The article names the game in the headline, not clear why your post needed to try to be click bait?

It’s about OpenMW, the open source game engine to play Morrowind on.

Any points and click adventure game, there are loads including old classics and modern good games.

Monkey Island remasters are fun and can be played with mouse. Broken Sword games are also good.

Rusty Lake games are great if you prefer more puzzle games than narrative ones. Still has a great somewhat surreal plot just not like a point and click narrative game.

Also If you havent played dwarf fortress now is the time to learn, the siege update came out this week. Mouse or keyboard, or both, but definitely can be done one handed.

Vampire Survivor that others have suggested is a good shout, one hand on the keyboard is enough and its very addictive.

Emulators are entirely legal and legitimate, and eveb essential.

Equating piracy with emulators is just nonsense from the publishing industry. If you own a game and a console its perfectly legal to rip the ROM to play on your own device. The games industry don’t like that because they dont want you to own anything and just be paying serfs renting your console and games.

Emulators are used by people who pirate, but the illegal bit is the piracy not the emulator. And its worth remembering that piracy is a civil legal matter not criminal for individuals in most jurisdictions. The games industry (and lots of other IP holders) love to murky the water there too. There are certainly criminal organisations making money out of piracy but the end users are not criminals. And the “cost” is usually imagined and massively inflated - they talk about lost sales but there is no guarentee people who pirate would have spent a penny on the pirated content.

Kinda bizarre take given that English is not a romance language and instead Germanic. Lots of words and phrases then came in from French due to the Norman conquest, and lots of words have been borrowed from other languages due to long European ties, the British Empire and the American globalisation.

English is the ultimate mash up language, and its flexibility makes it very versatile. It can feel hard to learn due to the ideosyncracies but even spoken badly meaning is often retained.

No noun genders is also a huge plus. They exist but they dont have function - unlike in French or German where you need to know the gender of an object to work out how to form a sentence correctly.

So yeah “French pronounced badly”? Yeah, its really not.

If anything, he’s making me question “why not 500 hectares?”

Also separate from my long response, thanks for sharing that link. Very interesting read and the GNOME window decoration issue is rediculous.

For me, I’m sorry to say, GNOME is the epitome of asshole design. This one of many examples of its rigid design philosophy having negative consequences for users and devs. And devs are protecting GNOME from its own users bad experiences because the user blames the game for not conforming, not the DE for being rediculous.

Worth saying the 3% market share is very new, and previously the share has been way way below this. At 3% that is millions of users but even that is hard to justify a linux release; many games dont even get MacOS versions even now and it has higher desktop share.

The other problem for linux is version control - libraries are different across distros of different ages, and also constantly update. If you build software on a dependency and it changes in a few years, your game may break. As bad as windows is, when games are distributed a lot of the dependencies are distributed with the game as DLLs and installers for Microsoft tools. But for linux you previously could not guarentee the same version of the same dependency will be available on two distros still actively supported.

It can be surprisingly hard to get old Linux software to run on new Linux distros. People are not generally aware of this as generally its old windows and dos games that people try to get working (so wine or dosbox are used), not old Linux software like Open Office from 2005 or an old version of Firefox. Most linux software continually evolves or its niche and just stops working (unless youre willing to go back and compile from source, and that can get nightmarish if it doesnt compile)

Proton is part of the solution but developing “for” proton is not efficient long term. It is great for enabling windows games to work on linux, but linux native games would be more optimal. We’re just lucky we’re now in a time where there is a lot of CPU and GPU resource available to support the overhead and windows is also so bloated making linux + proton comparatively better.

I suspect Flatpak may be another part of the solution - Flatpak can essentially be a way of ensuring a game can have a fixed set of dependencies which install on any Linux and should just work. Its not that far off the windows model of packaging DLLs, but is much cleaner and contained.

Nix is another potential approach to this.

But developing for Linux wouldn’t take off until the market share is substantially higher. The SteamDeck and tge rumours Steam console may help with that, but for now I think devs relying on Proton makes sense.

Not a lot. The actual lesson is systems woth proportional representation dilute the power of extremists. They couldn’t form a stable government so they had another election and voters switched to other parties.

The original 2023 election reporting was a nonsense anyway - the media reaction was hysteria talking about the populists winning the election. They go 23.49% of the vote; and 37 put of 150 seats. The largest party, sure, but unable to govern. There is no route to power - they were always constrained by the realities of coalition government or another election.

For countries like the US the system allows populists to get absolute power - there are only 2 parties, and even if people hate the choices by definition one party will get over 50% of the vote, and as were seeing now absolute power. About a 3ED or voters dont even vote.

