Any fellow Linux users on here?

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I hate to sound like a traitor, but WSL(2) is such a good antidote to distro-hopping.

Sort of defunct really, especially for gamers. It presents the wrong experience to people new to linux, one of it's greatest properties is that it's just so much faster than windows, but you're not going to experience that inside a virtual box with the Windows Desktop still running in the background.

And if you're already a linux user then you're not going to waste your time mucking around with windows.

Running games in Wine is a better experience than in windows, under spec hardware is often no longer under spec. My older machine only has a GTX 1660 graphics card but it still plays No Man's Sky with all the graphics settings set to high.

 

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Running games in Wine is a better experience than in windows, under spec hardware is often no longer under spec. My older machine only has a GTX 1660 graphics card but it still plays No Man's Sky with all the graphics settings set to high

That's a good point; I totally forgot about gaming. I'm just really surprised at what can be done at the application level, but I really do need to see how good Wine and / or Proton is lately. I had some mixed feelings about Lubuntu, but if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

 

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....if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

I just use wine itself and winetricks without the third party front ends to set my games up.

The trick is to create a fake windows drive (Wine Prefix) that mimics the era of the games you want to play. There's no limit to the number of these you can have, I have different prefixes for different eras and I still occasionally play games from back in the 90s.

The confusing part for a lot of people when setting these up is the different versions of DirectX, Dot Net etc that you need to load, a lot of people think they can just try different versions without realising that a newer version doesn't overwrite the older one. You can have several different instances of DirectX installed simultaneously which won't run anything.

For most cases from around the year 2000 up to the late 2010s DirectX 9.36 seems to be the best version, it supports more games than any others. And Dot Net 4.0 or 4.2. And you'll need the VB 6.0 runtime files.

When you get that all set up the way you like it you then have to be careful when installing games - don't let them install their own versions of DirectX or other runtimes if they're going to attempt to replace what you installed manually beforehand.

This is what I'm playing at the moment:

 

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....if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

Just thought I should add - some very old games actually require an old graphics card if you want them to display properly. For these I use an emulator - Emulator of retro x86-based machines

I've tried just about all of them and this one is by far the best. Create a virtual machine then grab your virtual DOS floppies and start installing. I use mine to run Win98 for a couple of older games.