but i play that, too. probably too much..

For example recently i installed Arch on my GPD Win 1 (which is essentially a much weaker Steam Deck that comes with Windows 10) and tried:

* RoboBlitz - it needed Ageia's PhysX installer which always failed to install at startup

* Clive Barker's Jericho - Didn't start at all

* Cherry Tree High Comedy Club - Worked fine (but it is a very simple 2D game so i kinda expected it)

* Mars: War Logs - It started but 3-4 in the game (actually during a cutscene but was rendered using the game engine) always crashed at random points

* Blood Knights - Worked fine

* Marlow Briggs - Didn't start at all

* Chaser - Didn't start at all

All of the above work under Windows 10 fine which makes me suspect that Valve is just going to make game-specific patches for the next Proton in Steam Deck. After all being able to play "the entirety of your library" sounds implausible when you can't do that even under Windows :-P (many games - especially older games - need custom fixes, etc).

Also, setting up games can be a little bit of a faff. For example, wanting to play FFXIV, well, nothing worked at all. I had to go into the config file and skip the cutscene, and also change the launcher to the old launcher. Now, that doesn't seem like much, and it isn't, but the first time I had to do that took me hours to figure out.

Noticed any difference between Windows and Linux for that particular game?

It's on the list of my most played games so making sure it runs properly is really important for me to make the switch ^^

i've never played it on windows, so i can't give you a 100% answer. i've never had any issue with it, and i don't think you'd be able to tell it wasn't a linux native game.

Division 1 or 2?

Division 1 was built in a way that would be very hard to run on Linux, Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu.

If it wasn't for Stadia that effort would never have been spent, I was a huge advocate for linux on those projects for years.

> Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu

the division 2 isn't on steam, because ubisoft. and hence - as far as i know - isn't generally available on linux. there's some irony there i think.

I had assumed, if nothing else, that easy-anti-cheat would have prevented it.

On windows it can capture the audio from that specific window.

I’d maybe try to find an AMD GPU but I bought one of those first but need tensorflow and AMDs GPU support for ML was almost non-existent.

For example, some driver packages support Steam but not CUDA, while others support CUDA but not Steam [1, 2].

And I found some instructions online that let me "fix" it to work with both - but thereafter, any time I used CUDA I would lose audio when I next resumed from suspend.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ocuqtm/can_i_...

[2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5778

However, it should be noted that I don't play much AAA stuff. Most of my playtime is actually on the Nintendo Switch. The playtime that is in Steam is mostly in Linux native games (Tabletop Simulator, Cities Skylines, Unrailed, etc.), but the few Proton games that I've tried have all worked great.

Or if you have a brand new laptop with the latest Ryzen CPUs and the latest Radeon 6800M GPU with switchable graphics then you absolutely need a distro with the latest kernel to have a good experience on this new hardware.

So I asked why it matters if its 'pop_OS' or not since if that happens to bundle some driver, or Steam, or whatever, I assume I can continue not using 'pop_OS' and still install whatever it is if I want?

It just seems like an irrelevant detail, (and potentially not even a valid one? the more you do subsequently the less it 'is' that distro) outside of saying 'everything worked out of the box, didn't have to install a thing', which may or may not have been true, but wasn't what was claimed.

Of course you could forgo the packaged kernel and build your own then grab the Nvidia driver from nvidia's website, but then what is Ubuntu buying you?

Ubuntu LTS with its 2 year minimums lifecycle is kind of a worst case here among desktop distros, but different distros among the 6 month crowd can run into this depending on how conservative they are about putting the newest core packages into each release.

There's also the question of the method of obtaining third party software. There's basically a divide here between the ports method (see the AUR for the most well known example) where users distribute a build script to other users that in most cases should be pretty simply cloning the upstream source and running their build script, or the third party package repository approach where you download a binary package and install that. The port has the advantage of being very easy to audit the packager's code (if not helping for the developer's) and generally not needing it to be rebuilt every time the dependencies do, but the third party package repositories have convenience and you could argue that relying on launchpad's moderation is not any more or less safe than relying on Nexus Mods moderation which Window gamers happily do.

That's the thing, it's not their machine if they are running Windows on it. It's Microsofts. They can even wake up your machine to apply updates whenever they want.