I do, too, and drove one for many years. I’ll be the one to splash cold water on the conversation, though.

Driving a stick arguably requires the use of both hands and legs, which is great and partly the reason why so many enjoy it - that sense of engagement. It’s far less boring.

But here’s the deal. Injure any one of those appendages and driving a manual becomes a whole lot less fun. In some cases, you can get by, but it’s less than ideal. Having your arm closest to the shift in a sling, for example, makes your vehicle undrivable.

It won’t matter to most people… right up until the moment it does.

I’ve tried three times to fully convert my gaming rig to Linux, sticking with the effort at least 3 solid months minimum each time. The first time was back in 2015. Only a small subset of my Steam Library worked, despite all of my best efforts hacking on bottles, and there was no way I could stick with it if I intended to play anything with friends. Community aside, Valve and Feral were leading the charge, but I could not stick with it.

My second attempt was around 2019. Almost half my library ran, some in need of care and feeding, others barely functional, but running nonetheless. This was primarily due to my curation efforts of trying to make sure the games I bought offered some slim hope of compatibility. Wine was still a very inexact science, so attempts to get things running outside of native ports or Valve games was a poor facsimile. WineDB representation of compatibility layers was a wide gradient of colors, with most AAA titles still squarely in silver territory or worse. Anything with anti-cheat was a fool’s errand.

My rig’s now been on Linux for 4 months solid, and the state of Linux gaming is nothing close to what it used to be. The state of EAC support thanks to Steam Deck represents a quantum leap all its own, and that wouldn’t have happened without Proton. The overwhelming majority of my Steam Library runs with no effort, each game running nearly as good or better than it did on Windows. This shift did not feel incremental.

And I wouldn’t advocate for installation of a daily driver OS on anything less than an m.2, these days. Fair enough. A consideration for the future, then.

If you have two separate physical drives to work with, dual-booting is a great “training wheels” approach to the problem. Then you can take your time with the learning process and hop back into Windows quickly whenever you need a break or the ability to do something quickly that the Linux hasn’t been set up for, yet.

That’s mostly preference, once you get things all set up and installed. You can’t avoid updating forever because you’ll eventually need to install something new from the repos, and it’s good to have some kind of update cadence for security’s sake, but daily is a bit much. Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.

I save that effort for a Saturday once every couple of months, and it usually goes smoothly without incident. I could go longer if I wanted, 2 months feels right to me.

Steam Deck changed the landscape of dev support for anti-cheat significantly. It’s still not perfect, but most games relying on EAC work now with minimal issue. You might have to occasionally revalidate installed files or reinstall EAC for the game after a patch and that’s about it.

Other anti-cheat solutions are still a crap-shoot and likely won’t work. Thankfully, VAC and EAC are the most prevalent.

As others have stated, the cleanest option for a single monitor setup is to either share a specific window, or start making use of multiple virtual desktops, sometimes referred to as workspaces. Windows, Mac, and Linux are all capable of it, now - the only difference is how you set up, arrange, and navigate them.

Linux options offer the most versatility, Mac’s implementation is a decent balance between ease of use and scalability (with caveats), and the Windows native implementation is the newest entrant to this playing field… but it’s an adequate offering that gets the job done for this use case.

As a Texan, I feel I have the right to ask this very important question…

Has anyone else noticed how the symmetry of the inner and outer shape of a cowboy hat is strongly reminiscent of an inverted toilet bowl?

Just curious.

When a small but dedicated group of vocal people started unironically and emphatically believing the planet was a pancake, I lost a significant portion of my lingering reserves of hope for the future of mankind.

Extremist politics and all the associated mindsets have long since jumped a row of sharks in my mind by comparison.

Confirmed, been playing Apex since not long after the Steam Deck released. Pretty sure the devs will never fix R6S, though.

Been running Arch exclusively on my gaming rig for 3 months, now, with no issue. Thanks to Proton, the only blocker is games that use anti-cheat solutions that don’t work properly. Everything that’s relied on VAC or EAC work fine, though.

This is my third attempt at making this move on my gaming rig. The first try was back in 2016. The second was in 2018. This time, I think I’m here to stay. The Steam Deck’s success was the final ingredient.