I've never really been that into video games. When I was young, I played a lot of RPGs on the SNES and PS1. Within the last couple of years, I dipped my toes back in the water and tried a few out. I tried Skyrim on a friend's recommendation, but it was just a little too involved and open-world for me. I got Cities:Skylines, which I love because I love city builder sims, but that game just does not run well on any of my underpowered computers. And I loved Ori and the Blind Forest, a beautiful platformer, and I'd play it again right now if it wasn't Windows-only.

Here are my requirements. First, it needs to run well on a low-powered machine without making the fan go insane. I've got a MacBook Air 2012 and a ThinkPad x250 (Linux). Neither of these are the ideal gaming experience, I know, but I'm not looking for amazing graphics or bleeding edge technology or something super immersive. Pixel graphics are fine with me. It reminds me of my youth, anyway. I played both Skylines and Ori on my Intel NUC 4th Gen and while it worked, they both really taxed that little machine. I was able to finish Ori, but once a city reaches a certain size in Skylines, it gets unplayable.

I'm not looking for stress. I like RPGs and sims. But it doesn't have to be really hard or frustrating. I don't want to feel chased in a game. I prefer to feel that I'm driving the action and I can go at my pace. I want to feel like if I look away for a moment, I'm not going to lose everything. I'm a casual. I also don't mind if there's no defined ending of a game. For me, I'm more looking for a diversion and a slow build over some kind of constant progression/achievement type scenario.

If it has full controller support, that would be ideal. I've got a Steam controller, and I prefer using a controller to play a game. I've never liked using the keyboard to play. I'm not totally against it, but I guess I just never got into computer gaming. I pretty much always played on consoles in the past.

Linux or macOS only, please. I did have Windows installed once so that I could play games, but I'm not bothering with that anymore. I don't want to have to boot into another operating system just to play a game. I want to be able to hop in and out of a game while using my daily driver computer.

So in my research, I've looked into Terraria and Stardew Valley. These might be what I'm looking for. But I really don't know. Do either of these scratch my itch? Is there another game that I would enjoy based on what I've told you? Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

EDIT: Thank you everybody for your awesome suggestions. I'm still happy to hear more, as I plan to add the ones that really interest me to my wishlist and revisit later. I ended up getting Hollow Knight yesterday and I spent the whole day playing it. It's very engrossing, and it's the perfect game for me. It's so much like Ori, and that game blew me away. Chilled out, go at your own pace, exploring dungeons, challenging but not impossible (though the first Hornet fight was pretty tough for me). The game runs fine on my ThinkPad x250 (i5-5300U) in Pop!_OS Linux, apart from the initial movie scene stuttering--I just had to skip past it, unfortunately. It's such an awesome game, and I'm glad to see they've already announced a sequel. If you know of any other games that are like Ori and Hollow Knight, let me know.

I'm having some problems with a notebook I want to set up for a friend. And its the first time in a long time I'm not able to solve it just by myself. So I tried asking at #manjaro and #archlinux-newbies but I got no answer at all. It just seems that IRC changed a lot in the last 15 years. Or maybe my IRC manners are not up to date?
Anyway, do you know a place where there is a nice Linux-crowd? What are your favourite Places to get help? (besides the archwiki) ;-) I'm out of the loop for 10-15 years now because most places got pretty toxic.

I made this an "event" over on reddit, and I figured I'd also mention it here.

The Steam summer sale is alleged to start on June 23rd, and I figured it would be nice if people could go into it with current information on Proton compatibility for games so we can better know what to buy and avoid. As such, it would be great if we could all submit a bunch of ProtonDB reports this coming week.

I plan to go through my library and test high-leverage games: either ones that lack reports or games whose reports are quite old. Let me know if you're wanting to join in the "fun!"

To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate the command line short of copying and pasting command, and don't really know what I'm doing with the technical aspect other than following online guides. I have used windows all my life. I'm Linux illiterate for lack of a better description.

I decided I wanted some form of USB bootable computer, i'm familiar with chrome books, enjoy the light weight OS, and am bed bound to the google ecosystem so I when I saw how you could plug in a USB and have the computer boot into Chrome OS running off the USB I thought that sounded perfect. But during my research of discovery I found that Linux seemed like a very good alternative, I had always had it in my head that it was very technical and finicky system where to do a simple google search you had to code in half a dozen lines into the control terminal in some bizarre 2018 text adventure to use the web, I do exaggerate of course but the image I had conjured up over the years was of a very non-user friendly experience and a system made for those running technical aspects such as web servers and system management.

I decided you can't knock it to you try it and besides turns out you can't get chrome OS on a 32GB USB it has to be 8GB or 16GB apparently. So I installed Ubuntu on my USB, no clue if this is some snooty distro, or a version of Linux that's mocked in the community, or the perfect distro but after minimal research it seemed the most popular and well received version to put it on a USB and booted into it.

Instantly all my preconceived notions we're erased. It's clean, modern, simple, light weight, and easy to use with a very intuitive and familiar UI. It's pretty much a more open and degooglified (That's a nice word) version of Chrome OS. Since Firefox Quantum was released I emigrated over to try break some ties with google for privacy reasons like it's some pervy conjoined twin of mine, I know it's not good for me, I don't want it there but I can't get rid of it without harming me.

It's got a simple UI that's familiar to windows albeit without all the bloatware and ads spread everywhere, it doesn't track you like window does (that's as far as I'm aware it did ask to collect anonymised telemetry data which I opted out of). With windows I'm so used to having to go through 3 different pop up windows to change a setting that in Ubuntu it feels like I'm missing features although I'm yet to find one that's not there. The best bit about Linux, is if theirs a setting you want to change and can't find, than someone online has wrote a guide giving you a command line code to copy paste into the terminal to fix it.

Although to me it feels more on par with Chrome OS than Windows as a bare bones OS with simple apps and a web browser to use the internet with, in this regard Linux wins easy, way more open, no profit based motivation, and more accessible allowing itself to be used anywhere.

All though that comparison holds up for the normal user and if you are someone who just browses the web and uses apps like Spotify than Linux is amazing it's not complex or difficult, truly wonderful.

What makes Linux even better is the fact it's not a fair comparison, sure to me it's like Chrome OS due to the simple purposes I use it for but what's truly great is all that nerdy technical stuff I thought Linux was for you can do, if you are hosting a web server than linux gives you a free platform to do it, it feels like you are directly modding the PCB of the computer it's that open.

In retrospect to typing all that I feel I've just blurted out a generic description of Linux and for those that use it I'm sure they just think I was naive, but this is more aimed at the average user, Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is great, it's: simple, easy, fresh, clean, open, modern, intuitive, versatile, multi-purpose, and free. It's not some difficult to use system, it's alarmingly simple, but infinitely useful

It's easy to learn and difficult to master.

So we have many communities and everyone gets free *nix shell access, you can ssh into the remote server (mostly ubuntu) and do whatever you want! I mostly go there to talk with other users.

It is all old school, we use the command line and there is no gui that you can work with. You have to use the cli for everything you do (easy to learn).

You can -

• learn programming
• make webpages
• make new friends
• play games
• learn more about *nix

and much more.

See https://tildeverse.org to get started. (https://tilde.team/wiki/?page=other-tildes for more tilde servers)

I'll suggest you to join ctrl-c.club or tilde.town and then try other servers. You can make account everywhere ofc. I am ~cyaniventer on tildeverse, see ctrl-c.club/~cyaniventer

Edit: Not related to tildes.net

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?