Just edited to include my following experiences with Bazzite. It’s possible this will be the end of the road for me. I collected some of my annoyances/critiques of each distro in a notebook. I am guessing many of them will be sorted into “Yeah, we’re used to fiddling” but I still feel at least several of them would just qualify as poor QA and bad UI decisions.

Oh yeah, I definitely plan to install Heroic and Lutris, which simplified a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out which will be fastest if I happen to have a lot of indie, DRM-free games that follow the format of:

• Download zip file
• Unzip to folder
• Run exe in folder

Ideally a launcher could handle some of that relatively quickly for me without too much manual configuration. On Windows, it’s just unzip and then double-click, which of course will now change a little bit.

A VM is an interesting option - I vaguely recall interacting with very slow VMs a while back but supposedly they’ve gotten better. I don’t know if they’ve ever reached suitable gaming performance, or video editing performance though.

I wasn’t dedicated to Mint, but every thread on distro has had its arguments (eg “Whoa, no, I would NOT recommend xxx to a newbie” “yyy isn’t mature”), so it’s difficult to decide who to trust given the goal of Linux.

I had a bit of experience using Steam OS daily when a Deck was my only computer. I’ve heard of Bazzite, but wasn’t quite sure it was mature enough.

Am I misremembering to think Genshin Impact was a cause of one of these major security disasters?

It wasn’t even people who installed Genshin that were victims - it was like, Microsoft signed a driver made by Mihoyo to scan for cheat apps. But mihoyo, being a game company with a rapid release cycle and imperfect security, had a vulnerability in the driver. So, malware authors could include that driver in their packages to elevate access on Windows installs even when no one had any idea what a Genshin is.

Not quite the same thing as Crowdstrike I guess though.

If you’re adventurous, Sker Ritual and Hellbreach Vegas both apparently have good ProtonDB results. (Indie imitation games)

Sounds like a use case for a good product or program, but it’s a hard problem to figure out game performance without installing and running. Soooo many videos online where people install 8 different games to manuallytest framerate, and none where they look up a ready value.

You could first look up the laptop’s GPU, and try putting it into a GPU compare site, score it against a GPU you’ve known and try games you’re familiar with.

If it’s just an Intel GPU, you pretty much know you’d only play basic 2D/lowpoly indie games, if which there are many.