Wildmimic

The slot that is currently in use is the slower one since it’s only Type: x1. Depending on what you use the slot currently (such as an M.2 drive), you might wanna switch slots so you can take advantage of the M.2 speed; the x1 slot is completely adequate for 1gbps ethernet if you don’t need more. Both slots are otherwise functionally the same, but make sure to look up in your mainboard documentation if there’s any limitation if you use both slots or a specific hardware configuration (mine deactivated the second M.2 slot after changing from an 2600x to an 5950x for example)

https://metager.org does the trick

And where are your “not anecdotes” when claiming that people do more tinkering than playing on linux machines?

Using Steam, i click “Install” and “Play” after downloading, same as on any Windows machine. The amount of titles that act up is miniscule and it’s mainly older niche titles nowadays. The only time it gets a little bit more involved is when running pirated copies (if you don’t know what you are doing, and that’s my own problem) or manually modding games (again, a very low barrier that becomes nonexistant when using modding clients, either steam workshop or others), and that’s not the common experience.

I have tested around 15k PC titles on my 5950x with either a 3070ti or an 5070 (many more are waiting, but i am only one guy and don’t have unlimited time), and issues are a rare occurrence - i’d say it’s a little bit more when comparing unpatched cutting edge titles than under windows, but for everything older than 2 months there simply is no difference in compability nowadays (unless noone cares about the game at all, which is rare and often a sign that it isn’t worth playing).

The only title i really had no chance of getting to run when pirated was Omori - because of the very nonstandard way of doing things this game uses. But it works fine when buying it and playing legally, so that’s fine by me.

Edit: I forgot to mention that your “fragmentation” argument completely falls flat when taking into account things like flatpak (har har). I like native more for my gaming environment, but the steam deck i use in parallel shows that flatpak is just as able to do the same things as my desktop. And the times where standard chipsets had grave issues with compatibility under linux are gone, unless you are going out of your way to search for the most obscure laptops.

Sources, please.

Lol GTFO.

I have used windows starting with windows 3.0, up to Windows 10 because of gaming. My PC is here JUST for gaming, except for stuff like the web and very,very light office work once a month or so, and running LLMs/GenAI for shits and giggles.

You know what I’m running nowadays?

Nobara (Fedora spinoff, because they have NVidia based installations)

And i haven’t seen any performance or stability issues, even tho i used multiple different NVidia cards on this machine, using a PCIe Wifi6 card and and extra PCIe controller to increase my limited NVME space.

Not once has any of the components on my PC acted up, asked for driver installations or something similar, outside of me having to reinstall the graphics and mesa drivers after upgrading from Nobara 40 to 41, and that was because i ran out of space on my boot partition and i didn’t realize it at first.

If you aren’t in the crowd which plays mainly games with Anticheat (and that’s not because of Linux but because of the decisions made by the publishers), Linux is the way to go. I can run games from the DOS era just as well as i can play the latest titles, and emulation support is actually better than on windows with things like Retrodeck. If something doesn’t work, i very often have the option of just dropping by on Github/Gitlab/Codeberg and get help there or simply report a bug that will often get fixed way faster than Microsoft would drop me a “please reboot and if it doesn’t work recover windows” answer on their boards.

If you value gaming, you should value Linux. Because it always was the OS that was ideologically closer to what gamers wanted - and nowadays it’s technically closer.

Edit: I forgot to mention that with Linux native technologies like BTRFS and the deduplication features it offers, it also is very attractive to people who like to mod their games. I have 4 different installations of Cyberpunk 2077 on my PC, all with a completely different mod loadout, and they don’t take up more space than 1 installation and the raw space for the mods themselves.

I’ve been playing Vultures: Scavengers of Death, a turn-based Resident Evil style game. I like the atmosphere, but it’s been a bit of a “best of bugs"-festival (stuff like 0 Bullet stacks that crash the game when clicking on them in the inventory, softlocks when the train you should enter disappears when leaving/reentering the room and all the good things).

I also invested in getting the addons my Rimworld was missing, and i am currently bashing my head against my inability to play it without mods - i even accepted just installing a collection instead of rolling my own, and after 17 minutes of start time it just crashed, which means reverifying the 1220 installed mods.

That might introduce more issues than help. If high speed particles impact your shielding, you might get a “particle shower” from the impact on your electronics. Radiation Hardening is part of the design of the chips - mainly creating less dense structures with bigger transistors, because they don’t flip as easily as the very small gates on a H200. That’s also the reason why most space based computers have the processing power of a system around 2005.

Wanted to say that - Random shit does happen, even to the most stable systems. There’s a cutoff in consumer hardware where selecting for more stability simply isn’t worth the cost such as radiation hardening. Best you can do is ECC Ram.