It’s amazing how quickly they get it.

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

dye a hero

Yes… but what colour?

Double-check that you have Nvidia Prime configured/selected. It’s been a while since I’ve used Mint, but… try this…

1. Open the App menu (bottom left, same as in Windows)
2. Type "nvidia’ and this should show you the NVIDIA X Server Settings app. Click on it to launch.
3. Double-check that you see all the drive info, including the driver version. Close out the app of all looks “right”.
4. In the Mint system tray (lower right), click on the Nvidia icon (if you don’t see it, open the app menu, type “startup” and make sure “Support for NVIDIA Prime” is enabled) 5. Set the profile to “Active profile” (it’s hard on battery life in this mode). This forces everything to run on the Nvidia card only…
5. Test your games. Do they work better? If yes, you’ve found the root cause of the performance issue… if not… Hmmm, I’m not sure, then it’s time to try other things.

My experience with this is that Nvidia Prime was not being enabled/selected when I was trying to game. If this (forcing everything to launch on Prime) works and your games are working at a more acceptable performance level, you can leave it in “Active profile” at the expense of battery life… or you can set up the On-Demand profile… or explicitly switch between Intel and Nvidia, using Intel for all non-gaming things and pop it into Nvidia when you want to game… lots of possibilities depending on how you want to use the computer. :-)

BTW, an alternative to the systray method is simply setting the profiles right within the NVIDIA X Server Settings app (the last menu item on the left nav menu within the NVIDIA app). I just find that the systray icon is a quick/easy way, and it’s worth knowing about.

They manufacture and sell the buses in Canada… There are BYD buses in operation in at least Toronto, Victoria, Longeuil, St. Albert and Grand Prairie (and probably more by now). https://en.byd.com/news/byd-opens-first-canadian-bus-assembly-plant/ If you’re in Montreal, there’s a decent chance you’ll see BYD E6 taxis.

There’s been rumors of the cars being prepped for general sale in Canada… but I can’t find any proof of that right now.

It’s really a YMMV thing with Nvidia on Linux. I’m running 3 computers in the house on openSUSE Tumbleweed (mine and my 2 boy’s computers). The computers all have various Nvidia cards and they all work just fine for gaming.

The “iffy” part for Nvidia is mainly focused on the troublesome issues some people run into with kernel updates and the drivers not keeping up. This is mostly a historical thing. It’s been several years since I’ve ran into any Nvidia driver update related issues in Linux. The other major complaint about Nvidia is screen tearing… it’s occasionally ugly. It’s hard to resolve or fix,a nd in many cases it just is what it is.

The issue you’re encountering with games running poorly on Linux Mint will probably not be resolved by distro hopping - I’m not trying to discourage some experimentation… that’s a fun/good thing :-) … but the Mvidia drivers on Mint will be the same ones you will install on Fedora, and openSUSE and and and. The very first place I’d look is at the drivers. Are you 100% certain that the proprietary Nvidia drivers are actually installed vs the default Nouveau Nvidia drivers? You’re running on a laptop… so that’s the hybrid video card thing. Are you 100% certain that the games are launching on Nvidia vs running on the default Intel? If the games run terribly… they are very very likely not using the full capability of the 2060… either because the full drivers are not installed or you’re running on the Intel by default even though the drivers were installed.

Generally, you use the radio network from mobile phone to cell tower, and then fibre optic to the switches. Sometimes they use microwave line of sight for surface-to-surface connections where fibre doesn’t make sense, or is unviable (terrain, distance, cost, difficulty of laying fibre, etc.). It’s possible that there could be a satellite connection in the process, but unlikely unless you’re on an airplane, a ship, etc.

The GPS on the mobile phone definitely does use satellite (receive only though, no transmit).

It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.

Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?

Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.

Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.

Personal experience on my part. I deleted 13 years of contributions on Reddit. They are ALL back. My account was deleted… but every single comment (that I checked anyway) is still there. I checked after I deleted them… and they were not visible for almost 2 months after I did the pass to delete… now they’re all back.

And if you deleted all your comments… they undeleted everything.

🦍 😢

You’re not the target market for FF16 then.

Lol. You’re not a parent are you?

It’s not lazy, it’s being involved as a parent. I teach them. I council them. I explain the good and the bad.

They don’t have unfettered access to the internet either. I carefully limit to what is appropriate to their ages. As they get older and are more able to understand the implications I relax the restrictions.

My kids will survive just fine not playing in an environment that encourages bed behavior.

Roblox is filled with “quality” content like this: https://www.roblox.com/games/8110845141/POOP-WITH-FRIENDS

My kids used to play on Roblox… then they invited me to try it… and I started watching what is going on in there. It’s pretty bad. LOADS of grooming going on… shitty games… games that encourage anti-social behavior… horror games targeting under 5s… now they aren’t allowed to play it anymore.

That would explain a lot… things seemed normal until about 2013…

Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I’ve had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.

Linux needs more GUIs for managing complex settings.

openSUSE has YaST which covers almost all complex settings… it’s not perfect, but it tries

I wouldn’t go with Opensuse or Fedora for gaming.

Why? I use openSUSE Tumbleweed for gaming and it’s been rock solid. Seriously, I’ve never really had any issues. It has its quirks, but they are easily “fixed” by adding Packman and the Nvidia repos… and running an update.

I’ve tried Ubuntu multiple times and it was always a shitshow disaster. Mint was OK-ish, but had Ubuntu-related silliness.

Kinda depends where you work.

I’ve been working full time in software dev and hardware dev since the mid-1990s. Through that whole time I’ve worked almost exclusively on (in the early days) Sun workstations, AS/400, and HPUX machines. This eventually transitioned to Linux and macOS (once it became Unix based). Over the past 7-8 years, every company I’ve worked for (primarily in backend software and “big data”) has actually heavily restricted Windows within the company. Most have required high level approval to have a Windows machine… you had to have a damn good business reason to run Windows as your primary OS.

Windows is definitely the leader in generic desktop work, but… there are pockets out there of Linux/macOS-only. And… given the strong shift to browser based everything… Windows has lost its shininess for all but the most specific applications - eg graphics editing in industry standard tooling like Photoshop.

Thankfully the school my kids go to doesn’t really give a crap what you run at home on on their laptops they used for school work as long as the kids are able to to their assignments. Almost 100% of what they do is browser based interfaces anyway, so it doesn’t matter what the underlying OS is. I’ve made a point of teaching my kids Linux, macOS, and Windows. They’ve both asked to run Linux on their personal PCs… it was, and remains their choice.