Some good advice already in this thread.

Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.

Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.

I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?

Gets mauled by a bear.

Thrustmaster makes the Eswap controller which are modular. You can change the positions of the sticks and buttons on both sides I believe. I dont know how they work wirh linux though.

https://www.thrustmaster.com/products/eswap-s-pro-controller/

Yeah its not a great headline. But in fairness Legion Go S extends SteamOS / valves reach so is part of Valves strategy. They make their money on the steam store - thats what matters to them most.

The Xbox device is the first time Microsoft has actually got involved to help improve the windows experience on hand held. I suspect the Xbox brand will confuse people though, as theyre still just Windows devices with an Xbox branded interface. I dont see it as a winning strategy. People will still want to be using steam and a system that doesnt put that front and centre is not going to have mass appeal.

An Xbox store would need time to catch on, and they havent managed it on windows. Steam dominates for good reason - convenient, aggressive pricing, and effective vendor lockin for many users who already have huge libraries of games.

Its an increase in the share of steam users. The steamuser base has also been growing in that time, so the absolute number may have increased more.

Not sure that is true? On a quick search, in the UK 3 in 10 had used it for point of sale purchases and 8 in 10 had used it online in 2023-2024. Of course that is used it at least once and does not reflect its actual market share.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1389396/paypal-adoption-in-uk/

We live in an era where anyone who is an arsehole can inflict themselves and their hate on other people. This is horrible and I’m very sorry to hear people in the gnome community are having to deal with this.

Yeah, I have MiniPC running Nobara. I’m interested to see of SteamOS would work even if i have no intention of switching.

But gaming mini PCs with steamOS preinstalled might be a future product range that comes along so its interesting to see how close steamOS is to that.

The gaming focused distros are great and won’t be harmed by that, but steamOS might grow the linux desktop further by being a viable windows alternative for people who want a bit more power than a steamdeck and want an off the shelf low or mid range gaming PC. Steam Machines may now actually be viable thanks to how far Proton has come. The original machines were probably 10 years too early.

I work in healthcare in a specialist field, and the best are not the ones who get recognised. The ones who get recognised chase respect and fame - in healthcare that is going to conferences and speaking, and writing as many papers as possible.

But the best people in my field are the ones who do the actual job each day at an extremely high level. They go unrecognised except by those of us who understand what it takes to be good. They’re humble and focused. Some of them for sure go and speak at conferences and publish papers etc but its not those things that make them the best, although those are the only those things that make them “visible” outside their place of work.

The same goes for music and actors. The most famous are not necessarily the best. They are the ones who people like or are the most commercial etc. The best singers are not necessairly world famous - they may be working professionally in less popular sectors such as opera or classical music or choirs, or they may be totally amateur. Similarly the best actors may be strutting a stage somewhere and never seen in a movie or tv show by the majority of the world. And even then they may be the “star”.

Fame and notoriety has get little to do with talent - some famous people are undoubtedly near the top of their field but it is far from required.

Ctrl + alt + backspace is the shortcut for killing X (which manages the desktop display) which will then restart.

This is the closest equivalent to the windows shortcut which restarts the graphics subsystem. It does not restart the drivers on windows, instead it reinitialises the display after flushing things.

However note that In linux, killing X will also kill all the programs running which depend on it. You will essentially restart your entire session. This is due to how X works and there isn’t an alternative.

Note some distros disable the shortcut be default now and you have enable it first. You will need to google your distro. I believe Ubuntu disables it, and possibly Gnome on all systems? I use neither, that is just from googling so may be wrong.

I am not aware of a Wayland equivalent.

You can also switch TTY using (Ctrl + alt + F1 to F8) to switch to a different “teletypewriter” - basically a full screen terminal display. You can login and then run commands including killing X and even restart the graphics drivers here. You could make a script that does this which you can run in a TTY if needed. You can’t restart graphics drivers while X is running on the GPU; X has to be killed first.

The rating is only about whether SteamOS will run the game and its middleware. Its not about how well the game runs on the hardware or with the inputs for the device.

Its basically like saying its compatible with Windows or MacOS - it will work with SteamOS if its SteamOS verified. It is an OS compatibility rating; slightly more than it just working with proton or linux to include “game functionality, launcher functionality and anto-cheat support” according to the steam announcement.

Whereas Deck Verified means it specifically works with the Deck hardware too, including satisfactory performance and inputs.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/532097310616717411

Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.

