If you must get something from Steam, I’d get something with great time by price ratio, like Terraria, Starbound and Stardew Valley. Or also JRPGs like Final Fantasy XII.

But from your picks, Elden Ring is the one I’d go for, mostly because it’s the one that picks my attention the most.

Otherwise, maybe you’d want to follow giveaway communities and alert profiles, e.g. here on the fediverse?

Also for installation, it’s pretty much the same, you plug the boot device, enter BIOS, select it to load first, exit and follow the instruction on the screen.

Hardware seems powerful enough that Ubuntu will run fine.

On software side, if you must use a Windows program, Wine usually solves it. If it doesn’t, Virtualbox does. If it doesn’t, some times you can find per-case solutions. If you can’t, we’d be working with extremely edge cases that maybe you could solve by swapping the SSD for one with Windows installed or getting a cheap second hand computer just for that.

Surprised it took so long.

Windows was becoming increasingly bad for people that use mainly keyboards, and my laptop’s HDD nearly dying and me having to use a Linux distro to recover files I couldn’t lose gave me an window and interest to try out a distro closer in UX as Android, thus I found Ubuntu almost 5 years ago.

As others have said, Linux Mint would be a good starting point. For UI and UX, it’s pretty unaggressive, specially for those coming from Windows, but it still doesn’t hide the technical part of the system.

Also its installation is pretty simple and without tricks. And if your boyfriend doesn’t care about removing the previous system, you don’t even need to tinker with partitions and the sort.

(Fixed the bolding issue)

From a file I keep since I started using Linux near 5 years ago:

Display the RAM usage:
watch -n 5 free -m
Useful if you open way too much stuff and/or you’re running on budget processing power, and don’t want your computer freezing from 3 hours.
Also useful if you use KDE’s Konsole integrated into the Dolphin file manager and you must for some reason not close the Dolphin window. You’d just need to open Dolphin’s integrated Konsole (F4), run the command and without closing it, press F4 again to hide the Konsole.

Terminal-based file browser that sorts by total size:
ncdu
why is the cache folder 50 GB big?

Mass-check MD5 hashes for all files in the path, including subfolders:
find -type f \( -not -name "md5sum.txt" \) -exec md5sum '{}' \; > md5sum.txt
Change md5sum (and optionally the output file’s name) for your favorite/needed hash calculator command.

For mounting ISOs and similar formats:
sudo mount -o loop path/to/iso/file/YOUR_ISO_FILE.ISO /mnt/iso

And unmounting the file:
sudo umount /mnt/iso
Beware there’s no N in the umount command

For creating an ISO from a mounted disc:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image_name.iso

And for a folder and its files and subfolders:
mkisofs -o /path/to/output/disc.iso /path/from/input/folder

Compress and split files:
7z -v100m a output_base_file.7z input_file_or_folder

Changes the capslock key into shiftlock on Linux Mint (not tested in other distros):
setxkbmap -option caps:shiftlock
Was useful when the shift key from a previous computer broke and I didn’t have a spare keyboard.

If you want to run Japanese programs on Wine, you can use:
LC_ALL=ja_JP wine /path/to/the/executable.exe
There are other options but this is one that worked the better for me so I kinda forgor to take note of them.

List all files in a given path and its subfolders:
find path_to_check -type f
Tip: add > output.txt or >> output.txt if you’d rather have the list in a TXT file.

Running a program in Wine in a virtual desktop:
wine explorer /desktop=session_name,screen_size /path/to/the/executable.exe

E.g.:
wine explorer /desktop=MyDesktop,1920x1080 Game.exe

Useful if you don’t want to use the whole screen, there are integration issues between Linux, Wine and the program, or the program itself has issues when alt-tabbing or similar (looking at you, 2000’s Windows games)

Download package installers from with all their dependencies:
apt download package_name
Asks for sudo password even when not running as sudo. Downloaded files come with normal user permissions thankfully. Also comes with an installation script but if you want to run it offline, iirc you need to change apt install in the script for dpkg -i.

If you use a program you’d rather not connect to the internet but without killing the whole system’s connection, try:
firejail --net=none the_command_you_want_to_run

Or if you want to run an appimage:
firejail --net=none --appimage the_command_you_want_to_run

If you want to make aliases (similar to commands from Windows’ PATH) and your system uses bash, edit the file $HOME/.bashrc (e.g. with Nano) and make the system use the updated file by either logging out and in, or running . ~/.bashrc

Python/Pip have some nifty tools, like Cutlet (outputs Japanese text as Romaji), gogrepoc (for downloading stuff from your account using GOG’s API), itch-dl (same as gogrepoc but for Itch.io), etc. If you lack the coding skills and doesn’t mind using LLMs, you could even ask one to make some simpler Python scripts (key word though: simpler).

If you want to run a video whose codec isn’t supported by your system (e.g. Raspberrian which only supports H.264, up to 1080p):
ffmpeg -i input_video.mkv -map 0 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -vf scale=1920:1080 -c:a copy -c:s copy output_video.mkv

deleted by creator

I’m not its target audience (not much of movies fan), but considering I made sheets for similar uses for music and games, it makes me think:

• couldn’t it be fully offline? More reassurance of no data collection and it should keep being useful virtually forever, specially if physical media and DRM-free movies and series get traction.
• instead of an LLM, why not a local database with a tag or like/dislike system, with the system having a bit of randomness for suggestions to have an algorithm?
• in line with the first point, if an LLM is a must, why not have a local one trained specifically on movies and series?

Remember to keep Hannah Montana Linux too!

But overall, feels a bit overblown.

Also about the issue linked at https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@surfhosting/115674311171581770, where I just gone through, likewise I can’t see any indication of malicious code, only the code maintainer failing to show he himself is legitimate. Still rather suspicious.

In case someone wants to read the whole context given, just a warning, the first two links are pretty lenghty before getting to the point, and the third opens synthetizing it.

So… What about autistic people sounding like LLMs before LLMs were a thing?

Iirc the maintainer of the wiki has a sister group in Steam’s forums, so people could ask him to migrate the wiki.

Maybe can ask also on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works?

There’s also games without DRM on Steam if you’d rather not spend more that what’s been gifted. As Steam itself doesn’t track those, there’s those two wikis keep track of it if you want:
https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

Just read the article. The arguments given feel like they could easily be used to push more anti-privacy laws, and considering how pushy they are, I feel inclined to think that’s the case. Also using Twitter as the target, they can induce people to cause noise for the subject.

If you get the Steam Deck and storage runs low, as the Deck is based on Arch, may I suggest ncdu?

GrapheneOS is also here on ActivityPub, on the microblogging side, and the profile reported the issue in messages through some days:
@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social