That true, though most of the results for Linux Mint slow boot show people finding it anomalous and try to help fix it, where as with Bazzite, most of the comments say that’s normal and they experience it too. The consensus I’ve seen suggests that Fedora Atomic boots slower than other distros, and thus Bazzite inherits that slow boot as well.

I’m not trying to suggest that Bazzite sucks or anything, it provides some very unique advantages such as the Deck mode, but at least in my experience, Fedora based immutable distros are slower on my hardware. If it’s not on yours, then I’m glad to hear that, but it its been very repeatable on my end.

Yeah I dunno about all that.

That’s been my experience across a couple different computers, one of which was a bit weak, and the other a very capable gaming laptop, both of which just felt sluggish compared to normal distros. This appears to be a fairly common observation of Bazzite, from what I’ve seen.

Bazzite isn’t limited, there are just different ways to do things.

I mostly agree, but I’d say it generally requires more research to accomplish certain things, and documentation for achieving those things on bazzite is far more limited compared to mainstream distros. I think Bazzite excels for people either doing simple things, such as just couch gaming, or desktop gaming + browser use and if everything is available by Flathub. It’s also good for people who are more experienced or willing to tinker.

But IMHO, at least currently, immutable distros aren’t ideal for the average user who might do more than gaming, or have older printers than need a driver from the manufacturer, or who may install things that aren’t in flatpaks (like a musician using Reaper). I think for now (because I do think immutable distros will be the mainstream in the future), normal newbie distros like Mint are still ideal since they cover the most use-cases and have the most documentation and application support.

No prob! :)

I’d normally suggest installing it on a separate empty drive to test it out, but I know it can be a real bear to access those to swap em out on a laptop.

In your case though, I think as long as you can get a Live version of Mint to boot successfully from a USB stick (like there’s no flickering issues at the desktop and everything renders correctly), that’s usually a pretty good sign everything will be fine after you install the Nvidia driver on a full install (not to say you 100% won’t encounter any issues, it’s still possible, but hopefully not!)

I tried looking it up myself just now, but I’m not really able to find anything that would indicate you’d have a bad time on Mint with your 5070 TI. There was one guy on the Nvidia forum that said he was having a bunch of problems, but turned out his BIOS was the culprit. Another person who reported a problem on the mint forums discovered that his card was outputting to his secondary monitor which happened to be off.

Support for the 5070ti was added in the 6.1 Linux kernel, while the latest version of Mint defaults to 6.12 now. You should be able to install it and then install the latest 580 Nvidia driver from the Driver Installer tool and be off to the races without any real trouble, at least from what I read.

System 76 (Linux laptop maker) now ships a laptop with a 5070 Ti, so I’d be quite surprised if you encountered significant issues.

Then I would suggest the standard Linux Mint Cinnamon, which as I said makes it extremely easy to install the Nvidia driver.

Off the top of my head,

• installing applications that aren’t available as flatpaks requires you to use distrobox to install them (not a huge issue if you’re familiar with the terminal).
• printer drivers are very difficult to install if your printer isn’t supported out if the box, as they cannot be installed in a distrobox container.
• changing user groups or permissions, such as to enable ssh or ftp abilities, is more difficult (it wouldn’t retain the setting after rebooting, didn’t research how it can be achieved).
• not a limitation, but it’s much slower in many ways compared to normal distros. It takes a long time for it to finish installing, booting is slower, updating is slower, etc.

There may be more limitations, but those are the ones I personally encountered.

I wouldn’t recommend CachyOS to newbies, as it’s based on Arch, which brings with it a much higher learning curve and maintenance abilities to properly use. For all of that, it gives very, very minor performance gains in gaming compared to standard distros.

Bazzite is more viable for a newbie, but the immutable base can be limiting depending on their needs, and may require them to learn how to use distrobox, which is quite advanced for a newbie.

I’d recommend new users stick with Linux Mint unless they have a multimonitor setup with differing refresh rates, or very new hardware that requires a newer kernel to function well, in which case Fedora may be a better option.

Linux Mint is a fantastic place to start (I would say the best place, personally). It’s especially good if you use an Nvidia card, as it makes the driver install trivial with the built-in driver installer tool.

If you don’t use an Nvidia card, I’d personally recommend going with the Linux Mint Debian Edition.

If you really want to freak Microsoft out, switch to Linux. Nothing terrifies them more than the moment you decide to leave.

Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.

An average user doesn’t really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.

As an example; I’m not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they’re trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it’s not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP’s, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.

With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that’s all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they’ll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it’s complicated.

Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it’s own codebase starting from scratch.

Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.

The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.

A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.

Just like with email, where you can’t log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can’t log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.

But if you’re familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it’s hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.

Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it’s own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you’d have to go to lemmy.world directly if that’s where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.

All of these servers are ‘federated’ with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.

Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you’re familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).

As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.