And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.

Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.

No, if you like mint and cinnamon then why change?

The only reason to change would be if you want a different desktop environment. You could do that with mint or go with a distro that mains a different DE.

Mint is popular and reliable, so only change if you fancy trying something new and are willing to reinstall if its not to your liking.

I used to be on Mint and left it when I decided to move to KDE. It worked fine in mint but I had lots of app duplication in the menus. I also wanted more cutting edge versions.of software so wanted a different district for that. So I switched to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (a rolling release distro).

If you do want to tinker and try out other distros then you could also play with distros in virtual machines (KVM or Virtualbox) or if you have a desktop get a second harddrive and install a different distro on it. Its easy to dualboot Linux distros (and safest to have separate hard drives so you don’t make mistakes when partitioning).

I’ve played around with this. I find lutris is good for most games but sometimes you may need to do it yourself using Wine or Proton

I managed to get a game called Discworld Noir working - its almost impossible to get running in Windows itself but in wine it took relatively little effort.

The key for getting old windows 98 games running for example is to create a dedicated own Wine prefix (basically its own virtual environment) and install the needed windows packages into it. I’m using wine but you can also use the gaming focused and optimised Proton in a similar fashion.

For my method you need Wine and Winetricks. Winetricks gives you lots of easy to use tools to configure a wine prefix to your needs.

I followed this guide to create a win98 like environment: https://www.myabandonware.com/howto/wine (I appreciate the sire itself may be objectional to some but the guide itself is OK). The author doesnt quite understand wine so take some of the comments with a pinch of salt.

I’ll summarise here.

1. Create a wine prefix using the command below. The guide I linked creates a prefix into the default folder .wine, but I’d create something named like Win98. The .wine folder is too generic for making dedicated environments and may already exist. You can have as many prefixes as you want in different folders. Also the command below sets it as Win32 but this is redundant on the bleeding edge version of Wine; win64 will be fine if you’re on the latest version (lots of gaming distros like Nobara) use the bleeding edge, just change Win32 to Win64 if you get an error about wow64 :

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/Gaming/Win98 winecfg

The command basically tells Wine to run winecfg in the prefix; as the prefix doesnt exist wine first creates the prefix folders for you then launches the generic winecfg tool.

2. Winecfg will open. You can set the scaling for the prefix using the graphics tab if its too small (4k screen for example). Set the DPI to around 200 for 4k works well. This useful scales everything including games in a window if you use tools like dxwnd (mentioned later).

3. Close wincfg and now use Winetricks in the prefix using the terminal;

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/Gaming/Win98 winetricks

This command ensures its using your specific prefix. If you run winetricks from your linux menu it will run on the default prefix for the system, which may be the lutris one or more likely another random default one. You can select a prefix inside winetricks but it can be annoying each time you launch it. Using the terminal to specify the prefix prevents any errors and is just easier imo.

4. Select the option “select the default wineprefix” in the menu. It will stick with prefix you specified in the terminal.

5. In winetricks its a good idea to first install the basic windows fonts so old games and installers work properly. Select “install a font” and then select Core Fonts and Tahoma then click OK. Winetricks will download and install the fonts. It will throw up a dialogue box every so often warning you that wine will be unavailable - its very annoying but not an error, it a bizarre design decision with winetricks. Just click OK/continue each time it comes up. Once it finally finishes the fonts are installed and youre back in the winetricks menu. You may also get wow64 warning boxes if youre on a gaming distro/bleeding edge wine- also annoying but not an error.

6. Next we want to install some old windows DLLs and packages. The ones listed by the website work well for me for old games. You want:

• d3dx9_3
• dotnet40
• dotnet452
• vb6run
• vcrun6sp6

You may need slightly different packages for your games.

Again you’ll get lots of warning messages and popups. Just click through and agree to any old windows licenses. Allow the packages to install to their default locations - they’re installing into the prefix in a folder “drive_c” which is your fake windows drive.

7. Once its done you have a functioning Windows prefix which is optimised as if it was 1998.

8. For my game - Discworld Noir - I then had to install the game into the prefix. I used winecfg to mount my CD drive into the prefix and ran the installer off the CD. You can launch winecfg from winetricks and also launch Explorer - this shows you the folders inside your prefix. Running both let’s you change settings and also browse your virtual windows machine, including launching setup files from the CD. Note winecfg doesnt auto update if things change in the host linux system (like yoy mount a new drive). Close and reopen winecfg to see changes - can be important if youre swapping CDs for an install. To be clear the system changes do auto apply to wine, you just can’t see them live update in winecfg.

