What might have happened: if you select a global compatibility tool (proton) in the steam settings, it will use that for all non-native games. But any games that ship a Linux binary will still use that instead of Proton. This is generally good, but some devs ship a Linux binary that’s actually not as good as the Windows one. I’ve seen some games not update the Linux binary until much later than the Windows one, so the Linux one is out of date, and for some games it’s just flat-out broken. In these cases you can manually select a Proton version for that game, which will force it to run the Windows binary.

You seem to be reaching for pretty advanced solutions – Docker and HA both require you to read a lot of documentation to get started. Bottles is also a powerful and flexible tool, which is the opposite of simple.

What game are you trying to run? If it’s on Steam it should be a no-brainer, otherwise Lutris can simplify a lot of things.

I doubt you actually need Docker for anything, unless you have a specific use case I would just abandon that. For your lights, I would try searching for “home assistant [model/brand of lights]” and see if you can find a setup that someone else has gotten working that you can mostly copy.

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)

Same with Jobs on the “visionary” part – the only thing that guy ever visualized was bigger stacks of money.

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

If you don’t plan to expand the swap partition, I would recommend just deleting the swap partition – you could either make it a new ext4 and use LVM to combine it with the shared storage, or if you’re going to combine your EFI partitions you could grow your Mint partition to include both the SUSE EFI and the swap partition – and using a swap file instead, as another commenter mentioned. You honestly really don’t need swap space regardless with 16gb of RAM if you’re really just using this to run a web browser, but you can easily set up a swap file if you want one.

Tax software is basically all in browser at this point.

Is there any reason? You’re effectively wasting half the drive by using that space for OSes you almost never use.

If you ever happen to need Windows, which I don’t see happening as you yourself can’t imagine an actual use case, you can just go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer or maybe use your phone.

As for Mint, do you just have it to experiment with? If you’re just trying to try out other distros, a virtual machine or even live USBs are much easier ways to quickly try out new systems without having to clear actual partitions.

If you had much more storage then sure, waste some of it, but you’re really gonna be missing that 120gb if you use your computer for… basically anything.

The order of the partitions basically doesn’t matter at this point – I think having a boot partition first used to be important for MBR schemes but I’m pretty sure in the UEFI era you can have them in whatever order. As others have mentioned, you could combine your EFI partitions, but doing so to an already installed system is slightly complex. You also could shrink some of your EFI and boot partitions, I’m not sure of the recommended sizes off the top of my head but I think they could be smaller. On the other hand, your swap partition should probably be bigger – making it the same size as your RAM is a good rule of thumb and will enable hibernation (I think).

SNW is the least bad but it still blows compared to anything pre-2009.

More worried than about its present?

The GPU is using your RAM? Maybe you should post a screenshot of that page

Try running an incognito window only, which should run without extensions (unless you manually enable each for private browsing). Check your usage then to see if the extensions are actually the problem.

Honestly 1.7gb of RAM for a modern browser is not that unexpected. Outlook is not a low-cost web service, first of all, but also the first tab is by far the most costly – most of the RAM is for the browser itself. Even with ten or twenty tabs I wouldn’t expect your RAM usage to balloon much, and if they’re “background” tabs, i.e. tabs you’ve kept open from previous sessions but haven’t actually looked at yet, they basically take no resources – actually one of the areas that Firefox does a lot better than Chrome.

Meta+arrow keys to manage windows: left or right to get a split, up to maximize.

Meta+pgup/pgdn to switch workspaces. Add shift to move the current window with you.

Those are the main ones I use all the time, but there’s a full list (some that aren’t bound by default) in the settings. I would probably remap pgup and pgdn to something closer to my fingers on a regular keyboard, but I use an ergo split 60% so I already have those keys on my home row.

Tbh GNOME feels best with a combo of mouse and keyboard, like Meta+mousewheel scrolling lets you switch workspaces very smoothly. And I think I had to map this myself, but I use right click drag + Meta to resize windows dynamically. But the above keys let me do 90% of what I want to with windows.

If you really want a fully keyboard-driven window management scheme you should probably check out a standalone window manager. I love sway personally.

Except it also went up? Looks like only apple dropped.

NixOS is amazing, but it’s also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.

Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they’re constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.

Yeah the whole article including the headline – “terrifying”?? – is 98% slop. Depressing.

Nice, came here to mention Sacrifice! A remake would go so hard, but I don’t think it’ll ever happen.

TLJ is also solid.

Umm, what I said: the updates happen faster. If you have a GPU maybe you should try it?

If you’re on a high-refresh display, the GPU acceleration allows for much faster updates. Makes it feel much smoother. It’s of course not needed, but neither is a lot of stuff we do.

Uhh, switching terminals is nothing like distro-hopping, that’s a ridiculous analogy. You might need to configure the new terminal, but that’s it, and there’s no cost or conflict.