I played WoW hardcore on Linux during Vanilla, off and on since. But blizzard always said they, unofficially support Linux. To their credit, Battle.Net and WoW always installed without any major issues or special tinkering required. Pretty much my only game, for a long long time, for that reason. Have to agree with you though, at least these days. Linux Gaming numbers have to be closing in on Blizzard official support levels. Tim Sweeney said, 15 million Linux gamers before we could expect a Linux official launcher from them. I imagine Blizzard is in the same boat in that regard. And Youtubers seem to speculate, between 5 and 10 million monthly active users. So, we have to be close.

Interesting. Bottles is usually my go to for Battle.net. I hadn't played any Battle.net games in probably a year now when I switched over to PopOs 24.04. I wonder what's going on. I do remember all of your tools needed to have the same flatpak version installed as the bottles version you are running, at least it seemed. Usually not an issue on first install, more like, when you upgrade one tool but not the others. Well, no biggie, at least you have a working install; all that matters.

haha, I've told people to just google around for over a decade now. Sounds like that's bad advice now. Is Geek Squad still a thing?

yeah, when I had a Win2k or XP machine to play video games, I would run into issues all the time. Fix Windows on my machine helped me fix other people machines. After a more than a decade of not fixing a Windows machine, best I can do is google around. Same thing they can do.

LMAO, back in my Slackware days (3.4, 3.6, 4.0, 7.0), If I had to build from source, which was most things, step1: ./configure step2: install the missing package step3: goto step1 until no missing packages identified step4: make step5: make install

Sometimes my packages were too old, So I would just go to step1 for each package that also needed to be newer. I'm not even a Linux Expert, and I definitely wasn't a Linux Expert then. All the building from source helps me jump into software projects and become productive real quick though.

It's only LTS. Desktop users rarely use LTS. Great to have live kernel updates on a developer workstation and servers though.

It's for LTS releases only. So you rarely see it on desktop, but for sure will see it on servers. My previous job, I ran LTS on my work laptop and would laugh at everyone always getting a forced update right before scrum. This new job, I have to use WSL on this Windows laptop and guess what, I'm in forced update hell. I can understand that for some(or most) the pro message would be annoying, but I'd rather see that pro message 100 times a day then get a forced update at random times. Especially right before meetings.

GabeCube was good enough for me.

You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn't ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.

Exactly this. It always surprises me when people get bent out of shape because there is an option that they don't like. Even worse when someone makes a choice they don't like. "Who the fuck cares. Let them do their thing. be grateful you have a choice."

That doesn't stop any of them. Windows users still go, willy nilly, traipsing around the internet downloading and installing random things. There is no money, no checks and balances. I'm sure you've read Windows converts complaining, "Linux isn't ready for the average user because it's too hard to install programs, they want to be able to download an installer, then click next next next and have the application installed." They think the security of package management is too much for the average user.

Sure, FOSS could get some bad actors. It would be no different than the closed source community. At least with FOSS, there is still opportunity for people to find and eliminate the bad code. The world runs on Linux and FOSS. The place where you would want to sneak in some bad code the most. You'd have a much bigger impact. And, it does happen on occasion, people notice, and the bad code is removed. Compare that to the much smaller, Windows world, where you need anti-virus checkers and maleware checkers.

It sounds like you have the computing world inverted. You believe Windows and closed source is the most dominant computing paradigm. It's not.

The goal posts keep moving. I remember when it was the Year of Linux. Linux dominates every market except Desktop and Console. The Year of "Desktop" Linux is what we've shifted too. The only thing that's kept Windows the dominant OS on Desktop is vendor lockin. Windows isn't even the dominant OS on Azure. How pathetic. Without vendor lockin, Linux would have seen all kinds of money for engineering efforts from PC manufacturers for Desktop. Sad part is, so many people actually think they chose Windows.

"You can have any color car you want, as long as it's green." - Comrade Car Salesman