It’s in beta as of a couple weeks ago and it looks quite customizable, in fact. Lots of themeing options and an optional tiled mode. If it lives up to its espoused design philosophy, it looks to me like it’ll be awesome but I haven’t tried it yet.

COSMIC, the new desktop in beta, is written from scratch in Rust. Cosmic the older version was a fork of Gnome. 2 different DEs, made by the same company with the same name. Different codebases.

Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”

And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.

When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.

Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.

About 20 years ago, I wanted to add recording studio capabilities to my gaming PC but I was a broke high schooler, so I installed Ubuntu Studio as a dual boot option alongside Windows XP.

Anyway, I installed Arch on my laptop about 3 years later in college using the Arch Book, which was essentially the same as the wiki’s install guide at the time.

I had a dual boot system with Windows and Mac (it was a hackintosh) as my home recording studio Pro Tools/gaming PC for about a decade, then my Windows install had to be wiped due to an issue I had, so I decided to just wipe the whole thing and go single boot with Linux Mint, so now I use Reaper for recording and Steam + Heroic + emulators are meeting all my gaming needs. I use the Xanmod kernel and the kisak-mesa PPA, and since making the switch I’ve upgraded essentially all of the parts in my PC, which is good because I first built it in 2013

Yeah, exactly. I was trained on Pro Tools and Ardour worked OK and made sense to me, but Reaper feels more intuitive to use than either Pro Tools or Ardour.

Audio Engineer here.

You want Reaper. It’s a $60 program but you can keep it in trial mode for as long as you want till you’ve got the money. Reaper has lots of tutorials available on YouTube and can use industry-standard VST plugins, plus it has enough plugins bundled in to get you started.

TRaSH guides don’t actually force you into using one filesystem. I have Sonarr setup using the guide and it uses 2 separate drives just fine.

One thing I would note is that because of the emphasis on quality above all else, following the guides strictly would fill up your drives fairly quickly. If you were to re-prioritize the config to emphasize small file size, you could probably fit 3-4x as much content on there.