They’re designed to run constantly, and your GPU is designed to run with some heat. I highly doubt you’re maxing out either like you would with a demanding game. Fans are much cheaper than a new separate device, and your GPU will become outdated long before it dies to wear and tear.

Why will using your PC “run it into the ground”? Unless you’re trying to use it for something else simultaneously, it seems like you’ve already got a solution there.

You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don’t have the disposable income to easily afford it.

Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren’t depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that’s only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam…

Also, in many cases it’s actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that’s probably taking a cut.

I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.

If it saves time but you still have to double check its answers, does it really save time? At least many reddit comments call out their own uncertainty or link to better resources, I can’t trust a single thing AI outputs so I just ignore it as much as possible.

You can game on just about any distro – I’m using NixOS and it’s great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.

But if you’re looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.

I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)

SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.

It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.

There’s a big overhaul update that got teased after over a year of radio silence, fingers crossed that it comes out soon!

In my experience it either works or it doesn’t, based on whether the devs have blocked it or not. The only extra step I’ve needed to do for anti-cheat on Steam games is installing a Proton runtime for the given anti-cheat, which are just in the tools section.

Hmmm okay I understand. There might well be a dedicated program for this, but I’m also sure it’s technically possible, just maybe far from trivial.

A bit of searching turned up this, I haven’t tried it myself but it claims to offer the functionality you want: https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxjoymap/

My understanding is that actual kernel-level software would have to at least have a Linux-specific driver included. Otherwise if it really is running entirely through Proton, it’s somehow faking the ring 0 access. I’m not entirely sure, but I do think that anti-cheat must work differently from the big ones like FACEIT and Valorant.

Ahh okay no I’m pretty sure that isn’t being explicitly enabled.

Hmm, I haven’t had this issue with Peak and I’m running Wayland… But I do run AMD.

Denuvo is not a blocker for Linux, anti-cheat is the main one.

BattleEye and EAC have both worked on Linux since 2021. Any games that use those at this point but don’t support Linux are choosing to block the platform (e.g. Fortnite).

I wouldn’t recommend replacing your steam deck os with bazzite… What’s the expected benefit?

I think that’s pretty specific to Elden Ring – it’s had that stuttering bug since launch on Windows and while they made it better it still happens, but for whatever quirk of Proton it never happened on Linux.

Without context this is pretty useless for OP. It sounds like you have some exotic non-gaming-related workflows and without knowing what those are it’s impossible to say if they’re anything OP would ever need to deal with.

For gaming the only non-starter at this point is games that the devs have chosen to make not work on Linux, i.e. ring 0 anti-cheats and a few other games made by assholes like Fortnite. VR is also hit and miss, for some people/systems it works nearly out of the box, for others it might be a big pain.

They won’t run on proton. “Kernel-level” means it’s well below the level that Proton runs at.

I don’t understand what you mean, how do you do this in Windows?