TechnicallyColors

I'm not sure what a good written guide for manually running linux games is off the top of my head, but generally yeah you install Lutris, install the latest Proton-GE version through e.g. ProtonUp-QT, create a game entry in Lutris with a "Prefix" location dedicated to your wine prefix, pick Proton-GE as the runner, copy the game into the generated prefix, target the normal EXE, and launch it. Sometimes if a game isn't launching you'll need to use "winetricks" to install vcrun2022 and dotnet48 dependencies into the wine prefix, since each Wine prefix is sort of like a copy of windows, and windows has a handful of dependencies that games sometimes rely on. I've heard you can also just add the game as a "non-steam game" to steam, but I've not bothered as Lutris gives more control. Again I can't vouch for any specific guides, but the keywords from this post should help target a general direction to move in.

In my experience, there is nearly no difference between windows and linux when it comes to piracy. There are a few games that linux can't run (anticheat), but generally that shouldn't be an issue for games that you would typically pirate. Linux does have a standard learning curve though, and you'll need to get familiar with Lutris or some other Wine prefix manager to manage your games. If you're dedicated to moving to linux, game piracy should not be a deciding factor.

As I understand it, the assertion is that the 1080p FPS is the same as 2k/4k FPS, assuming that you have an infinitely powerful GPU. So the 1080p FPS is your max potential FPS at any resolution with the CPU, and then you need to look at a GPU 2k/4k chart to see how much FPS it can achieve from that target. HWUnboxed also reasons that gamers are not blindly using ultra settings, so in real scenarios people are going to be lowering their settings to try to achieve a specific FPS target anyway. They also mention that lowering ingame settings doesn't usually affect the CPU FPS benchmark.

So in summary, the 1080p CPU benchmark is the ~highest possible target you can achieve, and then it's up to your GPU and ingame settings to decide how much of that target you can reach. It's a little more difficult to grasp and calculate mentally, but it prevents the 2k/4k benchmark data from showing what is effectively misleading "point in time" data that will not be useful if you have a different GPU or ingame settings. This is most clearly demonstrated by re-reviewing older CPUs in the future-proof section and showing that putting massive GPUs on old CPUs puts the FPS benchmarks of all resolutions to roughly the same value - i.e. the CPU doesn't truly have an effect w/r/t resolution, it's mainly just the GPU.

One of the main points of this video is that 1080p testing is the only thing you should be looking at for CPU benchmarks (to the point that HWUnboxed is no longer doing 2k/4k testing in the future I think?), and although I was skeptical at first, the future-proof section did finally convince me. The new problem with this line of thinking is that you really need to be cross-referencing a GPU benchmark to figure out what a real world 2k/4k scenario will look like for the CPU you're interested in.

Fragmentation is a big one on mechanical harddrives. If you have 1000 video files that all share half of their pieces with each other, the disk is going to seek like crazy between them instead of reading sequentially during playback.

I'm still not sure I fully understand what's going on at the low-level, but there is a "How it works" section on the debcow github page that at least made an attempt to penetrate my skull.

Edit: I guess the main thing it's doing is skipping the .tar archive extraction, and ref-linking the raw bytes from the .tar into new files? Extacting the .tar normally will create standard files, and those files would be reflink copied to the new location, but that still requires a more or less "normal file copy" during the .tar extraction. This really has greater implications for allowing generic reflinking from .tar archives, instead of just being limited to package installation. Could be interesting if it was handled automatically during .tar extraction. Or I could be misunderstanding, which is equally likely.

I think ProStreet is very underrated, and I'd say that's my favorite. The car handling is a nice balance between realistic and arcadey, and the game is just a really entertaining take on track racing. Most of the game feels tight with its controls and challenges, and there are clear ways to express skill and achieve goals. My biggest problem with it is that dominating events (setting track records) is a little too easy, which probably works well for kids, but as someone who knows how to play racing games it's often a matter of not crashing and having a reasonable car. There's probably a mod to change that though? The soundtrack is also a bit mid compared to other NFS titles from this time but it does grow on you a bit.

Most Wanted is probably my second place, but I think it's not untouchable. The rubberbanding almost singlehandedly kills any sort of difficulty. In MW you're there to race neat cars and look cool doing it. There's no real challenge, and if there is, it's not a fair one. It could be a little less menu-driven too. Sometimes it feels very linear in how you progress through the game, just picking event after event from the menu, and even starting police chases from it.

Carbon is probably third place? It's more interesting than MW in a lot of ways but it's also just more mediocre in most respects. I consider MW and Carbon to be two sides of the same coin, but if it comes down to it I think you can easily put Carbon below MW. I think most people consider Carbon to be complete trash, but I don't think it's fair to say there's nothing good about it.

Underground 1 just sucks, and Underground 2 doesn't have a lot to offer in retrospect. Both Undergrounds were amazing at the time, but now that we have newer alternatives I don't think there's a lot of reason to return to U2, and I think U1 has aged like milk in just about every respect. I could definitely be convinced to play U2 again, but it's not something I feel a strong pull to return to.

Other Need for Speeds have a lot of hits and a lot of misses, and it's hard to want to put them in any sort of ranking system. They can all be fun in certain ways, but like most people I consider Black Box NFS to be the real NFS.

In my experience, installing Linux Mint onto just about anything is trivial. IMO, the learning curve is more about using a different operating system than it being pre-installed.

That said, as long as you have a preconfigured distro like Linux Mint I think it's about as easy to use as Windows or Mac. The main difference is that people are already used to how Windows or Macs work, and have forgotten there's plenty of jank that they've learned to avoid. There are still things Linux could improve on w/r/t new user experience but I think the gap is getting smaller every year.

Feigned enthusiasm/friendliness. "Thanks for catching that problem!"

Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.

Wow you weren't kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there's a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it's probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there's apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

That's great to hear. All I vaguely know is that the writer for TSR got kicked from the project a month ago so I wasn't sure if TSR was going to just remain unfinished or not.