That’s really strange. I have an M-Audio 60ish key and a smaller Novation Nocturn MIDI keyboard as well as a Roland electric drum kit and have no issues doing anything over MIDI with them on Linux.

Maybe its worth another try? I don’t need drivers for any of that stuff.

That’s fair. I guess its a lesser of two evils situation. No unlimited internet? Need to buy storage. No storage (OP’s situation) let Steam handle it.

Don’t back up your games. Steam Cloud saves are a thing and if your games drive shits the bed you can just buy a new one and re-download all your games.

Really? I run my home studio in Nobara Linux without any latency issues. I use Reaper as my DAW. Are you using yabridge?

Have Win 10 and was a Windows die hard since I was a kid.

Been running Linux on another drive as my default boot for a year and a half in anticipation of this horseshit and was only hesitant to delete Win because my Fanatec sim racing hardware wasn’t supported on Linux.

Welp, turns out hid-fanatecff is a thing. Installed the kernel driver and boom, working Fanatec peripherals. Even my Moza shifter is plug-and-play.

Bye bye Microsoft.

Asking the real questions.

A good gaming monitor with something like the Framemeister, RetroTINK, or OSSC can give properly unnoticeable amounts of input lag.

Ok, so wait a second here. You’re suggesting that buying a “good” gaming monitor (hundreds to thousands of dollars) and an upscaler (the cheapest of the options you mentioned I found for $369 USD is a better option than buying a CRT?

I found a perfectly good 28" Panasonic CRT on Kijiji for $200 CAD.

It makes the retro noises, it displays the games the way they were meant to be displayed, and there’s no perceptible input lag. It also just fits the visual aesthetic if you have a retro gaming area/room in your house. There’s no way I’m paying anywhere near 5-600 USD (up to 1k CAD, basically) to play retro games on a modern monitor when I can have a setup faithful to the experiences I had as a kid in the 90s for $200 CAD.

It’s not wrong. You can feel it.

My wife is not a gamer and even she can feel it. She hated playing on our living room TV. Said she felt like she got really bad at Mario Bros over the years or something and was disappointed.

Bought a CRT; she loves the game again and is still quite good at it actually.

Reacting to stimulus is completely different than timing inputs in a video game. A few ms of delay isn’t really going to register in a reaction test, but if you’re using constant time sensitive information on screen to accurately time your movements in a game, you can easily feel lag in the sub 5ms range.

As a guitarist, I can feel latency down to 2ms if I’m playing through a modeling amp on my PC, especially if I’m playing at high tempos. The faster you play, the greater the percentage of time between notes that latency becomes. The effect is the same in high speed video games.

A modern TV is a really bad example.

Not when it comes to console gaming.

The look of CRT is important to retro gaming but do you know what the most important characteristic of CRTs for retro gaming is?

No input lag.

Play OG Super Mario Bros on a modern TV and let me know how long it is before you wanna smash the controller in frustration. The game just feels incredibly sloppy.

Didn’t the whole “unveil” fail spectacularly? I saw a bunch of videos about it.

You don’t typically pay to run Linux distros. They’re open-source. I can’t imagine they’d be subject to this.

Apparently there’s a way to install Win11 and bypass all these requirements.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement

https://youtu.be/tx5TaozMXMQ

Can’t beat them for games that require low latency input though. Just playing retro games on them is worth owning one.

Go to a family member’s house and try to show them something on YT.

Cringe in horror at the experience.

Who on earth is gonna shoot a starling for food?

Have you seen starlings? They can fit in the palm of your hand.

Everyone can do it

The vast majority just won’t.

Some shit is just straight up poison though.

You hate to say it because you know this is a ridiculous take. There’s no fucking way that the parents are “more at fault” for their son’s death than the company whose product encouraged him to hide his feelings from his parents and coached him on how to commit suicide.

Read the lawsuit filing. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine-v-OpenAI-Complaint-8-26-25.pdf

*I have excellent parents and even they were not privy to the depths of my emotions as a kid. * You are actively choosing to ignore the realities of childhood as well as parenthood to play some shitty devil’s advocate online.

Louis Rossmann has commented on the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJvrTC6oTI