The problem is that games don’t run at all or require major effort to run without issues.

A major cause for that is the distro - when it comes to gaming, the distro makes a huge difference as I outlined previously. The second major cause is the flavor of Wine you chose (Proton-GE is the best, not sure what you used). The third major cause is checking whether or not the games are even compatible in the first place (via ProtonDB, Reddit etc) - you should do this BEFORE you recommend Linux to a gamer.

In saying all that, I’ve no idea about pirated stuff though, you’re on your own on that one - Valve and the Wine developers obviously don’t test against pirated copies, and you won’t get much support from the community either.

Unfortunately you chose the wrong distro for your friend - Linux Mint isn’t good for gaming - it uses an outdated kernel/drivers/other packages, which means you’ll be missing out on all the performance improvements (and fixes) found in more up-to-date distros. Gaming on Linux is a very fast moving target, the landscape is changing at a rapid pace thanks to the development efforts of Valve and the community. So for gaming, you’d generally want to be on the latest kernel+mesa+wine stack.

Also, as you’ve experienced, on Mint you’d have to manually install things like Waydroid and other gaming software, which can be a PITA for newbies.

So instead, I’d highly recommend a gaming-oriented distro such as Nobara or Bazzite. Personally, I’m a big fan of Bazzite - it has everything you’d need for gaming out-of-the-box, and you can even get a console/Steam Deck-like experience, if you install the -deck variant. Also, because it’s an immutable distro with atomic updates, it has a very low chance of breaking, and in the rare ocassion that an update has some issues - you can just select the previous image from the boot menu. So this would be pretty ideal for someone who’s new to Linux, likes to game, and just wants stuff to work.

In saying that, getting games to run in Linux can be tricky sometimes, depending on the game. The general rule of thumb is: try running the game using Proton-GE, and if that fails, check Proton DB for any fixes/tweaks needed for that game - with this, you would never again have to spend hours on troubleshooting, unless you’re playing some niche game that no one has tested before.

1. I used OneDrive, and especially the file on-demand (all files on server visible in explorer but only downloaded when needed) feature a lot

You can continue to use OneDrive. I use the OneDriver client and it works really well - your drive appears just like a local drive, but files only get downloaded when you try to access them. Once downloaded, it gets cached locally and is available offline, and is kept in sync automatically. Other cloud providers should have similar FUSE clients available.

2. What are best practices for managing apps?

Best practice is to stick to packages provided by your distro’s repos. Flatpak should be your second option if you can’t find your app there, and AppImages should be your third option (since Flatpaks are superior as they can share dependencies, unlike AppImages). Avoid Snap. In fact, avoid any distros that even use Snap (*buntu). Also, if you’re on a Debian/Ububtu based distro, avoid adding PPAs (thirdparty user repositories) as far as possible, as these can cause dependency issues and may cause pain when you upgrade your distro.

Is there a GUI (I know) way to see all applications

That should be provided by your distro - Gnome-based ones have “Software” and KDE-based ones have “Discover”.

Anyone here know how to disable shorts? I could’ve sworn there was an option to disable it previously, but I can’t find it any more.

I’m not sure what Gaduda is using, but neofetch supports various logo backends (with ASCII being the default). To get a high-resolution image, you might want to use one of the sixel/tycat/w3m/kitty backends (depending on what image protocol your terminal supports).

https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/wiki/Image-Backends

I am not a fan because they install all that WINE stuff on the system level which is a huge security degradation.

I disagree with this. Sure, it could be made more secure, but Wine, on it’s own isn’t, any greater security risk compared to any other scripting runtime such as say Python, which is also installed at the system level. Ultimately it’s up to the user to get their executables from trustworthy sources - and whether it’s a random bash script or an exe, doesn’t really make a difference.

As for Firefox, if you’re truly concerned about security then you wouldn’t be using it in the first place, you’d be using Librewolf, which you can install without any issues.

I am! I run it both on my gaming PC and laptop.

But it doesn’t seem like a “typical” distro for a daily driver? How does Bazzite for example differ from Nobara which is another gaming-oriented distro?

Well, for starters, if you get the Bazzite-deck edition, your PC boots straight into Steam’s game mode - in this mode, everything runs thru gamescope so you get all the awesome benefits like being able to use FSR even with games that don’t support it, HDR and more. You get a console-like experience on PC, and it’s awesome.

Another cool thing about this mode is that all your updates - including OS, Flatpak, firmware/BIOS, container, Nix, pip etc - all of it is presented as if it’s a Steam update like in SteamOS - and it’s automatic too, and it doesn’t interrupt your gaming experience. Basically a unified update backend and frontend, which is awesome.