You can also mount ISOs using linux and winecfg will pick them up as CD drives, or also use Winetricks to launch Windows installer files directly. You can also use the terminal to launch the setup files directly.

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/Gaming/Win98 wine /path/to/setup.exe

The game will install into the prefix as long as you run the setup file in the prefix.

9. Next, because my game has issues with being fullscreen in Windows I downloaded a windows program called dxwnd - https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/ This is a great tool for older games even on windows - it runs the game in emulated full screen which can solve a lot of unintended errors. It also has lots of config options for games that can help with tinkering.

Unzip the file into your prefixes fake drive C folder. For my example i put it in: ~/Gaming/Win98/drive_c/dxwnd/

Then using winetricks or the terminal, I launch dxwnd. Dxwnd contains loads of template configs for old games in its “export” folder. For my game I import the “discworld noir” config and then right click OK the new entry and select “modify”. I then point dxwnd to the location of the game exe (in my case I also needed to download a modified exe file for the game made to work on more modern systems - it also patches some other game errors so is still needednin my win98 fake machine).

I also then change the game resolution to 800*600 in dxwnd because for my game that is the source of crashes which the default config gets wrong.

Then thats it - I launch the game from the dxwnd launcher and a window 800*600 appears with the game in it. The great thing about dxwnd is that window gets scaled according to the DPI I set in winecfg so its nice and big on my 4k screen.

This is an example - your games may need different config options. Or you could get them running in Steam using proton - just add a “non steam game” find the exe in the lutris wine prefix (lutris/proton both create their own Wine prefixes) and add it.

There is also a tool called protontricks that is very similar to winetricks and allows ypu to modify the proton prefixes into the same way as winetricks for my game.

Protondb.com provides lots of information on popular and modern games, including peoples tips on how to modify the prefix or settings to use on launch to get games working.

It can seem intimidating but essentially wine and proton are doing the same thing: they create a windows environment with config files in a folder in your linux home folder. Lutris automates a lot of this installing the DLLs etc it needs for a game. But when lutris fails to work you can tinker with the lutris prefix using winecfg and Winetricks (launch them from within lutris), or create your own like I did.

I like to create my own prefix for probelmatic games as my lutris set up is now quite complex and has many games installed. So if there is one game with unique needs and tinkering it is useful to be able to create a dedicated prefix - then you dont break your other games if you break the prefix.

Hope that helps. Its honestly not as hard as it can seem and I have managed to get games working on linux that are nigh imposaible to get working on Windows now.

Also I havent even touched on Dosbox/dosbox-x which can run loads of dos games and even run Win98 itself. And of course you can also use KVM/Qemu or VirtualBox to make Windows virtual machines as another route. Generally though so far ive managed to get my windows games working on Wine.

And of course on top of all that you have emulation tools like Emulation Station, or EmuDeck, and loads of emulators. I use ScummVM for my old adventure games, and fs-uae for old Amiga games. You can do a lot with linux!

You can’t directly convert the app to make it natively android; android is too different for that. The app is built to use the whole android OS, not just the kernel (which is forked from linux). That means the android app is designed to run on mobile processors (usually ARM), and will be making calls to the android OS for everything.

You can’t repackage it directly as a linux app. However there are emulators and translation layers that cannbebused to run android apps within linux.

Waydroid for example allows android apps to run using android containers in linux. Anbox is also a container approach to running android apps. Both these approaches essentially translate for the android apps, and reduce the overhead asnthey dont have to emulate everything and can directly pass instruction to the linux host system. You can also use full virtualization to emulate an android device and run a whole virtual device. This would have a bit more overhead though.

I’m not aware of tools that can be used to compile android apps from source in to linux apps. It could be done in theory but would be complex due to the degree of translation of android APIs needed. Again compiling into some kind of container approach (I. E. Compile to include anbox or waydroid) might be doable but would bloat the app. I dont think there is the demand for that kink of approach when building in containers into Linux (and Windows) allows direct reuse of the android apks.

This looks like a good build.

A couple pf considerations; which really come down to your budget and future plans.

