I did a deep dive into frontends because I love organizing stuff in general. I use different frontends for each device I have because they all have different pros, but overall my favorite is Playnite because of its metadata and sorting features. For Windows I use Playnite, on Linux I use Pegasus, on Steam Deck I use RetroDeck/EmulationStation, and on handhelds I use Knulli Firefly.

Playnite is imo the king, because it has really beautiful themes with custom cover art and can sort games in basically any way possible: by system, rating, genre, name, release date, you name it. The only con is that it’s Windows exclusive (for the near future) and is janky in Wine/Lutris.

Pegasus is spectacular for its fine grained control, and can be configured to do basically anything. Its like the Arch Linux of the frontend world; start with the basics and build from the ground up. With tinkering, it works great on almost any platform.

RetroDeck is great because it’s plug n play. I love to tinker, but I also wanted a platform to just play my games without hastle or messing around. I find myself actually playing my games on the deck instead of tinkering with the frontend.

Knulli Firefly is great for smaller screen handhelds for a similar reason. It’s very customizable, but also works straight away with little to no hastle. It’s also better than most stock OSes that ship with emulation devices

Mystery Button

I’ve played a LOT of cod over the years, and I’ve seen it get slammed into the ground with hate from all directions at every release. In some cases it was deserved cough BO4 but I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment and hours from a bunch of them. I think people get mad if the gameplay is different when they try something new, hence the hate for BO3, Infinite Warfare, Ghosts etc. but also get mad when it “feels like the same game” like Cold War and WWII, so it’s a lose lose for them.

If I were to pick a favorite era though, I like the jetpack era: (BO3, IW, and AW) because they gambled and tried something new. It was hated at the time, but people are still online playing and enjoying BO3 and IW almost 10 years later.

I also really enjoy the true classics like COD 1 & 2. They were actually the first ones I played bc I had to sneak it past my mom by buying it at a yard sale when I was younger lol. They really capture that clunky early 2000s shooter vibe that I kinda miss

And the Linux community is Gordon Ramsay

Where’s the green bell pepper :(

Man, this is why I love lemmy. There’s always some extensive and insightful info in the comments somewhere. Great explaination! I might use some of these concepts in my dnd campaign

In my opinion linux runs old windows games better than windows itself. When I was on XP I used to play games like Starcraft and Lemmings Revolution which absolutely refused to work on Windows 10 after I switched, even in compatability mode. Later when I switched to linux, they worked great with Lutris with very few issues. Linux is great for older games. For newer games, Steam has most bases covered and worked ootb.

Do it, I left IT to become a chef. The pay is less but I feel so much better about my job. Theres a huge difference doing something that actually benefits people (making good food for people was my path, it doesn’t have to be cooking specifically) rather than slaving away for a corporation’s benefit. It’s awesome when you go out and see people enjoying what you did

If you enjoy Titanfall 2 you might like Call of Duty Black Ops 3. I still havent found a game that handles so well and feels so smooth. It got a lot of flak at the time (2014) because everyone was tired of future shoooters, but imo it has the best fps mechanics not only in cod, but in any fps game. The story is also really good; I wont spoil but it does get kinda philosophical and has plenty of twists and turns.

As others have said, the Half Life series is probably the best fps objectively. I started with 2 and then played 1, so while they do go in order, it isn’t required. HL1 is a bit clunky but still great.

Also James Bond 007 games are criminally underrated. Everyone knows about Goldeneye for the N64, but some of my favorites are Nightfire, From Russia with Love, Everything or Nothing, and Goldeneye Reloaded. A lot of the Steam pages were taken down for them though, and are only really playable on console, but definitely worth it if you are able to play

That first sentence hit me like a truck

I see a couple of other comments reccomending exfat; I’ve had problems with exfat with both the Steam flatpak and the Steam system package. Exfat does not support linux symlinks which are needed for some if not most Steam games to work properly. You will have to re-install your games onto an ext4 or linux-friendly filesystem, for Steam at least.

Emulation and GOG is a different story though. I have both on an exfat drive and I can access and play them with both windows and linux.

In terms of security, you will be at a slight risk using an unsupported os in the future. But hey, some people I know are still on Windows 7, so it isn’t a huge risk. As long as you practice basic computer hygene and have an antivirus running (windows defender (easy), malwarebytes (secure), or clamAV (open source) are decent picks) you’ll be fine.

I notice the same effects as well. On desktop I keep it on because it doesn’t take any longer and provides extra secutity, so why not. But on my phone over lte it doesn’t work at all, so I keep it off.

There are only a handfull of quantum computers that could actually brute force a good vpn, and I highly doubt any of them would waste time/resources on spying on me playing steam games or browsing lemmy. In my opinion it’s more of a future-proofing feature, and is less important to have on, in 2025 at least.

No thanks, I’ll just keep playing Morrowind on my 2009 Toshiba

Yes, you can find it in the themes directory. It also has really good documentation on github in case you want to make custom collections or swap out game system cover art. I went down the qml rabbit hole because of pegasus, it was super fun

The problem lies more with the phone itself no longer being supported, as both Calyx and Graphene only do harm-reduction updates after end of life, not full security updates. You will be taking a risk using either, but both are better than stock android.

For some reason you’ll find a lot of Calyx/non-graphene os hate on lemmy (just look at the dowvotes on anything calyx related, even on this post). But if your threat model is just combatting coprorate data harvesting, de-googling, or further securing your phone, it works well and does as promised.

You should also look into Fairphones with Calyx. They’re a bit pricey, but they get hardware support for 10 years instead of 5 (most android phones) and they are built with replacable parts in mind to prevent e-waste and unnecessary cost.

So in other words, yes you will have to buy a phone every 5 years (or 10 with fairphone) in order to have comprehensive security, even with graphene or calyx.

No problem! I think it depends on the theme. I use the Retro Mega Next theme which is optimized for handhelds, but it works great with mouse and keyboard.

Very nice! I will look into using it

Yeah, but I see it as a pro and a con. With previous browsers I used like Mull, Fennec and Bromite, the store versions usually lagged behind, usually due to FDroid shenanigans, and downloading it from the source eliminates the middleman. While it is more work, I do use my browser for many important things, so I feel like it’s worth it for my use case.

I use Pegasus at the moment as it’s extremely customizable, although it does have a bit of a learning curve since you do most things through media.txt files. You can configure launch commands, box art/media/videos through an external scraper (I use Skyscraper), and you can point to bash files which opens up use of the terminal for basically anything you want to do OS side. It also has many different themes, basic metadata, and sorts games by system.

Emulation station is also another popular choice and is more out-of the-box minded bit still requires a bit of know how.

I also really like Playnite because it’s video game sorting heaven, but sadly it’s windows only and is really janky in wine/lutris. I eagerly await the day a working linux port arrives.

Iceraven is my go to, been using it for about a year now. It works great