In the UK Brexit was 52-48%. Parliament was split and then in 2019 Boris Johnson called an election and won a landslide victory, with 365 MPs, 56% of the MPs and absolute power. He then pushed through an extreme version of brexit. But he only got 43.6% of the popular vote - 56% votes for other parties, and tge system skews votes to the big parties anyway. If you live in a safe seat for a party you hate, you might as well not even bother to vote - so then the winners share of the people who actually vote is inflated. He got 43.6% of the people who voted, with about a 3rd not voting because theyre disenfranchised by the system.

The lesson is first past the post is weak and allows populists absolute power to remake everything. Proportional Representation is strong as things can only happen if there is a consensus with a majority. Governments not able to do things because they can’t agree is GOOD for votera, not a fault or problem.

So forget the Dutch election in terms of the progressive party increasing its vote share - its the joint largest parry but in reality the Netherlands is still split and divided. The real lesson is a proportional representation system is protecting the Netherlands from extremists and the only things that happen are things that a coalition of parties can actually agree on to do. The system is working.

We need that in the UK and US. That is where populists can actually take absolute power and wrreak havoc.

It had to happen eventually. Seems reasonable time to make the moce. It’ll be beneficial for all Linux users, and probably a huge relief for Gnome devs to be be able to focus purely on wayland.

It just will suck a bit for those on rolling release distros who still experience major issues with Wayland, particularly when its not Gnome or Wayland projects that need to make a fox - looking at you Nvidia.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11. I’m one of the 30% of KDE users still using X11 - for me it was Nvidia issues, and I do remain anxious about being reliant on drivers from a notoriously bad manufacturer. Having said the drivers have improved massively over the past 18-24 months for me at least, and maybe everyone moving over to Wayland is what’s needed to force Nvidia to act.

Yeah the Lego layers of the saucer section look very angular and homogenous. It just looks like a big block of Lego - doesnt give a sense of it being a ship with lots of decks with windows.

Also the tail section looks very angular.

I can imagine its very difficult to capture the curves of the ship in legp, and its recognisable but… Nah thanks.

Interesting question, I’d imagine that one major limit would be the number of cores your CPU has available. Once you got to more VMs than cores, I’d guess things would quickly grind to a halt?

But I wonder if you could even anywhere near to that point as on searching only L2 VM is mentioned on various sites and that is with warnings of severe performance limitations and for development testing only. While L3 might work the problems may get too bad you can’t practically go beyond that level?

GG.

I never delete anything, although I did forward all my emails from Gmail to Proton and delete them off Gmail.

Everything is marked as read too although tbh I do that in large batches of a few thousand in one go. I’m very bad at checking my emails.

I’m not really a data hoarder - I just can’t be arsed to go through them and delete them, plus very occasionally it’s been very helpful to find an random email from years ago. I’m also pretty good at not subscribing to marketing emails etc and unsubscribing if I do (eventually…)

I think your auto-correct has gone wrong; patients rather than patents 3 times.

Totally agree with your point though. I’d extend it to include copyright reform as well as patents; intellectual property rights are being abused globally and used as a way to abuse citizens.

And Women wouldn’t trust a man has taken it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who become pregnant not men.

While companies have looked into male drug-based contraceptives, ultimately even if it were 100% effective, it would never beat female drug-based contraceptives. It’d have a market sure - but it wouldn’t stop women taking birth-control because it’d remain the only way for them to be sure.

The key is getting out at the right time, and that is weighed massively against small investors. The big investors and institions control the market and can move quickly while small investors cannot.

Tesla is not doing well - look at its falling sales. It’s a risky stock to hold. The AI companies are also highly risky stocks to hold.

That doesn’t mean don’t hold them - all anyone is saying really is that these are high risk investments, and at some point they are going to probably crash because it’s a bubble.

That doesn’t necessarily mean “don’t invest”. It does certainly mean be prepared to get out fast and also only use money you can afford to lose when investing with such high risk stocks.

I was imagining a cruise ship with thousands of passengers. They have up to 120 guests and passengers were ferried in small boats to the island. Presumably also someone accompanied the passengers on their hike.

Leaving her behind sounds entirely avoidable - whatever system they had for tracking passengers on and off the ship sounds like it failed.

Of course it’s doesn’t follow that she may have lived. She could have died immediately when she went to rest. However it does still raise many questions about how an 80 year old was deemed fit to go on the hike, and then how the hikers left someone behind. The golden rule of all hiking anywhere on the planet is never leave someone behind.