The Ryzen 7700 X is a good value per £ spent, and a good chip. But if your budget allows then £140 more gets the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has twice the threads at 16, better specs generally and nearly double the bench marking scores. Obviously prices vary in different regions but I’m seeing the 7700 X at £330 and the 7950X at £470. For 40% more you’d get about 100% more power. Those sorts of things are worth considering when you build - a higher budget now may save you money longer term as you may not need to upgrade for longer and youre already sinking the £330 in which you wouldn’t get back when you upgrade.

However you would also need to think about CPU cooling and may end up spending more on a fan too. But fans are generally cheaper and if youre already getting a good fan it’d be moot. Do get a fan; I dont think the 7700 X cones with one and generally stock fansnwith CPUs are OK but not the best for high performance use like gaming.

For graphica the RX 7900 GRE is a slightly better AMD graphics card. Its about 11% more powerful. I’m seeing t at £560 versus £520 for the 7800 XT. About 7% more expensive. 11% is a more marginal boost but again might be worth it. I’d definitely go with AMD at that price range - Nvidia 4070 is similar performance to the 7900 GRE but I’m seeing the 4070 as more expensive and Nvidia drivers are not as good on linux.

Thats not to say the drivers dont work - I do have a 3070 on Linux and I have a good experience gaming. The problems are ive had bad driver updates ive had to roll back, and I have problems with Wayland so use X11.

However if money were not a limit, the top end cards are Nvidia and you’d still get your gaming power from them on linux. Its just frustrating and annoying when drivers lag Windows, or have buggy updates. In terms of value for money and Linux, the AMD RX 7900 GRE is the better buy.

(Edit: worth saying too for single player gaming the ones youre playing are the ones that make good use of ultra high end graphics - so for example Witcher 4 is going to making use of top end graphics in the years ahead. GTA VI too. Not sure that justifies the cost of high end cards though - they are rediculousl overpowered and overpriced fr current uses)

Last thing, again coming down to budget vs future proofing. 32gb of ram is good but maybe worth getting 64gb if you can afford it to future proof. However if sticking with 32gb get a brand and combination you’d hopefully he able to buy more of down the line. Its not a good idea to mix ram sticks so you could get 2 16gb sticks now, and then another two 16gb sticks in the future - so make sure its a decent brand like Corsair that will still sell in 3-5 years. However if you get 64gb you might be OK for 5 and maybe even 10 years.

RAM is also always one of the cheapest and first and easiest ways to boost performance in a systemif you had to pick just 1 item to boost. (Edit: but in your case 32gb is already top end so you probably wouldn’t notice the 64gb unless you have some very memory intensive scenarios. I do have 64gb - which I do use for Cities Skylines as I load so many mods. So 64gb can still be a good buy if you’d use it)

Edit 2: also get a 4k gaming monitor because with the specs youre considering you’d be playing at 4k. I play at 4k with high and ultra settings still on my 3070, and that’s less powerful than what youre buying.

Out of interest, when GTAVI comes out will it matter?

Will the next game need a new from-scratch RP mod? Or will some of the open source components of FiveM be reusable?

FiveM have an advantage being owned by Rockstar but if it all has to be done again from scratch, FiveM may be irrelevant? Interested members of the community will make their own thing like they did before. Or is that wishful thinking?

Neither of these systems are powerful, and they’re also running Intel integrated GPUs which are frankly generally poor.

If you want to game with Proton, then the device still needs to be able run the game well if it had Windows installed.

As a general very rough rule, most games will work with proton if other games work with proton on your system. Its basically a compatibility layer between the game and your linux PC - if Proton can communicate well with your graphics card and CPU, and it has the right specs, it should just work - proton does the heavy lifting. But if no 3D games are running then most of them wont.

When it doesn’t work, the first place to look is your drivers and hardware. There are then certainly lots of caveats for specific games which may behave peculiarly with certain hardware and needs adjusting but I find that is the exception rather than the norm. Start with your drivers and hardware.

Yes: Five has four letters. Nine has four letters.

There are no more.

If you meant to ask if there are any more whole numbers with the same number of letters in the name as the number, then the answer is no. It is fairly simple to check - you only have to look at the numbers 0-30 before it becomes clear no other number will fit this pattern.

If you went into fractions like 20.12325 then there will be many numbers where all the letters added would get close but the fraction itself would mean you couldn’t quite reach the exact number as you can’t have fractions of letters.

If you included negative numbers then “minus eleven” has 11 letters. Minus thirteen has 13 letters. It seems to again break down once you go beyond 13, and its dodgy to include negative numbers as you can’t have negative letters.

So, no.