Dual booting may be the way to go. Sure Steam, Proton, blah blah but there are so many other launchers and AAA games that are not going to be supported at all (or at least not without a bunch of fiddling). For my own kid, I gave up on Linux ages ago and they have a Wintendo now. I have been daily driving Linux since the mid 90s but I’m also practical when I need to be.

That machine is also isolated on its own VLAN to hopefully reduce the blast radius of whatever garbage it eventually detonates. I make regular backups of it and am ready to repave it at a moment’s notice.

Bazzite, perhaps? I don’t have the dongle but all of my controllers have worked with it out of the box and I have a couple weird ones. It’s gaming focused so you might have some luck with it.

Also as others have said: xone.

Kept my parents’ desktop running for 14 years with Debian, XFCE, and the occasional hardware replacement. Maybe a bit of a PC of Theseus scenario but it worked pretty great.

this is absolutely incredible. thank you so much!

I have been looking for something like this for ages. Wish it could be integrated into freetube and newpipe. Thanks for sharing!

“secure” boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices don’t run software other than Windows during the bootup process

FTFY

Pi-hole on an ancient pi zero w.

I’ve got a little MSI box with 16GB of RAM, 500GB SSD, and a quad core i3 running Proxmox. Home Assistant is in its own VM, I have a VM for a bastion host/jump box of sorts for a client’s network (yes, I know VPNs exist), and then a VM running a few Docker containers: CheckMK, Dozzle, Uptime Kuma, and The TP-Link Omada Controller software. I intend to migrate those to Podman eventually.

On my desktop in Podman, I’m running Dashy, Redlib, and Dozzle regularly. Sometimes I run other services but those are pretty persistent. I use Podman on my local machine for my development work and it’s just handy to have Redlib and Dashy right here.

I tend to interact with things via SSH unless it’s a webshit.

I have been using the hell out of bazzite for the last few weeks and I’ve really enjoyed it. There have been a couple of minor bugs but otherwise everything just generally works.

I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’ve also installed bluefin on my work laptop.

Not OP but:

• on a desktop it’s defaulted to desktop mode. I’m unsure about the steam deck.

• you choose. KDE or GNOME. Budgie is being worked on.

• lutris can install your windows executables. Bottles is available too.

The only games I’m unable to play so far have been AAA games with unfriendly anticheat. ProtonDB helps here.

Echoing the other sentiments, it’s probably a good idea to hunt down why your system is having trouble because distro hopping might not fix it.

That being said I’ve recently been using bazzite and it’s been relatively smooth. You just have to learn a couple (easy) ways to do package management a little differently.

Some of the questions about distros don’t take into account those of us who have been using Linux since the mid-90s. Your scope here seems to be directed at the last decade or so.

RedHat 5.3 with fvwm (or fvwm95) is very nostalgic for me because it was one of the few walnut creek CDs I managed to get working. Mandrake and early SuSe were cute as well.

I’d wager it uses systemd considering Lennart Poettering works for Microsoft.