While I can see why there’s a lot of doubt I can see one reason they would.

For years now Apple has been moving things in house, like moving from Intel to their own designs and chips. And moving away from Snapdragon to their own modems.

If they wanted to buy intel it would be for their fab capabilities to reduce their reliance on TSMC.

Do I think they will… probably not, but as I said, I can see why they would.

Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/

The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8

There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

Arch isn’t too hard with the AUR offering packages that said I only stuck out with Manjaro. They had a GUI to help with the install.

I personally wouldn’t advise using it if you are new to Linux. I use Linux Mint and it’s been amazing for my work load. (Cad video editing and games.)

While the safe bet with Linux is AMD, it’s not like Nvidia or Intel are bad options for Linux. (,running RTX 3050 and 12100f).

It just depends on your platform and how comfortable you are with tinkering.

From my testing, Ubuntu based, is the easiest to get up and running while Fedora and arch can take a bit of work.

For my recommendation, look at the games you wanna run and see what they recommend for hardware. An in general safe bet, 12th gen Intel i3/i5 or 3rd gen Ryzen is a good bet for cheap hardware still in stock in stores or online. Upgrade is good (12-14th on the same socket & 1-5th gen Ryzen on the same socket).

Graphics cards works on both, and AmD and Nvidia works on Linux, though Nvidia is behind on support, but not by much games will be stable.

So if I download a pirate copy, I’m in the clear because I purchased a license.

Nope since the copy of the software was obtained with someone else’s license. That said this would be hypothetically impossible to prove in court so 🤷

Circumventing DRM is questionable since I think it’s illegal to distribute but not own. So let’s say you have a CD installer for the Sims and download a crack exe to launch it without the CD. You are in the clear but the host for the download is not.

GOG or backing the game up yourself is the only way around this.

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

Honestly since the New 3DS screen is so small, the slight blurring is negligible to my eyes. So long as there isn’t certificating in the image, like shimmering and or screen tearing, I don’t noticed it.

My first system I could call my own (not sharing with siblings) was the fat Nintendo DS. It will always be my favourite out of nostalgia.

But my primary DS is my New 3DS, does everything want and plays everything.

For me the DS is the Pokemon machine, from the mainline series to the spin offs. Such a good time to be a fan of Pokemon. Even the knockoffs were fun like Fossil fighters.

The DS was also a good rpg power house the first system I beat Chrono Trigger on.

Then there was the slog of platformers, from new Mario bros, to license of game dubious quality, nicktoons unite anyone?

The 3DS was just an overall disappointment in comparison, game selection was limited and 3rd parties just didn’t give it the time of day. Don’t get me wrong love my 2d Zelda and Metroid revivals on it, but outside of Nintendo games, it didn’t offer me anything.

I love Emulation since it can be on completely different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand you have ROM collections on modern system, like Capcom Arcade Stadium, or TMNT Cowabunga Collection.

On another you have complete reverse engineering project like PCSX-Reloaded, and community developed emulators with retail games are based on, all open sourced and technically legal, so long as you have the hardware, and tools to back the ROMs, BIOS’s, and other material required.

Then you have the complete black market, where the ROMs are illegally obtained, the BIOS’s are just downloaded from a random server, and the emulators are paying to get access to the latest retail games patches like Yuzu.

All 3 of these interact and play off of each other, like arcade collections using MAME, being able to extract the ROMs from collections to use in emulators, and Nintendo using someone else’s ROM dump of their own game for Wiiware. That it’s just interesting that emulation works at all.

I personally love it, and try my best to get my ROMs, ISO, and BIOS’s without resorting to downloading it.

Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.

For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.

It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.

I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.

Anyways I’m on Mint now.

Depends on the distro.

I found Linux Mint good enough for 99% of things, and most problems can be solved without a terminal.

Problem is you’d still need to know enough about Linux (just like with windows) to troubleshoot. For example, the files app was causing an error when plugging in drives, I need to figure out that the files app wasn’t call files, but nemo, it’s config lived in a hidden folder called .config in my home folder, and in .config I could delete my configuration to fix my issue.

In my view Linux is about Windows XP or 7 in terms of usability, a bit of a learning curve, but one worth learning.

A few modern improvements which makes using Linux easier.

Use Flatpaks where possible, it’s platform agnostic and usually supported by the actual devs.

AppImages (think portable exe for windows), are another option, but to “install” them you’d need an app called Gear Lever.

Check with an apps developer before installing, flatpaks can be packaged by anyone, and they might loose support (steam for example is installable via Deb not flatpak).

I wouldn't worry too much about not knowing this. The steam deck is still relatively new and proton/dxvk is improving at such a blinding pace compared to the rest of Linux that my head is still spinning.

From my limited understanding, because of Arch's rolling releases and Valve basing the steam deck on Arch. DXVK the compatibility layer for DX games to vulkan is managed by the distro. How this works is magic is still magic to me. I also think graphic drivers gets pushed on arch early too, since it's a rolling release.

However I am in complete agreement, Arch isn't beginner friendly, I personally like Manjaro and find it friendlier, but that's like having a pet cat, and it's a Bob cat. Sure it's not a Lion, but it's not a Kitty.

Have you not heard of the Steam Deck and Proton? Running MS APIs through a compatibility layer is the main goal for Linux gaming for the past few years, as it allows legacy games that had no hope in getting a Linux native port (or a terrible Linux port) to run in Linux, through the Proton Compatibility layer.

The apps I was using were running with DXVK, but due to a bug with intel iGPU driver which affects both Windows and Linux users, it didn't work. A Intel Mesa update patched the bug, and my game worked better. When I moved back I was on an older driver and had to wait for it to be added in.

This comes from personal testing of games. There was a DX11 bug intel igpus where UE4 games crash instantly on boot. I was able to work around this by forcing dx12 in arch, but when I moved to fedora it wasn’t working, that was until about 2 months later after an update. Since I don’t know exactly how far behind fedora is in terms of graphics drivers I said it in ambiguous terms.

From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.

I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.

However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.

Many reasons. Many of which is down to how Google as a company is reaching between the proverbial couch cushions to get at the loose change to make a profit. Default opt-in tracking, breaking ad-blockers, and probably more which I forgot about since I abandoned Chrome years ago.