it feeds you lies about sandboxes. AND YOU BELIEVED IT!

No, you simply failed to comprehend what I wrote.

Literally every distro has seamless gaming.

To expand on this: Some distros want a little more setup than others for gaming, but it’s generally a one-time thing and not particularly hard. Even my Debian Stable system plays games beautifully with a handful of Backports installed.

Is flatpak the way?

Steam can be installed natively or in a Flatpak. The latter can be a little fussy every once in a while, depending on your setup, but has the advantage of somewhat better sandboxing. (For better privacy protection, do your gaming on a dedicated machine or at least in a dedicated user account.)

What about Proton?

Proton is great. Steam comes with several versions, allowing you to choose the one best fitting any game that doesn’t work with the latest/default version. Some users choose to add third-party Proton builds (like GE-Proton) to Steam alongside the standard ones, but it usually isn’t necessary.

work on x11 stopped ages ago.

The most recent release was last week.

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2026-August/003741.html

I really want something that’s going to be no-fuss, solid as a rock and that’s simply going to get out of my way.

That would be Debian Stable. I’m using it with KDE Plasma (6.3.6), and am pretty happy with it. (I also applied a few backports for gaming and software development, but that was easy.)

Is there something about newer Plasma versions that you absolutely must have right now, rather than living with 6.3.x until next year?

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.

It was a different perspective, not a personal attack.

Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.

Trying whatever hardware one already has on hand is perfectly reasonable, but it’s not a lottery.

Bear in mind that an OS image captured from a bare metal installation might fail to boot in a VM, depending on whether the original installation included the drivers needed in the VM environment. In that case, I would suggest learning about whatever recovery tools Windows offers these days, and trying to add the needed drivers.

taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.

There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.

I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)

it does streamline some things that Debian makes annoying (graphics drivers, for example).

Do you by any chance mean Nvidia drivers?

Weird. I don’t know how that happened. I wonder if I hit a glitch in Lemmy’s web UI.

deleted by creator

This is extremely dangerous command! If anything goes wrong for whatever reason and the variable $tempdir is empty at the time of this command, then it would delete everything.

And this danger is not merely theoretical. Steam for Linux did it in 2015.

https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

Related:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-x86-64-v3-v4

Time for the usual troubleshooting steps:

• Have you Checked for errors in the log output of…
  • Steam?
  • Proton?
  • The game?
• What changed on your system between the last time WoW worked properly and the first time it didn’t?
  • OS update?
    • Kernel?
    • Drivers?
  • Proton update?
  • Steam update?
  • Game update?
  • Battle.net update?
• Are you watching for other people discussing the same problem?

Blizzard has a recurring history of making changes to Games and Battle.net that break in Wine. When this happens, workarounds can sometimes be found (such as reverting to a prior Battle.net version), but a real fix often requires waiting a few weeks or months for Proton to adapt. It happened roughly once per year when I was last playing their games.

Good luck.

Another thought: Are you running Wine in a container of any kind? If so, have you given it access to your /dev/hidraw* devices? I have seen behavior like you describe when a game was unable to access them (but was able to access /dev/input/*).

If the game ignores the disabled state that you applied in Wine’s controller config, I wonder if it’s using SDL for input. In that case, you might try exporting an environment variable telling SDL to ignore the controller.

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/SDL_HINT_GAMECONTROLLER_IGNORE_DEVICES

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_HINT_GAMECONTROLLER_IGNORE_DEVICES

Please let us know what you learn.

The one I use was discontinued years ago, so instead of recommending it, I’ll offer a suggestion:

Don’t look for “gaming” headsets. Look instead for well-regarded headphones and mic, or for a telephony (VoIP) headset from a brand that specializes in them, on sale. You’ll be more likely to find something that sounds good in both directions and lasts a long time.

I don’t like to judge a book by its cover, but I must admit that the name chosen for Continuwuity (and conduwuit before it) makes me less likely to use or recommend it.

It’s worth noting that KDE Connect works on more desktops than just KDE Plasma. It also supports Linux, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and probably other operating systems, and can do more than just transfer files.

The Calyx statement explains it.

Google released the Android Open Source Project code for this new version of their OS, but not device-specific code for the new Pixel models. GrapheneOS targets only Pixel devices, so they cannot continue development without access to that code, at least not as they have been so far.