Man, I was soooo excited about the PS5, but then it turned into such a shit show to get one that I just put my money into my PC and I never even got around to picking one up when availability became more reasonable. I don’t think I’d ever really want to get back into the console gaming space anymore.
I had been thinking about it for a while. I had played with linux before on an old laptop, but not seriously, though I had been getting more frustrated with windows every time it updated it seemed. I then got the urged to play an old game of mine that i had picked up on a steam sale recently that i hadn’t played in years. It took hours of tinkering and web sleuthing to get it to run, then i played 20 min had to run to town, so I shut down my PC and bam. Windows update. Game no longer worked again. The next weekend I installed Linux mint, then Fedora, then the weekend Bazzite the weekend after that. The game I wanted to play on windows worked right out of the box on Proton. I’ve had less problems overall with Linux than Windows too. Most of the problems I did have early on were also self inflicted. Pro-tip don’t try to remove then re-install the lastest python manually in mint. It breaks everything apparently, luckily (unlike Windows) its very easy to re-install. It’s been about 7 months now.
A lot of people are also questioning why they even have a home PC now. Their Win 10 machine is “out of date” and they need to replace it or else, but their cell phone now does much of what their PC did. Instead of installing Linux and learning a whole new OS, they just cut out their PC and just use their phone.
Here’s the link to the docker I used. There are a few others on github, but this one seemed like it was the most actively updated.
https://github.com/sirjmann92/nicotineplus-proper
I liked slskd perfectly fine once I got it going, but I couldn’t get my partner to use it as she was used to nicotine and didn’t like the new interface. Once the Docker was set up in Portainer there was very little additional configuration and the rest was inside the nicotine webui app.
Instead of slskd I recommend using nicotine+. I found slskd worked fine, but was a pain to set up. I found a Nicotine docker that works just like the app inside a web UI. Much less of a learning curb for someone who’s not familiar with servers.
No multiplayer paywall, but they’ll probably try to charge you some sort of subscription anyway that’ll end up costing more in the long run.