For a while I daily drove a Purism Librem 14 with Debian’s fully free kernel, and installed as few non-free packages as possible, including firmware blobs (which I didn’t install any of until I decided I needed Bluetooth). My experience with gaming was generally fine.

With linux-libre you really have to buy your hardware specifically with support in mind. You’re limited to Intel and non-bleeding-edge AMD graphics cards, a very small range of wifi cards, and no Bluetooth. Otherwise, video games should work as well as they would on any other computers with the same specs. Especially if you’re also limiting yourself to games with free engines - I’m not aware of a single libre game that demands more than a modern Intel integrated graphics card can provide, even on high settings.

I’ll probably use Codeberg or another Forgejo server for my next programming project, if/when I have one that is far enough along to publish (motivating myself to get that far is a tall task). Until then, everything I’d consider contributing to is either on GitHub, or is self-hosting some other software, so I don’t have a reason to create an account yet.

No modern AAA games have been released this way, but there is at least one game made specifically for libretro (Dinothawr) and a few other games that have been converted into “contentless” libretro cores (Cave Story, Mr. Boom, Rick Dangerous).

The games (or their engines/emulators) would have to be modified to use the libretro API for things like input, rendering, and sound. Though it doesn’t look terribly hard to program for, it does tie the game to RetroArch (or another libretro frontend) and possibly limit what the program can do.

I thought I’d also bring up Lutris, which is not only a libretro frontend but also a frontend for numerous other game platforms. It may not have the game console-like UI of RetroArch, but I think if you must have all games under one launcher, it’s the best you could hope for.

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/11139

I’ve switched to FreeTube for now, it still works using the Invidious API. This is happening because YouTube is testing forced login to watch videos or use the API. There is a workaround it seems, but we’ll have to wait for all the major clients to roll it out.

First, go to [three dots] -> Preferences -> Runners -> Proton, click the button next to the newest available version of Proton GE (currently ge-proton-9-7), and wait for it to download.

Then, go to your bottle -> Settings -> Runner, set the runner to ge-proton-[version], and wait for Bottles to configure the new runner.

Have you tried using different runners? According to ProtonDB Ape Out is completely supported by Proton, so maybe try a Proton runner instead of Wine.

Almost all distros can dual boot, so there’s little reason to highlight one as being the best for it. Dual booting is a bit messy and risky no matter what you do, so back up your data first and, if you’re new to Linux, look up instructions for dual booting Windows 11 and your chosen distro.

Only one I can think of that does anything special with dual boot, off the top of my head, is Q4OS, which offers a way to install it from within Windows using an app. (It also happens to be tailored towards people familiar with Windows XP or 7, so it should be a somewhat smooth transition for a first time Linux user.) I haven’t tried this myself, but I imagine it just expedites the usual steps of dual booting: shrink the Windows partition, then install into the resulting free space (or to an unused disk).

If that doesn’t sound appealing, just try any distro recommended as “beginner friendly”, like Linux Mint. Tutorials should be easy to find.

1. Create a source control repository containing all your code, and publish it to an online code forge. GitHub’s docs might help with this: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey
2. Choose an open-source license and add it to the repository as a LICENSE file. If you want to require any projects that build upon yours to be open-source too, the GNU GPL is a good choice. If you want to allow proprietary programs to include your library without releasing any source code other than that which is directly based on yours, the GNU LGPL is good for that. If you want to allow people to do whatever they want, even use all your code as the basis of a proprietary program without credit, the Unlicense is a good choice. There are a lot of licenses with different degrees of “copyleft” and attribution requirements in between. Technically publishing with a license file is all you need to do, but there are more things you should do.
3. Create a README text file describing what your program does, and instructing users on how to compile and run it. Consider including more detailed documentation on how to use it, as well.
4. Clean up your code and file layout so that it’s as easy as is feasible for other programmers to understand.
5. Promote your project to whoever you think might find it useful!

Unfortunately, the state of Android music players is not great. Currently I have two FOSS music players installed: Metro Music Player (the F-Droid version of Retro Music Player) and mucke. mucke has a ton of really cool features that improve the shuffle experience but it’s actually worse than most apps at pulling album art. Retro/Metro has beautiful UI, and has pretty good features for customization, but lacks the cool features mucke has and is less stable. Both have more than one annoying bug, but it took me a while to find music players that had this few dealbreakers.

I suspect Plasma 6 will remove it. Though I’m liking this desktop setup so much I might just keep it for the rest of Debian Bookworm’s lifespan.

this is my “gaming” Plasma activity, so in theory everything I play regularly is there :)

i’m personally fine with the windows being slightly brighter, but i think an almost-black theme would look good too… might experiment with that, thanks for the suggestion!

Me too, but I also think it just looks cool. Sci-fi vibes.

deleted by creator

Details:

• OS is Debian bookworm, DE is Plasma 5.27.
• Plasma theme is Oxygen.
• Icon theme is a slightly modified version of Oxylite, only changes are that it follows my system color scheme, the “inherits” list is different, and the start-here and preferences-system icons have been changed.
• Wallpaper is Haenau.
• I’m using Oxygen for Qt widgets and decorations, with the Obsidian Coast color scheme, and standard Breeze Dark for GTK2.
• Layout is entirely my own. I’m showing my Games activity because the main one contains a folder view that might expose info I don’t want to expose here.

Hopefully this is original enough? I’m not sure. I’ve gotten away with posting desktops with mostly existing themes before, but on other occasions I’ve had posts removed for it. At least I mixed and matched some icons this time.

bonus screenshot with apps:

I’ve never played Starfield, but I haven’t had issues with Elder Scrolls mods on Proton. If the Nexus Mods app doesn’t work, you can just download the individual mods from their website, which I prefer anyway.

I know Okular can do at least most of that. Don’t think it’s available for Mac OS X, though.

Depends on a few factors, AFAIK as a non-lawyer. If the license allows closed-source derivatives (i.e. is permissive rather than copyleft), then anyone can create a closed-source version with all of the contributors’ changes, including the original maintainer. And anyone can choose to keep it open-source. The community contributions still to some extent belong to the contributors, though the license waives most of their rights.

Some projects are copyleft, but contributors are required to sign a license agreement (a CLA) which allows a single entity to change the license as they desire, including to closed-source - this is a good reason to avoid such projects. The contributors don’t own their work in such a case, but they can still fork the old project as it was before being taken closed source.

In a copyleft (e.g. GPL) project with no CLA, it’s illegal for anyone to make a closed-source version, and a major contributor could sue even the maintainer for doing so.

In all such cases, the change to a closed-source model does not erase the existence of the open-source code with community contributions. A fork is always possible.

I use https://vgy.me/ currently. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any open-source options, but vgy at least seems friendly and easy to work with.