and "masterpiece". What can i say, perhaps i am just old.

I looked through some of the positive reviews and most of those people didn't played more than few hours of the game, which is explaining the high score.

Just had a look at my Darkest Dungeon playtime - 11hrs. Glad it's not just me that got sick of the weird, forced grind on this one. It's a shame though, because it had a lot of style.

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Quoting: EagleDelta

Quoting: scaineI actually prefer Mint's approach of using an integrated Timeshift.

I messed with Timeshift a bit, but had to abandon it since I didn't have enough storage space to actually use it. Since most of what I have is either pulled from soemthing like Steam (for games) or is stored on a Git server, I don't really get any benefit from Timeshift :(

I think Timeshift (in Mint's case anyway) is more about backing up your actual system - it isn't really focused on your files/games/home. You can ask it to include dotfiles from your home folder, but by default, it's trying to protect you from installing/changed something in the system and realising you've messed up and need to rollback. Almost like a virtualbox/vmware snapshot. I like that it supports btrfs if you have a btrfs partition handy, otherwise it falls back to rsync.

Quoting: EagleDelta

Quoting: scaineI'm also surprised to hear you say that Cinnamon is buggy. Amazing that my experience can be so positive, while yours is negative (and vice versa for Gnome Shell).

I should've clarified a bit here. Cinnamon is great..... if you're using Mint. Just like Pantheon + Elementary and Budgie + Solus. They all work with other distros, but were designed for the distro that created them and it shows. Try running cinnamon or pantheon in another distro and it will be a painful experience (at least when I've tried it). I have complaints about Pop as well, I'm just not ready to give up the QoL work that System76 has put in to go to something else.... yet

Yeah, that's often true. Although I loved Budgie when I tried it on a base Ubuntu 20.04 beta install a couple of months ago. I just couldn't get GDM to obey my panel preference, so I jumped to Mint.

If I ever find budget to buy a System 76 laptop, I doubt I'll install Mint on it, as there's definitely something to be said for having that "designed together" feeling of hardware and software. I mean, hey, I guess it works for Apple. System76 could do worse...

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Well, an interesting read. I get your point about LTS now, that makes much more sense, ta. Although you claim moving between LTS releases is a big deal... I've never found that to be the case. Indeed, I jumped two releases back in 2012 when I didn't like the look of 14.04, and waited until 2016 to upgrade. My HWE Kernel and PPAs kept me up to date on everything I cared about - kernel, drivers, and primary software. And since it was LTS, I still another year of support to manage the transition to the more modern desktop.

Ultimately though, all your (excellent) arguments fail for me until GDM fixes its multi-monitor support. I like the look of Pop_OS but it's based on GDM and I don't feel like experimenting with LightDM and I'm not a fan of Gnome-Shell anyway, which I still find clunky, rigid and generally unpolished.

Pop_OS has a nice recovery tool, but it's quite low level. I actually prefer Mint's approach of using an integrated Timeshift. It's the only OS I know of that builds a Timeshift capability into the core OS, which is quite nifty. Never had to use it yet though, so it's unproven, I suppose (for me). I'm only 2 months into my Mint journey so far though.

I'm also surprised to hear you say that Cinnamon is buggy. Amazing that my experience can be so positive, while yours is negative (and vice versa for Gnome Shell).

It's both a strength and an infuriating weakness of the Linux ecosystem that there's just so much choice, so many ways to do things.

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I won't quote your post EagleDelta, but I guess time will tell. But if Canonical announce that 20.04 is the last LTS, or even 22.04... I'll be gobsmacked. Similarly, if Steam announce that their new target for compatibility is a rolling release, I'll be gobsmacked all over again.

I suppose time will tell.

Very surprised to hear you say that the panel can be moved to a secondary monitor. I researched this problem for weeks, also raised it on our own Discord, but everyone confirmed - when you change your primary monitor, the panel instantly wants to live there. Some of the hacks allow you to manually move it over to the secondary monitor, but on restart, it rehomes itself again. Pretty frustrating.

As for my "favourite" distro - well sure, that's Ubuntu, obviously. I've been a massive part of that community since 2006. At least... it was until I tried Mint again recently for the first time in about five years. It's pretty incredible and I honestly wonder if I'll ever find myself going back to Ubuntu after trying it. I also really liked Solus/Budgie. I'm going to keep track of that one, such a beautiful desktop.

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Quoting: doctorxI have mine running... but on Manjaro, i cannot get idle detection working. I run xscreensaver btw. Anyone have luck getting idle detection working?

Nope, sorry. I manually turn it on last thing at night and kill it in the morning!

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Quoting: EagleDeltaThis has been an issue with desktop for a while. To the point where Laptop/Desktop OEM System76 suggests you update every 6 months when they release their Ubuntu-based distro. To the point where they have a nice Rust-based updater that works quite well (I used it for Pop!_OS 19.04 -> 19.10 without issue). The idea here is that many desktop OSes are going to more of a rolling or semi-rolling release model. Partially due to security and partially due to the fast rate at which software moves these days. The days of the LTS on desktop are numbered, I think. At least for things like gaming.

I'd suggest trying the Pop!_OS 20.04 beta and see how that works for you.

Nah, Pop is based on Gnome Shell, and their multi-monitor support means that you can't have your panel on a non "primary" display. But I need the panel to appear on the secondary display. Actually, I think the problem is the underlying GDM, because LightDM-based Unity didn't do this, while GDM-based Gnome-shell, XFCE, Unity(!) and Budgie all exhibited the same behaviour. It was just too much effort to get going.

As for LTS dying a death? Nah. Maybe for consumer distros... maybe. But the Redhats and Canonicals of this world need to support the concept of LTS for enterprise support. You might love rolling distros, but in my experience, they break too often, while I typically game at the cutting edge while on an LTS for periods of up to 2.5 years - or in the case of 12.04 to 16.04, just over four. They're stable and, thanks to PPAs, still cutting edge. Also, I just can't be bothered upgrading the core O/S that often. It does nothing for me. My PPAs do all the heavy lifting.

There are edge cases though, like mininova's insistence on some brand new feature of pygobject. Fair enough. I'll take that hit for the stability/reliability and convenience. And ultimately, I could upgrade it... I just don't care enough about their project to be bothered.

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