Yes! I’m on an eternal quest to find games that will just shut up and let me play.

My most recent find is Ghostrunner. Starts with the CPU doing the first kill and then you’re off.

Before that it was Celeste. I now realize in both games the player dies a lot. Maybe there’s a correlation between how much fun I have and how much the game allows me to die without repercussions 😅

I guess I’ll need to try Elden Ring now. There’s gotta be dozens of us. Anyone have more recommendations?

For me it reached a point where I now expect a new game I’m trying to just work. This was a monumental shift when I first realized that a few months ago.

Your best bet is Steam/Proton, since Valve stands behind it and development on all the Proton components (Wine, DXVK, VKD3D, Gamescope, …) is very active.

If you get games outside of Steam (I often prefer GoG if that’s an option, plus I have some itch.io bundles purchased a while ago), some tinkering may be necessary. For those, I like to go “vanilla” with Wine(-GE-custom usually), plus DXVK or VKD3D on top. There’s also Lutris to help with these scenarios. Works great too.

Another topic is native Linux games. There are some gems which work beautifully. I recently finished native Celeste from itch.io and it was flawless. Another great Linux port is Bastion. But some older titles may have compatibility issues - missing or incompatible libraries, broken gamepad support or stuff like that. For those, the Windows version via Proton may actually work better than the native version. Luckily, we can now pick either one.

This is excellent.

I’m happy to use Gamescope for many use cases but I’ve always had issues FSR upscaling Civ4 with it. The mouse cursor would misbehave. Tested just now with Wine-GE-Proton8-11 and it beautifully upscales from internal 1280x720 to my monitor’s 2560x1440.

Can be turned off with WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=0 which seems to fall back to nearest neighbor scaling. That’s fine for me. I’m not sure if WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH has any effect though. Maybe I’m just too blind to see the difference.

I’m very happy to see these developments in the Linux gaming world. Thank you to everyone involved!

Gen 9, base i5 model

Generally these UEFI logos are some kind of a standard - search for “UEFI BGRT” to find out more. But it’s up to the vendor whether to allow (or usually not) changing them.

ThinkPads are somewhat special in this regard - the firmware package includes a README.TXT which says:

 *  THIS VERSION OF THE FLASH UPDATE PROGRAM GIVES THE OPTION OF      *
 *  REPLACING (OR ELIMINATING) THE DEFAULT "LENOVO" IMAGE THAT IS     *
 *  DISPLAYED DURING SYSTEM START UP.                                 *

…and then proceeds to list instructions which don’t work 😉

I don’t think Dell has this as a feature of the firmware update tool.

Interesting, hadn’t heard of powerstat. I’ll be checking that, thanks!

Agreed, that sounds like the way to go. I was hoping there was already something to do the monitoring for me :)

Thanks, I do like powertop. I think it’s pretty good for short measurements, e.g. over 30 seconds:

% sudo powertop --time=30

The battery reports a discharge rate of 4.17 W
The energy consumed was 125 J
The estimated remaining time is 11 hours, 4 minutes

But in the real world I will not be getting 11 hours of runtime. The moment I start a browser or play a video, power consumption goes way up.

I’ve been running a basic Pentium J5005 NUC for a couple of years now as a Linux media center and a simple home server. This tiny box still impresses me. Linux support is excellent (i.e. everything just works), it boots in a few seconds and sips very little power.

I think the NUCs are a great example of a well-implemented x86 platform. Many competitors have sprung up, offering similar-looking boxes. But I’m not confident they can reach the level of compatibility and OS support as the NUCs.

That said, I think they’ve been a bit too expensive to become super popular. The “enthusiast” line were also interesting devices IMO, but with even more prohibitive prices.