Honestly with the exception of trying out Nvidia drivers until they worked nicely (took 3 tries the first time back when I was on Ubuntu because it had nouveau as default and I miss read the first time) everything worked fine with wine or proton (or was just Linux compatible in the first place) and often I had better performance too.

Now on endeavouros I do more tinkering but I still don't have any problems except on my Wayland machine which experiences stutter in a few games but I'm guessing that will be fixed later this year with the new drivers and Wayland protocol changes.

Please stop reminding me that 2017 was 7 years ago.

Minecraft runs fine for me, surely FIFA runs fine with proton (protondb says 2019 -2022 work)? I don't even get why people use Roblox from what I've heard so I have no idea about that.

I have no idea what is going on with that laptop.

Aren't Roblox and old Minecraft rather efficient? FIFA 17 sounds like it's from 2017. To me it sounds like mostly old games so without the specs of the laptop which don't sound good with 256gb of storage I can't really judge whether 10fps in newer Minecraft versions isn't perhaps to be expected. Minecraft has always run the best on my machine (compared to most steam games which are more finicky when it comes to drivers. Btw for me fixing drivers it's usually just switching between the ones on flatpak and arch whenever it doesn't work and worst case I do a downgrade until it's fixed.)

Would it be worth testing the vanilla Minecraft launcher to see if that's the problem, perhaps compare the launch options if it's not possible? (I completely get not liking what Microsoft is doing with the launcher and I'm looking for an alternative at this point as well.)

It's possible that the laptop has an old/niche graphics card with bad driver support, which will probably be worse to try to fix on windows, unless they already know how to use the manufacturers likely gui based weird custom installer already (I think that's how Nvidia does it and of course it has ads).

Personally my experience on windows has been a nightmare with it breaking itself more often than Linux (while being used a fraction of the time or probably slightly more if I count the time spent on my old laptop which had slightly fewer issues). Luckily I don't have to use it but I do have a windows install in dual boot which takes 3x longer to start, shows me ads, requires me to plug the mouse in after booting for it to work.

Searxng throws together results from different engines as far as I know.

Not sure how a federated search engine would work though.

Edit: hash0772 (is there a correct way address someone's username on Lemmy?) already mentioned this but it's generally best to use an existing instance, there's also some on tor. (they obviously still only search the clearnet)

At least FOSS doesn't try this. At least not as part of the program (I think there's some childish behaviour from devs but generally it doesn't make it to the code).

Lemmy is foss which is the only reason I'm here. I assume it being one of the only foss social media platforms is what draws a lot of other foss enthusiasts here too.

There'd better not be any ads.

Lemmy is free and open source (AGPL), the ad money would only go to the person offering your client not the people hosting your instance. If your client has any ads I'd recommend switching. I use Jerboa (Android, play store) and the official web app hosted by my instance.

There's lots of LGBTQ+ and FOSS (I wonder why lol). Star Trek and science are also becoming rather common (or it just took me a while to find the right communities). I also get the feeling that the age bracket is larger than on other platforms and people seem to be nicer too (at least compared to the month or so I spent looking through Reddit before finding Lemmy).

Following is more about the kinds of post than users. (I don't want to waste your time if that's not what you meant by "common things people see") There's also some videogame and pornography communities (I'm sure there's combinations too) so I do set my client to blur nsfw images and I block video game communities for games I don't play/don't want spoilers from.

Lots of webcomics also seem to be (automatically?) uploaded to their respective communities.

That could get rather annoying. Imagine if when you installed your distro everything was compiled from source (I apologise if you use Gentoo or LFS), it would take a lot longer.

Also people could still just upload a binary to various package managers (assuming the source is available).

I've tried compiling C on windows in vscode in the meantime and I gave up and switched to a GitHub codespace to use GCC and cross compiled for Windows, then had to download an extra dll for a library and put it in the folder with the exe and it's massive I believe it was like 1.4mb instead of 30kb on Linux. I've got all of the games that I want running on Wayland now too while on windows I still can't run a tiling window manager or change keybinds for moving around windows.

If you were just talking about how most non programmers will find a way to compile C natively on windows rather than switch OS, fair enough. I'm also sure windows has more desktop apps available but there's plenty of useful tools on Linux that don't run on windows or don't integrate into system components (have you ever extracted a tarball in windows explorer? tar ships with windows but it's terminal only) and nobody (other than ms) is allowed to change the last part (to my knowledge, I'm not a lawyer and haven't read all of the windows EULA but I think it would fall under reverse engineering).

If you are not a programmer and don't care enough about your privacy to learn about a new system and you don't care about customizability too much you're probably best off macos (seems to be compatible with more none games and customization tools) or windows which is hideously expensive unless you know where to get it and then you still get spied on and receive ads (not sure whether Macos does that).

Fair enough but have you tried running GCC on windows? Or perhaps videogames on Mac (according to non Linux users that I know both of those are a real pain)

To be fair I had some trouble running some apps on Wayland at first but now it's only a couple of games (which run fine on X11)