• 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • Thank you! I’ve been hesitant to install a whole bunch of extensions but vitals and astra monitor look great, I’m going to try them out this week and see which I prefer.

    I’ve been avoiding flathub, it just doesn’t seem like my cup of tea but I may have to reconsider and take a proper look at it because it sounds better than a browser extension ngl

    I was just so surprised that a terminal that supports tabs doesn’t have generic tab switching, at least I know I’m not crazy now for not enjoying Gnome terminal lol

    I promise the giant cursor is a useful feature even though so many people have thought it was a weird bug lol I constantly do it when I’m trying to figure out how to word an email and on the very rare occasion where I can’t find my cursor it has actually been helful!


  • I’m pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I’ll change my mind but I doubt I will.

    IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc

    • Dolphin > Nautilus
    • Kate > Gedit
    • Konsole > Terminal

    These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.

    For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I’ve had a couple of “could not open” errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.

    Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.

    Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.

    KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven’t found anything similar on Gnome yet.

    KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn’t launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app

    By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn’t seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol

    Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.

    Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK

    I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel




  • What do you mean they’re failing to install? That sounds like a wine issue.

    Sometimes games just work better on previous wine versions so it might be worth trying a couple of those.

    I haven’t played the game but it seems to be DX11 so DXVK probably needs to be installed to the prefix

    Towards the end of the FG installer, there is usually an option to download the dependencies so make sure you have those installed with winetricks to the correct prefix. C++ Redist download option here refers to vcrun in winetricks and its probably vcrun2022 since the game is new.

    Is it defaulting to using your integrated graphics instead of the discreet gpu?

    You could also add it as a non steam game in steam since proton will be set up properly to see if it runs better.

    Edit:

    470

    Do you need to update your drivers? 470 came out in April 2021. DXVK only supports 510 and later so d3dcompiler instead of dxvk should be used but a driver update would be better.



  • Just tar and zstd. They’re probably installed by default for most distros anyway.

    I think this is what I used when I first tried out zstd https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-and-use-zstd-compression-tool-on-linux

    Tar supports input from zstd so I put everything on one line.

    tar -I 'zstd -v --ultra -22' -cvf YourFile.tar.zst -C /path/to/your/file YourFile
    

    -I takes the input from zstd which is in quotes.

    –ultra it should be redundant but for some reason its needed for higher levels of compression.

    -22 the highest level of compression offered by zstd.

    -c for compress.

    -v for verbose.

    -f for the file name.

    -C excludes the absolute path to the file/directory and just takes YourFile as the file/directory to compress. Its not needed if you’re in the same directory as YourFile.

    I would recommend leaving out

    --ultra -22
    

    and just test how much compression you get with the default level first because 22 is super slow and if it just can’t compress the file you won’t see any difference in file size compared to the default compression level.


  • For 3DS games I use NDSTokyoTrim to remove useless data from the game files to make them smaller.

    DreamCast, PS1 & PS2 games get compressed to chd with chdman.

    GameCube and Wii are compressed to rvz with Dolphin.

    PS3 I remove the PS3_UPDATE folder, 256MiB for each game adds up. I also use Gnarly Repacks for PS3 games since they have better compression than anything I’ve tried so far.

    Switch games, I use nsz.

    Then I use tar with zst on all of them, Nsz and rvz already use zst so theres no change but I just like to keep everything the same accross all of my roms and pc games.

    Everything else, GB, NDS, SNES etc all get archived and compressed with tar and zst. For these I’ll also use the --ultra -22 option since they’re small enough files anyway so they don’t take long to compress/decompress. If anyone knows any specific compression/trimming methods that are better than zst, I’d love to hear about them!

    Copies of all the tar archives are kept on 2 separate drives and a copy of the games are on my PC in whatever the smallest format is that is compatible with their emulator.



  • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Manjaro, is in fact, Arch/Manjaro, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Arch plus Manjaro. Manjaro is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Arch system made useful by pacman, yay and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.



  • I’ve run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don’t work with the older version, work with the new one.

    Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

    Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you’ve installed too many useless dlls and you’ve finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

    I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

    But if you don’t have issues I don’t think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.



  • I use Lutris and set up my directories a “GameName” and then 2 subdirectories “game” “prefix” and point Lutris to these.

    All of the game files go in “game” and the prefix is created in “prefix” when I press play in Lutris. Any extras dlls that are needed can be installed with winetricks within Lutris to that specific prefix

    This way you can just compress and decompress “GameName” folder and point Lutris to these locations on whichever machine.

    You can choose which prefix version you want in Lutris and it will download that version for you. I’m pretty sure it saves the version to somewhere in ~.local/share/lutris I’m not at my PC now so not 100% sure of the path.

    It saves it to ~.local/share/lutris/runners/wine and you can put a custom wine build here and Lutris should recognise it when configuring the runner options

    So you could copy this over to the corresponding location on the deck and Lutris will automatically detect this version as installed and won’t have to download it again but its not necessary unless you don’t have internet on the deck, or you’re like me and want to keep an archive of the working prefix for the future in case the prefix version is no longer available for whatever reason and other version just won’t work.

    If you’re new to Lutris, I wrote a step by step guide on how I use Lutris on a different community

    https://sopuli.xyz/comment/9858101