One day I'll pay to activate Linux Mint.

Yeah it's so weird. I tried using that Mass Grave thing I heard about but it won't work. Tried running it in Proton-GE, too, and nothing. I guess I'll live with it, since it doesn't interrupt my workflow too much. The watermark on my desktop doesn't bother too much and eventually I lose sight of it anyway.

Remember Lindows OS?

"made me love my PC again."

I know, right?! That was the best part. It felt so liberating, as if I was transported back to the early 2000s when the OS was a tool, not an ad-infused spyware machine. The best thing is that I have control and - surprisingly - confidence. I was worried I'd only have control and over time I'd get confidence. But essentially, I had confidence day one.

I'm still a nascent Linux user, but using this OS is so refreshing. I love my PC so much.

I've used "Linux for work" and "Windows for gaming" for a long time, about twenty years now. Got fed up with Windows shitting itself on a regular basis, and made myself a new year's resolution to try Linux-only gaming for a bit, see if it would work for me, and I never went back. That was in 2021, and it's just been getting better and better.

Linux Mint has always been an easy install, and putting Steam on top to get Proton is pretty trivial. A few things have made an amazing difference:

• installing the official NVidia drivers used to be a pain in the arse. Download them, stop your display manager, blacklist Nouveau, install them from the command line, restart and hope for the best. Awful. I've gone fully AMD, but I understand they're pretty much a non-issue now.

• Proton keeps getting better and better. Seriously, they fix compatibility with about 99% of the games that were broken every year, basically everything runs now. Maybe leave off buying anything with a tech-demo engine for a week, and accept that you won't be playing stuff with certain anti-cheat, and it's all good.

• DXVK gets overlooked, but it's amazing. Basically frame-for-frame with Windows on every game, and on some it's better as it fixes intrusive stutter by precompiling. Can't argue with that.

It's mostly the account name and computer name, something like

user@computer $

OP might have a good reason (e.g network setup different/real name visible) or is just security/privacy conscious, but you'd be unlikely to dox yourself from a screenshot like this if you're not a power user.

Mint is quite a friendly distro, definitely a great first choice and one I'd recommend. However if you find it not to your liking but still want to try Linux; fedora is another good no nonsense distro that would be suitable for you.

Looks to me like they are just censoring any instance of their username, possibly because it contains their real name.

Edit: also device name

Ha! You activated my trap card, nerd! Now I'm getting lots of advice from these Lemming nerdy losers on how to solve my problems!

I tried CoolerControl back in Dec/Jan but couldn't get it to work. If I recall correctly, I think only CPU fan was detected but it didn't see case fans or GPU fans. I see some other comments from others so I'll check those out.

(More seriously though - thank you for the help!)

For case fans, with an msi mobo, I had to install some nct drivers from a githib repo.

So if you can't still control them with CoolerControl, try to lookup for "linux {motherboard name} sensors".

I had a package bug with Mesa on Sid today, which got me reading the changelogs.

libd3dadapter9 / GalliumNine was removed. It's been long coming, since Gallium3D is deprecated, but it did get me a little nostalgic.

GalliumNine is almost the progenitor of the current linux gaming movment, wined3d had been uh... terrible for quite some time and then out of almost nowhere - 'native' D3D9 on Linux. Right on the coattails of the Radeon driver starting to seriously not suck (well before amdgpu) - everything sort of came together for real linux gaming experience.

Ave GalliumNine.

As soon as I unzip my tar balls.