Worth noting that Linux Mint Debian Edition exists and is based directly on Debian instead of Ubuntu. They starting publishing it specifically because the Linux Mint team doesn’t like the direction Ubuntu is heading in with snaps. Not sure how good it is as I haven’t tried it in a while (and don’t really use regular mint either).

Honestly I’d consider using this in combination with NixOS just for the flatpak support

Did you actually read my comment? It’s actually impressive to get those takeaways from that…

Anyway, if you want to twist my comments into something that makes yourself pointlessly mad I can’t stop you. Your definition of an android game seems to be Google Play malware, so I don’t think you’ll ever get what you want.

When I’ll get games comparable to like FFX or Shadow of the Colossus (the first two that come to mind) I’ll finally be satisfied with android gaming.

Again, indie games exist and can easily be run on most phones through Winlator/GameNative. The Nintendo switch is basically an 8 year old midrange phone processor and that still got games, plenty of steam titles will run fine on even a low/midrange android phone.

Until then all the p2w shit and other crap, or even 5yo PC games at low graphic settings on flagship phones, won’t cut it.

So you want games comparable to what came out in 2001 and 2005, but a 5 year old AAA is too old for you? What???

Luckily my current phone will probably be my last android device too.

If you’re saying this because you’re switching to iPhone, I wouldn’t get my hopes up on the situation improving. It’s equally as bad on iOS. If you’re saying that because you’re getting a Linux phone or a non-smartphone, fair enough but those don’t have any games, let alone emulated ones.

Also, emulating is very cool, however what’s the last AAA PC game you played in your phone?

Excuse me for sending an incredibly clickbaited YouTube video, I don’t play AAA’s since honestly IMO they’re not as good as indies anyway. However, according to this cyberpunk runs (albeit I’m guessing that’s on low) on newer phones: https://youtu.be/ACPXNADIjKw

I’m sure other AAAs from even just a few years ago could run fine. The only problem is that most android phones don’t have enough storage for AAAs anyway. A “native” android release wouldn’t change that.

Also wine is not an emulator, as its name clearly states, it makes things run natively so we should more generally talk about “PC gaming” there.

If you still want to make a distinction between games born for Windows and games born for Linux, then yes, those are not “Linux gaming”.

So is the line you’re drawing the emulation layer needed between ARM and x86? Or is it the difference between emulation and translation?

If this exact same fex+proton software was run on a snapdragon laptop under Ubuntu is that really that different? Do you count apps running under Java bytecode as emulation? Because that’s a vast majority of android apps. The distinction between translation, native gaming, and emulation is ultimately kind of meaningless if you get a good experience out of it.

Android is technically Linux under the hood, so it can (and has) been making use of the improvements to Linux gaming.

If by “android gaming” you mean you want to see a world where games are published to the play store in addition to Steam and consoles, you should probably give up on that. The play store is too ridden with actual malware to make that a reality. Even if games got released there, people would complain that they aren’t free because all of their other phone games are. If you want to play games on your phone with a Bluetooth controller and get a decent experience, it’s already here.

Honestly if I can play all of the new indie games on my phone I don’t really care whether or not they’re “android games.”

By your logic the steam deck doesn’t have any games since most of them rely on proton to work.

There are android apps combining fex/box64 with proton in order to run full Windows games now. Android may actually be a semi-viable gaming platform in the near future.

GameNative is one that works as a full steam client but there are a few others that give you more control like Winlator (both on GitHub)

You can actually play games pretty decently on them, especially indies like hollow knight and Celeste.

COSMIC is early on enough that you’d probably be better off opening an issue on their GitHub, this is very likely a bug

The company says it is now developing an “advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified.” This installation flow will include safeguards to protect people who are being coerced into installing a dangerous app, or tricked by a scammer, along with “clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved.”

Seems like there will also just be a toggle somewhere (probably developer settings) that lets someone install from any source

To be clear this was not a recommendation lol I completely agree with you

If you want to do both at the same time without knowing which side any given task will fall under use NixOS

Or source code at this point, AOSP is still missing the 16 QPR1 release that came out for pixels at the beginning of September

Release QPR1 source code first though it’s been 2 months 😭

(Or at the same time, that would be good too)

That’s the thing though. If I’m going to need to be on-call tech support then Linux isn’t actually a better option then Windows. Sure it would be more private and less sucky but if the computer doesn’t actually work then that doesn’t mean anything. I’m willing to make ad-hoc workarounds to my own problems because I’m a software developer and don’t mind falling down a rabbit hole to get something like push-to-talk working with a custom pipewire script. My friends who want to play games and relax when they get home from work are understandably not willing to go through that hassle.

I’d love for Linux to be ready for daily driving but for most people I know it just isn’t. Maybe when Wayland desktops are more mature but I’m not going to make people choose between functioning shortcuts (X11) and functioning monitors (Wayland).

I could never get any of my friends on Linux (maybe I’ll be able to now that Windows 10 is dying) but I was able to get everyone on prism instantly because it’s just a better launcher than the official one in every possible way (it’s also on Windows and MacOS)

They haven’t stopped it yet for the pixel 10s but who knows how long it’ll last

Note that if you’re in the US, Samsung doesn’t unlock the bootloaders at all and afaik Motorola is also hit or miss. Importing a phone is also risky as international versions might not have the cell bands required for US carriers.

If you want a custom ROM in the US you basically have to buy a pixel, and at that point you might as well go with GrapheneOS since it’s the most secure

If you are fine with having things on the same OS, look into distrobox. It would let you set up an Ubuntu environment/container on top of your Bazzite install. You could also use something like OSX-KVM for MacOS with GPU passthrough (assuming you use a compatible GPU) which would simplify your setup greatly. That way you could technically have all 3 environments on one OS with one set of hardware but now the only thing being virtualized is MacOS.

(You could also dual-boot with MacOS if you wanted and it would be slightly faster than a VM but also more of a headache to setup)

Edit: Missed that you mentioned Windows but the setup for that would be pretty much the exact same as MacOS except getting GPU passthrough to work on Windows is easier (again, same limitations as MacOS though, and games with anticheats would be able to tell that Windows is in a VM).

I use refind also, there should be a setting somewhere to let refind scan entries from other EFI partitions. I have that setup and just created a second EFI partition for my Linux setup, so that Windows has no idea Linux even exists. I even have everything running off of the same drive (my laptop only has one nvme slot) and I haven’t had any issues.