KarthNemesis

I use listal.com

It's not exactly a game collector site and it's kind of flooded with softcore porn and creeps, but no one bothers me doing my own thing, either. I can track movies, shows, and games there and I like how it's setup, and I can make as many lists as I want. Easy for me to add stuff, too.

You can also track books there but I use other sites for that (librarything primarily, atm.)

I've thought about making my own list-software to my specifications but that's definitely a pipe dream atm. I love making lists.

I had far more issues on windows than I ever have on mint.

When I had issues on windows, which i would run into multiple times a week, the "fixes" would be hacky, slapped-together nonsense that don't even make sense on paper. I had to change almost every program manually to run as administrator. Installing old games was a nightmare and didn't always work properly, even with compatibility modes. New drivers would break stuff. Trying to learn anything new was a rabbit hole that took countless hours and then I only learned the fix for that one specific use-case, and not anything... overarching. System updates were so intrusive, installing crap I didn't want or removed manually, I disabled them completely. It was slow and boot took forever. Ending system processes via task manager didn't always work and the system would freeze often when something went wrong. Often uninstalling programs was messy and left shit all over in the system registry and files and you would have to defrag and system clean once it started getting bloated.

When my windows install finally broke completely just trying to get shit to work the way I wanted, I bailed.

Transitioning to mint was certainly a learning experience.

Reorganizing your workflow will always be more upfront work, but I found I took to the changes fairly quickly. I found the file structure the most odd, but I became very used to it and very much prefer it over how hard it is to find stuff spread scattershot in windows files. It had a lot of little quality of life things that I really appreciate, mounting and unmounting external drives felt better, way more stuff worked out of the box, old games were not a nightmare to get working because they're had longstanding fixes for years that actually make sense. Solutions, in general, make way more sense to me, and I actually get a sense that I understand why they function. My boot time is very fast and I've never broken my system (I came close once doing something incredibly stupid and very niche, but I just timeshifted back and voila, fixed.)

Fixes or changes for preference tend to "stick" for me, like when I swapped to pipewire myself it's been very smooth sailing. I can pick and choose updates or ignore packages that don't work. There was an issue with kernels for a while that significantly increased my boot times; I just postponed that update for a few versions until one of the newer ones worked. I find I can get down similar rabbit holes to learn some stuff, but it both feels more like "lasting" solutions (and I learn more about how to do other stuff) as well as just more fun. Documentation is a lot better with users who know what they're doing instead of the guesswork "well I dunno but this might have worked for me, I tried 20 fixes so it's probably one of these!" I would run into on windows troubleshooting...

I think my favourite part of linux is a lot of things I wanted solutions to, for years, usually have at least one person out there with a similar issue that wrote a small program that just does it. Does it well. For free. I spent so much time digging for really basic stuff like a sound equalizer that wasn't garbage, bloatware, full of trackers, or ransomware! I don't have to spend hours trying to find a stinkin' RGB controller that isn't awful because the choices available are just better! I don't have to spend weeks comparing and contrasting antivirus-es and hate all of them in the end!

I find mint extremely stable and have no urge to swap nor return to windows. I find it much more stable for my use-case. I really like it, actually, and I appreciate how a lot of it is set up. Been using it daily for 4 years.

I loathed windows the entire time I used it, and had been side-eyeing linux for quite a while before committing. I don't know if I'm a "normal" use-case, probably not. Possibly it is best to take my experience as, "if you keep hitting walls often in windows that frustrate the hell out of you, linux might be a decent choice for you, and might "feel easier."" Both have their own quirks and own troubleshooting, I just prefer the ones on mint and they make more sense to me. (And take me far less time.)

sorry if the Incredibly Late reply is bad, but i saw this today and these are the people in the picture if you still want to know:

double trouble (she-ra and princesses of power)
najimi osana (komi can't communicate)
crona (soul eater)
raine whispers (owl house)
a somewhat spoilery character to explain (steven universe)

i can't tell who the red jpeg'd blob in the middle is supposed to be if anybody though lol

While you are technically correct, this is a massive PITA to turn off manually every single boot and rebooting just to play a game isn't very fun, ha. (It also breaks linux, where I play.)

For the forseeable future, unless someone is committed enough to making Darling work.
(Mac layer instead of Windowz, the mac version does not and will not have vanguard.)

This. An always-on rootkit is worlds different in terms of privacy and security than most conventional ones like EAC.
(Not like conventional ACs are good for these things either, of course. But it is many degrees less invasive.)

it's just gambling. the thrill of getting something "good" or FOMO with limited editions is what they operate on.

Beef maruchan ramen. Basically almost entirely what I survived on until I was 25.
I used to do chicken + mushroom flavour when I was very small but they discontinued it.

If one is interested in the perspective of using Mint for games:

I have been using Mint for gaming for ~4 years and anything that was broken for me is fixed now. Went straight from Windows 7 to Mint and have had a very pleasant experience. If you're using Steam primarily, there's very little that doesn't simply work out of the box. The rare case that doesn't is generally solveable through ProtonDB, or eventually fixed.

The only shit that doesn't work for the foreseeable future is generally online-only stuff specifically that has invasive anticheat. Big MMOs, Destiny 2, Valorant, that sort of thing. Blizzard games mostly work fine, though have some random temporary issues rarely. But I don't usually play games like that for various reasons, so I do not personally care myself.

Special mention to League of Legends which is the big multiplayer game I do play and works a hell of a lot more consistently than it used to, there's actually a community here on the fediverse if you have issues setting it up, ( !kbin.social/m/leagueoflinux ) but in recent years it should be pretty easy compared to even 2 years ago. Install through lutris and it just works for me now, and it runs measurably smoother.

I wouldn't really recommend using the Epic store, as stuff does not run very consistently and it's awkward and slow to run through lutris. Itch has a native client that works very well for native games, and at least tries to run windows stuff through wine (so-so on if it works, some small first-timer games just aren't very stable ha. Most games work for me.) GOG is a pain in the ass imo and I know that's a controversial opinion, some people like downloading every individual game through the website lmao. I have hundreds of games and this is mostly annoying to me, personally. There's actually a third party doodad for it (minigalaxy) that works fine, but I don't care to try it myself. (A lot of the appeal to GOG for me was their client, not being able to use it just makes it "worse steam" to me.)

If you like indie games (especially those popular enough to have steam pages), singleplayer games, or retro games, it's a great OS. (It's actually superior to run retro games on Mint versus Windows, from my experience, trying to get some of them to run on Windows was an absolute nightmare.)

I have had no drivers issues, didn't really have to go out of my way to "set things up." Though I would recommend having a rig with an AMD gpu. Nvidia is the one you run into more drivers issues with. I did swap to pipewire manually but it's not really necessary. Everything I've stuck in has been serviceable as plug-and-play, though some I've added tweaks to some things for my own tastes over the years.

If you search for "haptic fidget" on etsy there's a bunch of small, unobtrusive ones. If you like two pieces of 3D printed things you can slide around with magnets. My favourite is embedded with rolley balls on the outsides but there's all types of them.