hydroel

It is an ad, and also a really shitty practice to display it exactly like it was the first result of your research.

That's another option, but my current build doesn't have room for another drive, M2 or otherwise. So I could buy a new, larger M2 and partition it but I don't really want to have to setup both systems again already.

All in all it depends on you. Arch isn’t that big of a deal if you can read and are willing to put a bit of an effort to it and its strenghts justify that for the vast crowd using it.

I can read doc an put that bit of effort if necessary - the eternal question is, do I really want to project myself to do that on a daily basis?

It seems to be, at least! I've been meaning to switch from Ubuntu to Pop! OS on my work laptop but I can't justify to take that time at the moment.

Newer games might not be optimized for Linux in the first place

Thanks to the success of the SD, I believe many developers have started testing and optimizing their games for Proton, which I also account for when I'm talking about "optimized for Linux".

Noted for the rolling releases! Don't rolling releases necessarily bring the risk of unstabilities as well? There's often a balance which might be hard to find between features and stability.

won’t be doing business with them anymore.

Agreed, just stick around for the free games!

Good to know, thank you!

I agree about Snap: it should be great, in theory, it just doesn't work as well as it ought to.

I've been considering Pop! OS, which seems very nice indeed.

Battle.net works as well, OW2 plays fine on Linux.

I thought SD users had to dual boot to play Diablo IV quite recently, I thought it was because of a Batlle.NET compatibility issue but I might have been mistaken.

As for a distro, I’d aim for something Arch based. Simply because you’ll get the latest drivers and mesa versions all the time, which is proven to increase FPS a ton over say, Ubuntu.

That's a very good point I hadn't thought of! Any specific recommendations?

Ubuntu has been (mostly) great so far! And there are some Ubuntu-based distros that seem to be tailored for gaming, so I was curious to see if any users around here had used them - I've mentioned Draugr and Ubuntu Game Pack, but if I was to use a base distro and tune it myself I might pick Pop! OS which seems really nice.

I almost exclusively play solo games, with exceptions here and there for solo campaigns - I'm currently playing MH:World, which is officially supported on the Deck so I guess compatibility will not be an issue. So anti-cheat systems will not impact me (or barely), and I don't know what games will be a hinder.

Any games that haven't worked at all for you? And what kinds of hiccups have you encountered? I haven't seen any actually incompatible game so far on the Deck - the main blockers I've seen were controller issues, or sometimes performance issues here and there on bad ports like FFXIII, FFXIII-2 and FFXIII: Lightning Returns. I guess modding can be quite a problem too, especially when all external tools are built for Windows.

Regarding NVIDIA drivers, what GPU do you have if I may ask? I recently upgraded to a 4070, I must say I'd hate to have upgraded to hinder performance because of the OS.

Yes, it is so much better than even 2 years ago - I would have never even considered Linux for my desktop, until very recently when I saw how everything pretty much works on the SD.

Your first two points don't impact me that much, but that third one hurts - I have been unable to make my monitor work in the correct resolution / refresh rate with Wayland and have had to use Xorg instead.

Isn't Arch a bit much? I've only used Ubuntu so far so I could consider easily using an Ubuntu-based distro, and although I tinker a bit with it I feel like Arch is really for more experienced users. Although Endeavour seems to accompany users a little bit already.