• Lemmy is mainly developed by Dessalines and Nutomic on Github.
• Piefed is mainly developed by Rimu (and others) on Codeberg
• Mbin is developed on Github

But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.

There are still active cinema and TV show communities, the ones from lemm.ee mostly moved over to piefed.social.

• !movies@piefed.social
• !television@piefed.social
• !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social
• !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone

You could try I think a grub probe command to get grub to rescan for other operating systems.

Setting up a dual boot while tired can be a bit risky, since it’s possible to slip up and install onto the wrong partition or drive and overwrite the other OS. Hopefully not the case here!

If your other OS is on a separate drive, you could also check your BIOS to make sure the SATA or PCIe slot its connected to is enabled.

I had no issue making Wii Sports Resort with motion plus.

Looking at it again, I misremembered the Dolphin wiki entry for it. Apparently it only has problems unless using Bluetooth Passthrough mode, which I didn’t really want to mess with to get working with my bluetooth dongle.

you can completely erase the pain point of this by using Playnite as front end (in windows) and configuring your emulators (Dolphin, PCSX2 etc) to start full screen WITH controller support started at run time, along with enabling hot key macros for shutting down game and returning to dashboard etc. Playnite has native scripting control.

Unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to use Playnite, as I’ve fully sworn off Windows personally in favor of Linux. However, even if Playnite were on Linux, I’m honestly not sure I’d go that route for myself. Even though it’s fully configurable powerful, with macros that can be set up to get things just right, and specific versions of Dolphin may be more ideal for a particular game, I’m kind’ve at a point in my life where that type of fine-tuning and tinkering is far less appealing compared to when I was younger, where I would’ve seen it as a fun challenge.

The original merit of consoles was that they’re simple plug-n-play devices that don’t require much though to use, and that aspect is really appealing to me nowadays, as it leaves me more time to troubleshoot or experiment with non-gaming things, like tinkering to get a good audio production setup going on my Linux PC with certain outboard audio (which can be time consuming to figure out). So for me, a jail broken Wii really fits the bill of a simple box that I can just turn on and know everything will just work, and no update will mess anything up and require me to look into it.

But that’s just me! For others, that tinkering and the end result of it is highly gratifying, and more power to em, I say :)

Only downside with the miyoo is the size of it makes my hands cramp up if I play any game that requires a lot of movement, like fast paced racers. Didn’t think it’d be an issue since I have really small hands, but alas.

It’s excellent in every other way though, probably will get one of those grips that it can slot into to make it more comfortable, but I do kinda wish I’d opted for something a bit more ergonomic out of the gate, with controls on the sides of the screen, or a clamshell design, instead of the classic gameboy shape.

If you have a compatible Bluetooth adapter (it can be hit or miss), you can select Real Wiimotes in the controller section of Dolphin, and make sure continuous scanning is enabled, then once a Wii game is running, you press 1 & 2 simultaneously on the Wiimote, and it’ll sync up (but certain controllers, like Wiimotes with motion plus built in may need you to use the dedicated sync button instead to sync).

You’ll also need a USB IR bar for the Wiimotes to function, which can be had for around 8 bucks from ebay.

However, I personally couldn’t get the Wii motion plus functionality to work in the handful of games that use it, and some games still don’t work right in dolphin, like Wii Sports Resort.

Seconding the Wii. I personally dismissed it for many years as a gimmick console, but recently gave it a chance and did a deep dive on its library, and was astonished how many good titles it had available.

However, after experimenting with Dolphin vs using the games natively on a modded console, I ending up forgoing emulation, as I found that it was significantly less convenient to use compared to just booting up the console and immediately having the controllers synced up and working perfectly.

That avoided the need to boot up my couch PC, navigate to Dolphin with my Bluetooth keyboard/mouse, make sure it was set up properly (some games need certain settings enabled to avoid weird visual glitches, like Resident Evil 4) launch it, full screen it, and then sync the Wii controller (certain models of controllers must be synced with the sync button in dolphin, while others let you hold down 1 and 2 simultaneously). And if I left a game to play a different one, I had to go back to my Bluetooth keyboard, launch a game, full screen, and sync all over again.

I could’ve negated most of that faff by installing a retroarch distro to my couch PC, like Batocera, but I personally hate the UI/UX of retroarch and its various frontends.

I also found that my Wii motion plus controllers simply wouldn’t work correctly for the games that utilize it, and some games still don’t work properly in dolphin, like Wii Sports Resort.

The only downside of using the actual Wii is that it only outputs 480p, but with cheap component cables and the deflicker disabled in the ROM loader, it usually isn’t that bad once you’re moving around and immersed.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

Glad you enjoyed! :)

I’ll be posting more of StrafeFox’s stuff here, they’re criminally lesser known considering the consistent quality of their videos.

the Movim XMPP client could probably be modified to replicate discord, as it’s already close.

Fair enough :p