Somewhere between Minecraft Java edition and a modern title made with the Steam Deck in mind, like TMNT Shreaders Revenge.

I’m just happy to see a slowly increasing support base, even if its just to support wine

For an alternative, when I was looking into server os’s, from what I can tell RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is the go to since it’s stable. That said RHEL is not free, so what people use to do is get a free OS which is down stream to RHEL, that’s your Alma and Rocky Linux.

However back in 2023 IBM made some changes, and now Alma and Rocky had to rebase off of CentOS Stream which is what RHEL is based off of.

For all intent and purpose I’d recommend using Debain, but Alma and Rocky are alternatives you may want to look into. Personally using Alma and outside of the learning curve of using a RHEL based OS, it has been quite stable.

I presumed the issue was probably Flatpak Sandboxing (Steam is natively installed but my emulators were not). However Sunshine + Moonlight isn’t a viable alternative since I am trying to play on my TV with a Gamepad, and Moonlight wasn’t controller friendly on Android the last I checked.

That said if this was PC -> PC then yeah Sunshine + Moonlight is amazing.

Buy some games on discount. I can easily get Fallout 4, or about 7-10 other games on steep discount. PC gaming is the best.

Oh how I wish I had nemo on the iPad rather than apple’s own files app. The issue with SMB is getting files off of the iPad, this is a little easier for me since I can do so from my PC. And I’m not dealing with Apple’s files app silently crashing on me.

According to a brief Google search: Apple File Conduit (AFC)

In most non Apple Desktops, the most you’d get from connecting your iPad/iPhone is access to the photos and videos. You’d need to use iTunes to access the music or device documents.

On Macs it “Just works” and gives you full access to music and files.

While I can’t access my iPads videos and music in Mint. It’s nice to at least get me access to the documents, along side the camera videos and pictures. Not as good as I’d like it to be, but a lot better than what you can do with Windows… without installing iTunes.

I think how happy I am depends on what I am comparing it too.

Compared to Windows? I am very happy with Mint since thus far everything I need works, and I can even play some games.

Compared to my dream distro which doesn’t exist. Not as happy. Since it works, but asks me to use the terminal more than I want to.

Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista -> Windows 7 -> Dual Boot Ubuntu -> Windows 7 -> Dual Boot Ubuntu -> Windows 7 -> Windows 10 -> Ubuntu (VM) -> Pop_OS! -> Windows 10 -> Manjaro -> Fedora -> Manjaro -> Open Suse -> Linux Mint -> Linux Mint DE -> Fedora -> Debain -> Linux Mint

Was more focused on the online games with kernel level anti cheat. But yeah, it’s surprising how many online games work. Excluding native games like CS2/CS GO and TF2, I was able to play non-steam online games online like EA’s Battlefront 2, OG Battlefront 1, with wine-ge.

While I agree with this video. As someone who did migrate from Windows to Linux, I feel the biggest issue which wasn’t address here was the planning for migrating to Linux.

Migrating to Linux means loosing access to Windows native applications like Adobe and kernel level anti cheat online games. What I found helped the most was transitioning to cross platform application and learning their ins and outs in Windows, or discovering ways to validate which applications work well in Proton and Wine.

With games ProtonDB is your best bet to see if there are issues. Or finding ways to solve issues.

With Professional software… you’re not going to be as lucky, so transitioning to an alternative which works for you might be the best solution.

The best way to check if Linux will work for you is to run Linux in a VM or on an external SSD on your actual hardware. The best way to check if something works for you is to try it yourself.

There is a handful of smaller communities that still exists that are still good. But most of them are gone or filled with content farming spam.

Look at the compatibility of the device you are running it on. Older hardware like the PlayStation Vita, will only work with H.264 AAC.

Handbranks is able to convert this for you with no issues (even on Linux flatpak ftw), and web playback on a Apache2 server is great. But if your planning on watching it on more modern devices, then don’t worry too much about it.

Well your only alternative is Kdenlive, which is a very unstable experience. There are some alternative video editing software on Linux, but they follow the adobe model of, give me your money forever to use it. Resolve works, just need to tune your injest to get the video to work. I have a bash script I can send you that batch fixes videos which I can send you.

