As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

Yep, you can emulate, it does work, but there is a better option. Clone Hero works better, has lower performance requirements, supports all of the songs from all of the games, has great peripheral support, and has a whole community of people making modern songs available.

I would also recommend looking into a RetroCult controller mod if you really get into it. Quite a fun electronics project and suitable for someone with limited experience as it has been made very easy and only includes a little bit of soldering and cutting away a little bit of the case.

Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.

The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.

For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.

At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.

I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.

I have found that with Arch I don’t run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.

The good thing is it fails properly. This should not continue because it would break your system. The package ownership of those files has changed but the package manager would have to remove the current owning package then install the new owning package after in two separate transactions. Technically this could be make possible I think it would lead to bad packaging and would be bad practice. Happily it fails loudly and makes next steps fairly clear.

Yes, as the other responder said, tell steam through the properties dialogue to use Proton for compatibility.

It would also be a good idea to tell the devs that they have this issue. They can take down the Linux release and let it default to Proton, but they have to do it on their end.

It isn’t really clear from what you have said if you are using a laptop or desktop. If you are using a laptop chances are you only have one primary storage medium, likely an HDD or SSD. If it is a desktop it is more likely you have or can have two drives. If you have the option of having two entirely separate drives you can keep Windows installed on one drive and Linux on the other. You could select your boot device on startup and the chance of one messing with the other is reduced a lot.

A potentially better way to learn is to either install linux on an old or spare machine or to just boot off a live USB. The great thing with a live USB is you can access the system, use the software management stuff, try out finding settings and getting things done, all while being able to just reboot and have everything go back to normal after. If you want you can even make the USB a persistent install, so changes hang around and allow you to keep using the system in Linux with your changes over multiple reboots.

That all said, my honest recommendation is to use VirtualBox or a similar program. VirtualBox lets you run a virtual machine and install Linux on it without risking anything on your main system. You can learn how to do software updates, install new programs, configure things, and so on all while touching nothing on your system. Your machine can keep working as normal in Windows, you can learn with no risk, and you can compare different versions of Linux to see what you prefer. The process for setting up a virtual machine in VirtualBox is fairly simple and should only take about half an hour to do, so it isn’t a big time investment.

Is this running with Vulkan? Have you tried using other graphics backends like DX or similar?

Have you tried windowed mode? That had fixed a similar issue for me before.

Have you tried running the graphics settings all down to as low as possible, like absolute potato mode, to see if it continues there? If it works as a potato then adding a few things until you replicate the issue will help you narrow it down. If it happens on potato mode then maybe try verifying the game files?

Lastly, maybe consider trying an earlier driver version? Same for kernel? Sometimes weird issues like this are regressions and it was actually solved a few versions back but someone recreated the problem because they thought they were being smart and regressed the issue.

It is more than that. In previous studies from the authors they have controlled for the nutritional content and the processing and found that the content itself, so carbs fats etc, have a certain amount of causal influence on health, but the processing also has a separate and significant effect. Just having less processing seems to have a meaningful effect. This means less of the additives like milk powder, xanthan gum, sweeteners, flavourings, extracts, and so on. The exact mechanism seems to vary depending on the specific case, but separating components of food and then remixing them as well as adding non food components and processing with heat and pressure seems to make these things no longer digestible and safe.

Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.

Yes, this can be done through WINE.

Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

Hope that works out for you

How did you go? Any luck?

NTFS does not have the permissions structures Linux native filesystems have. All sorts of problems come from using NTFS for executable files. That said, exfat seems better in a bunch of ways, maybe try that?

What is a CHA score? I can’t find something that fits the initialism with any relevance, certainly not a CHADS score (stroke risk).

What do you do with a faulty RAID drive? Early in the morning!

So broadly you will find categories in games like Smash Bros and so on. Some characters will be heavy, some light, some fast, some slow, some strong, some weak, but each trait creates an axis. The ideal distribution of characters is to have all areas of the multidimensional space filled or if not filled at least alternated.

For example, you should have one heavy, fast, weak character, one heavy, slow, strong, but maybe not a heavy, fast strong or a heavy slow weak. You can chart them on a two dimension axis at a time, then use the characters from Tuxcart etc to fill the space based on what makes sense, eg the Gnu should be heavy but also fast, but it is definitely a prey animal, while penguins are smaller and fast with a more moderate attack level, maybe even weak.

Once you have some of the extremes filled you can consider subversions of the paradigm. For example, a compiled language is slow at creation but fast at use, so maybe a mascot for one of those could have two modes, switching state and therefore characteristics.

Another thing to consider would be the dynamics of your interactions. Are you going for the jumping around of Smash Bros? If so, lots of the details about their camera work can guide your decisions. What about the overall pacing? Do you want frenetic play like Smash Bros? Combos? Strategy? Lots of things to look at there with a narrative approach to the characters as representing their projects, for example Wilbur is smaller and supposed to be super modular, so maybe having quite a few modes with different characteristics would work, while something like puffy is great for water levels alongside tux and any other aquatics.

Oh, great, that actually limits what it is a lot. If it were related to video we could spend ages looking at codecs, drivers, all sorts of stuff.

If it happens in all windows including winecfg we have to be looking at a few causes.

Do you have a high polling rate mouse? That can cause a stutter issue. To test remove the mouse before launching something in wine (by terminal if you have to), then see if it replicates the issue. If no change, move on, next item.

You could be having a problem with your audio system trying to give things too quickly and falling over itself. Prefix the wine command with the below line.

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60

So it would be something like

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 winecfg

That should stop it if it is that audio issue, so see how you go.

Lastly, if you have winecfg running it is slowing itself down, but is it impacting other programs as well? I assume so, but want to make sure, so if you are for example playing a video in your browser and then launch winecfg does it start stuttering the video?

If none of the above helps can you dump the output of ps , mount, lspci -k, and iostat while no wine is running and while wine is running? Iostat is in iotools in mint I think, you may need to install it. Also, probably use a pastebin for the outputs.

You may be having a disk seek issue. Are you on a spinning disk? If so, sometimes running something a couple of times will have some cached or at least have the heads in the right spot to read the needed data. If that is the issue upgrading to an SSD would probably solve the issue at the root. A possible test would be using a RAM disk if you can be bothered testing it, you have sufficient RAM that it may be viable depending on the game.

That all said, for next steps I would personally consider if maybe an older version of WINE would work. Could you try installing another older version of both the vanilla and GE versions? Also, did you update your nVidia drivers recently? Maybe roll back if your system will work with that, I can do it easily in EndeavourOS but Mint is not something I am recently acquainted with, it may be a real pain or may tank your driver install to try and roll back. Also testing installing a browser in WINE and loading a video that way may help troubleshoot, or VLC through WINE and native to compare. Ultimately you want to try and find the difference between the failed states and the working states, so if you come back bring a log from a working run and a failed run.