Xwayland is an X11 server that runs under Wayland. It acts as a compatibility layer so that programs that are native X11 programs that don’t support Wayland can still be run. The system largely determines when to use Xwayland; it’s not generally something the user does.

Wine, and it’s derivative for gaming Proton are normally run as X11 applications. There is a Wayland driver for wine - it’s not perfect, and not widely used by default yet, but it does generally work. Still, at the moment usually wine and Proton are by default running with X11 (and so xwayland) even on Wayland.

When there are issues under Wayland it’s generally to do with Nvidia drivers rather than xwayland or x11. But the wine Wayland.drv can still give a performance boost. It can also causes its own issues so is best used on a case by case basis.

Some people do set wine or proton to use the Wayland drivers when using Wayland; for example with Steam and Proton-GE just add PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 into the games launch options and it’ll run directly under Wayland.

It may be a way for OP to switch to Wayland and see if they can get good gaming performance in wine/Proton. However it’s more likely the Nvidia drivers are the cause of the performance issues under Wayland.

So to be clear Wayland + Pantheon resolves the issue but with a performance hit in games? X11 + Pantheon has the issue but with otherwise good performance in games?

Presumably all the system packages and software is up to date. If not then do a update.

Starting with the basics, what kind of mouse and keyboard do you have? If they are wireless, how are they connecting to your device? Note some manufacturers don’t provide drivers for Linux so it’s worth seeing if your brand and device is supported (E.g. Logitech and it’s wireless dongle; you need Solaar to get basic support and switching to Bluetooth may be best if available).

If they are wired, have you tried plugging the keyboard and mouse into different ports on your PC? If they’re on the same USB Bus that could be contributing to the problem. Although that really shouldn’t be an issue at all with modern devicss, it might be enough to get round whatever the issue is if one of your devices is conflicting.

Presumably if there is a power profile in Pantheon, and if so you’ve set it to performance, not something like balanced? This ensures that everything is running at full capacity. There are rare polling issues with wine and some USB devices, and one solution is ensuring the CPU is in performance rather balanced power settings to prevent a bottleneck.

If the issue is still persisting then I would next install a different Desktop Environment to see if the issue persists. This may help check if it’s an issue with Pantheon itself. Install a lightweight desktop environment such as XFCE. Try out XFCE in both X11 and Wayland, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t then submit a bug report to the Pantheon makers and consider switching to another DE (such as KDE or Gnome). If not then it at least helps seemingly exclude pantheon as the cause. It can be messy installing another DE and difficult to remove cleanly so one method is create a backup of your system using Timeshift, and then restore it after trying XFCE to bring your system back to its original state.

If the issue persists you could also try switching to an older version of the Nvidia drivers or the open Noevaeu drivers. If it resolves it that helps narrow the problem although if it doesn’t resolve it you still can’t entirely exclude the graphics drivers as the cause.

I think assuming all the basics make no difference, the most telling test will be if switching from Pantheon to another DE helps - in X11 and Wayland. Pantheon is relatively niche and DEs are also important factors in themselves when it comes to performance and also bugs. If it persists beyond a DE test, then I’d be most suspicious it’s a driver issue either with the devices themselves or the graphics drivers.

Not much more I can think of beyond that at the moment sorry.

Install Qemu and have a play with Kernal Virtual Machines to try other distros. You can get a feel for them in a near native speed and find something you like.

Even if you stay with your current distro, VMs are useful. I have a Win11 VM (fully licensed), as well as some dedicated linux VMs sandboxed for testing software, and a VM set up with a VPN for torrenting, plus a variable number that I play with to learn linux. I’ve set up Arch from scratch in a VM just for fun/interest for example.

You’re probably not missing much — if your computer’s from 2018, newer graphics drivers won’t bring major benefits, and stability is likely your main goal.

That said, you’re not representative of all gamers, and older systems can still run into issues. For those with newer GPUs or who want to use the latest Proton or Wine, a bleeding-edge distro will usually work better. Linux relies on thousands of interdependent packages, and while Debian backports security fixes, it rarely updates package versions. This ensures stability but causes compatibility gaps as newer software depends on newer libraries.

Bleeding-edge tools like Proton and Wine evolve alongside their dependencies, so older, stable bases gradually fall behind. Backports help, but only to a point.

If gaming, especially new titles, is your focus, a more up-to-date distro will give you fewer issues. You don’t need a fully rolling release, but Debian-based distros with faster release cycles (every 6–12 months) offer a good balance between stability and modern software.