As for apple machines. I get the distain as I too don’t like Apple, and feel their locked in software, hardware, and ecosystem is overpriced and unreliable. But the way I see it, if the computer is for work, which this appears to be, I need the best machine for the job, and Apple unlike Microsoft and Google, has very clean software and hardware that I can trust for professional work. No ads, very fast hardware, stable, with no compromises.

That said I will not use them for personal use. Hence the switch over to Linux. I would’ve got a Mac Mini for work if I had the budget for one.

OK, let me fill you with my experience. Now I am on Desktop Linux, and I can’t say how your Double Touch screens will work. But I can tell you about some of your points.

Affinity, canva, corel, and cinema4d are not Linux compatible and you’ll need to run them in Wine/Wine GE via software like Bottles or Lutris. Most will not work, while others like affinity might work, but requires a lot of working around. If these software’s are required, you may want to look at a Mac.

keyshot, gimp, vscode(ium) are all native and have either scripts or can be installed via Flatpak or from the distros app repos.

Davinci Resolve is interesting, You’ve lucked out since you have an rtx2060, but Resolve is quite finicky to get working Linux. You’ll need nvidia drivers and the open source free drivers will not work. All good Linux distros should have easy access, but I found Fedora to be trickier to install. Once you can get Resolve working, you’ll either need to buy Studio if you want H.264 support, and if your videos aren’t using PCM audio then you’ll need to convert it using FFMPEG. I have a script which I use at the end of my injest. Afterwords, it runs and works fine, with no issues (assuming you have the RAM to run it 32GB recommended). If you don’t want to deal with any of this (understandable) Mac OS has no issues out of the box.

Working file explorer: up to taste, and personal preference. Every distro will have one and it’ll be good enough, but some distros tailor theirs to their OS’s tastes. If you are running with a popular Desktop Environment, i.e. KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, then it’ll work.

Now if you want my two cents on all of this. First you should aim for a Ubuntu based distro. While Ubuntu itself isn’t bad, I personally prefer a different Desktop Environment as Gnome is too different for me from what Windows offers. Linux Mint with Cinnamon and POP_OS are good alternative with a more Windows/Mac flavoring, and since they are running Gnome underneath it’ll have the same compatibility as Ubuntu proper with hardware.

Another option is Kubuntu which used KDE’s Plasma. Plasma is OK, but I find it to be a little less refined than it’s appearance lead me to believe.

Now for testing, I’d advise you to get a second SSD and an enclosure and plug it into a USB-C port. It’ll do wonders to quickly go an run everything, without sacrificing you existing install of Winblows. Linux is so efficent I ran my main PC for a week off of it, and only noticed while running games.

Finally, depending on how often you are using your Windows only software. You might get away with running them in a Windows 10 VM, and using a shared folder to the Host machine to move files back and forth.

This is definatly a project you should look into, but I feel you should probably look at more cross platform alternatives to your software first. Since another alternative, if you aren’t playing games, is a Mac.

I’ve moved away from KDE for a while now. Been using Cinnamon since.

And most of my “bugs” are more missing features than anything.

It’s like al KDE projects IMHO. Good on the surface and works well. But use it for any length of time and you will find problems, unfinished areas, or parts where it was implemented without considering why it was like this in the first place.

For example, plug your 1080p laptop into a display with 4K and watch are your desktop icon gets sorted by a-z randomly instead of keeping the order you had it.

Or try to add a calendar even to your system by clicking the calendar which is found in the date and time on the taskbar.

Online accounts added to the system do not integrate into other KDE apps requiring additional signin.

I feel this is probably caused from KDE’s team being small, but having a large suite of apps.

Sorry to hear that. Ubisoft Connect has been hit or miss for me. On my intel machine it works fine, on my nvidia machine the menu was just a black box which failed to or loaded so slowly that it was unusable. My only advice is to use the latest Proton/Wine-GE/Proton-GE and wait for updates from Ubisoft. This is all unofficial so having it work at all is a miracle.

I’m running it the latest Linux Mint running Lutris installed from their official deb file.

I had an issue with connect and the recent update fixed it for me. By if it’s the same issue I had, try running in Wayland if your using x11. Or go back to x11 if you are in Wayland.

In Settings you’ll find an option called “Compatibility” here you’ll find 2 options, I’ll advise the Steam Play for supported titles, but the all other titles option is more desirable, but the results may not be desirable.