Christian

I began writing this comment with the intention of answering your question, but it actually ended up mainly being me venting myself.

Obviously no, it’s never been a flawless experience, but a few months back I decided I wanted to try gaming so I put an nvidia card in my pc and reinstalled linux to start fresh. All of the examples you’ve given sound like the sort of problems I’ve had since then, but never in the ten years before when I was using intel integrated graphics. I was aware going in that nvidia is massively more problematic than AMD, but this card was a spare from someone I know.

Obviously there are games I can run well now that were unrealistic before, but there are also a couple 2D games with SNES-quality graphics that I’ve tried which spike my CPU to 100% and lag like crap in spite of working perfectly before I installed the card. I’ve had two experiences where a game suddenly has issues immediately after an update to the nvidia-utils package. I’m not new to linux, but I am new to gaming on it and I’ve kind of given up on troubleshooting this stuff in favor of “maybe there will be an update tomorrow that fixes this”.

There’s reason for optimism, everyone is saying the situation is steadily improving because nvidia has been much more cooperative in the past couple years. It’s not realistic to say you won’t find annoyances regardless, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of your struggles are a direct result of decades of one company’s deliberate decision to ignore pleas to stop making life as hard as they possibly can on software developers trying to support their hardware.

Yaoling is spectacular. Monster taming RPG (think pokemon) with autobattle mechanics.

h-node?

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.

Yeah, I wasn’t considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I’ve stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it’s the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don’t understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.

There are, but as long as 98% of the userbase is all on the main instance the decentralization provides little protection from the whims of corporate.

I’ve started playing a game called Yaoling, which is a monster taming/collecting game. The battling system is much more like Yo-Kai Watch than Pokémon - you’re not really bossing them around, they kind of do their own thing once you’ve made preparations and started.

Absolutely spectacular gameplay so far, I’m really impressed. Love the artwork and monster designs. It’s in early access right now and it warns you to expect some bugs, but other than a lot of typos in the English translation I’ve only come across a couple minor issues. Official release planned for mid-July I think.

I played this as a kid. I loved the game except for the fights. I would press ‘0’ to sucker punch every time. I don’t even know what Indy Quotient is, why should I care about it going down?

I swear even the time I finally won I successfully clawed at Scar’s face over a thousand times before I realized you just throw him off the cliff.

Hijack, but clementine used to have a “remote” available on fdroid where I could manage clementine on my pc from an android phone connected to the same local wifi. Is there anything analogous for strawberry?

Same here, played it about a month ago, fun idea at its core that’s executed extremely well, very memorable. Unfortunately it’s very short, probably around ten hours for me to complete everything, but it have might gotten stale if it went on too far beyond that without significant gameplay alterations. Probably like 70-80% a puzzle game, 20-30% action. My only complaint is that I don’t really like hearing all the terrified screams, but I’m not sure those could be removed without destroying the immersion.

Different genre, but another indie game I want to mention is Eastward, which is actually something I tried playing after seeing a poster here on lemmy give glowing praise just a week or two after it came out. I think it’s the best pixel art I’ve ever seen. The dialogue and story are wonderful overall, heartwarming at times and creepy at others. The charcters have personality. Overall the appeal for me is that there’s a lot of emotion packed into every aspect of the game.

I think the gameplay is fun, but that’s not the reason the game is memorable and the main complaint people have is that there are many long stretches that are just building atmosphere with minimal gameplay. I didn’t mind that at all, but I was disappointed with how much of the story was up for inperpretation after beating it. I spent most of the game excited to see how the loose ends and parts of the story I didn’t get would be tied together, so it was a let-down when the game ended and most of those questions just weren’t answered.

It really bugs me when people don’t comment their code at all. I have no idea what this is supposed to do.

I’ve been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don’t want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I’ve figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.

That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I’ve had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I’ve spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn’t exist except for connecting joycons, but there’s always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.

In all honesty I still don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I’ve really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I’ve had a stable system for like ten years now though and I’m too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.

I know I’m getting wildly off-topic just three comments deep in this thread, but comedy that warps into existential horror is a genre that I’ve recently discovered I love but probably never would have expected to be my kind of thing. This video is one of my favorites.

I have tracked down the missing word and returned it to its rightful place. Better late than never.

Man I’ve never really thought about how much having the wrong successor could fuck up the whole ecosystem.

I remember mint being billed as essentially just that like a full ten years ago. I’m actually surprised to hear mint hasn’t been enshittified itself at this point, I just assumed that would have happened by now.

Frog, dog, and kitten, over and over and over in completely arbitrary orderings.

I’m just speculating on reasons behind why people might feel it’s still not user-friendly. It was a pretty easy transition for me too, and that was years ago.