Compared to Fedora/Nobara, one advantage this has is that the updates are image based and atomic, so when you reboot, the new update goes live instantly so there’s no wait-time. Another advantage is that your previous image is available in the GRUB menu, so in case the update broke something, you can always boot from the previous image - no need to even restore anything, no need to edit your fstab etc (unlike btrfs snapshot restores where the subvolid changes). And you can also pin “good” images to your GRUB menu (and I highly recommend doing that), so you can always fall back to a known good version. This came in handy on my laptop recently where after one of the Feb updates I was experiencing some weird graphics corruption in game mode, but thanks to image pinning I always had a working image to fall back to. Also, the rebase feature allows you to go back and forth between 90 days of images (stored on github), so it’s easy to switch between various versions for testing. The rebase is also interesting because with just a single command you can switch between any other Fedora Atomic distro, so if you’re bored of Bazzite or you want to try out a new DE, it’s just one command to switch. And with pinning, you can always switch back instantly.

Finally, there’s the whole immutability aspect. Personally I’m ambivalent on this, but the fact that it allows image/atomic updates (with easy rollbacks/rebases), I think of it more as a convenience - especially on a gaming-oriented machine, where I just wanna jump straight into my games without worrying about updates and broken systems.

So having used Fedora, Nobara, and finally Bazzite, I can highly recommend Bazzite as a daily driver - and it’s 100% worth switching. AMA.

This looks nice, good job!

On a related note, does anyone have any good reasons as to why I should be using Restic instead of Borg? (my Borg backups are all local btw - generally they’re snapshots of various projects I’m working on, so I don’t need any cloud features).

I have, actually. I’ve converted both my elderly parents and aunt and uncle, over a decade ago, to Linux. They were first running Xubuntu, and now they’ve been running Zorin for the past couple of years. Both of them use an pure-Intel PC/laptops (no nVidia, no proprietary drivers) and they have zero issues. All they need is a browser for Facebook/email/etc, some light document editing, and the occasional prints/scans.

Linux works 100% perfectly for their needs, since all they’re doing is basic computing tasks. In fact the whole reason why I switched them over in the first place back then was because I got tired of doing tech support every time their Windows crapped out.

Why do you assume you’re going to do tech support? Does your MIL have any specific proprietary software or hardware requirements?

Like I cant reasonably put my MIL on a linux laptop that I put together for her and expect her to have a good experience

Why not?

It’ll really depend on your local job market. I was on a serious job hunt earlier this year and I couldn’t find a single Linux job which asked for LFCS certs. There were a couple which asked for Red Hat certs though. Of course, this could be specific to where I live, so I’d recommend looking at some popular job sites for where you live (+ remote jobs too) and see how many, if any, ask for LFCS, and you’d get your answer.

Should I focus more on dev ops? Security? Straight SysAdmin?

From what I’ve seen so far, the days of “traditional” Linux sysadmin roles are numbered, if not long gone already - it’s all mostly DevOps-y stuff. Same with traditional security, these days it’s more about DevSecOps.

As a modern Linux sysadmin, the technologies you should be looking at would be Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers (Docker mainly, but also Podman/LXD), GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and tools.

Some Red Hat shops may also ask for OpenShift, Ansible Tower, Satellite etc experience. IBM shops also use a lot of IBM tools such as IBM Could Paks, Multicloud Management, and AIOps/Watson etc.

And finally there’s all the “cloud” stuff like AWS, Azure, GCP specific things - and they have their own terminologies that you’d need to know and understand (eg “S3”, “Lambda” etc) and they have their own certs to go with it. I suspect a “cloud” cert will net you more jobs than LFCS.

So as you’d probably be thinking by now, all of the above isn’t something you’d know from just using desktop Linux. Of course, desktop Linux experience is certainly useful for understanding some of the core concepts and how it all works under the hood, but unfortunately that experience alone just isn’t going to cut it if you’re out looking for a job.

As I mentioned before, start looking for jobs in your area/relevant to you and look at the technologies they’re asking for, note down the terms which appear most frequently and the certs they’re asking for, and start preparing for them. That is, assuming it’s something you want to work with in the future.

Personally, I’m not a big fan all this new tech (I’m fine with Ansible and containers, but don’t like the industry’s dependency on proprietary techs like Docker Desktop, Amazon or Red Hat’s stuff). I just wanted to work on pure Linux, with all the all standard POSIX/GNU tools and DEs that we’re familiar with, but sadly those sort of jobs don’t really exist anymore.